Category: Vignettes at Large
-
Munchausen by Proxy
Charles HalstedDavis, California, United States My last patient of the morning was a teenage girl, just turned eighteen. She walked in slowly, her face in agony, apprehensive. Her mother said the pain had begun at age twelve, about when she started to menstruate, yet it never let up, periods or not. Refusing food, she began…
-
Heart failure
Charles Halsted Davis California, United States By the time I completed my third medical school year, I had learned the basics of physiology and biochemistry, but had never been face-to-face with a person who depended upon my skills to survive. I had never heard a racing heart nor the sounds of gurgling lungs. I was assigned…
-
Schistosomiasis
Charles Halsted Davis, California, United States She was admitted to Ain Shams Hospital in Cairo after vomiting blood, having slipped into Nile mud while harvesting sugar cane eighteen months before. Surprisingly, she had not fallen into the current, but had regained her footing and survived her fall. Although all seemed well for the next year…
-
Kwashiorkor
Charles Halsted Davis, California, United States An eleven-month-old Egyptian infant sat wailing on a cot, his abdomen pouched out and covered by spider-like purplish veins. His tiny arms and legs were like sticks, except for his swollen ankles. He was brought in by his mother who knew that his food and care would be free,…
-
Lucid interval
Emma ManuelEshwar RajeshChennai, India Even during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, some people like me were silently grateful for the opportunity to spend some time with their family. Born as a single child whose parents got frequent transfers, I had lived with my grandparents to get proper schooling, and then some twenty years passed…
-
No complaints, only symptoms
Peter Arnold Sydney, Australia “No complaints, only symptoms,” I told my cardiologist this year. How dare I complain? I am eighty-four. Thirty-two years have passed since my quintuple coronary artery bypass; eighteen years since a diagnosis, in one of eleven biopsy samples, of invasive prostate cancer—left untreated, because so few of us die from it; five…
-
Crawford W. Long, first use of ether anesthesia
Crawford Williamson Long (1815–1878) is best known for his first use of ether as an anesthetic. He graduated from medical school in Pennsylvania and walked the hospitals in New York. He then returned home to set up practice in Jefferson, Georgia, a village some 140 miles from a railroad, where professional visits were made on…
-
The novice
Charles HalstedDavis, California, United States Living in the convent at age eighteen, the novice practiced vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. All she ate was in vain, the more she prayed, the more weight she lost, the weaker she became. I discovered her thin and frail in my clinic. Her stature was a striking feature,…
-
Mandarin doctor examines the patient’s pulse
This nineteenth century Mandarin doctor is flouting the traditionally accepted rules of medical examination of inspection, palpation, percussion, and auscultation. He is intently focusing on the patient’s pulse but seems to have omitted the preliminary step of inspection in that he is looking away from his patient instead of looking at her. Spring 2020 |…
-
Hippocrates by the bedside
This rather unwell looking patient is being fed or medicated by a physician supposed to be Hippocrates, assisted by a wide-eyed female professional. De regimine acutorum was published in England in the thirteenth century. The image (on the left) is an enlarged historiated initial from the medieval illuminated manuscript (shown on the right). Highlighted Vignette…