Tag: 19th century
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JLW Thudichum: neglected “Father of neurochemistry”
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom Knowledge of diseases of the nervous system reflects an understanding of the basic sciences of neural mechanisms and organization. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Nobel prizewinners Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal founded the neuron doctrine, and Charles Scott Sherrington explained the propagation of the…
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Silas Weir Mitchell and causalgia
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom Silas Weir Mitchell (1829 – 1914) (Fig 1) was born in Philadelphia, the seventh physician in three generations. Webb Haymaker gives an early clue to his unconventional personality when he recounts his smuggling of Frederick Marryat’s Midshipman Easy into a dark corner of a church pew to relieve the boredom…
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Robert Bentley Todd
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom Students of King’s College Hospital London are familiar with the Todd Prize in Clinical Medicine and with Todd Ward. Robert Bentley Todd’s father, Charles Hawkes Todd, was a well-known surgeon of 3 Kildare Street Dublin. His mother was Elizabeth Bentley, a relative of the poet Oliver Goldsmith, who was himself…
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Guaiac and “the old Guaiacum test”
James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States “The old Guaiacum test was very clumsy and uncertain.”— A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887 So declares Mr. Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel A Study in Scarlet, first published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual 1887, and then as a book in July 1888 published by Ward,…
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Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543)
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom Nicolaus Copernicus was born on 19 Feb 1473 in the Prussian town of Torun, now part of Poland. He studied at the Jagiellonian University of Cracow, and although his main subjects were mathematics and astronomy, he also immersed himself in philosophy and read the works of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Euclid.…
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The Grand Army and horsemeat
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “An army travels on its stomach.” — Attributed to Napoleon Out of all of the innovations of Dominique Jean Larrey (1766-1842), one has yet to be properly appreciated. In his own words, “I have very often, and with the greatest success given horseflesh to our soldiers and the wounded of our armies…[I]t…
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Wilhelm Baum (1799–1883)
Postgraduate medical education in the nineteenth century required personal contact with the masters of the profession – working and rounding with them, or at least listening to their lectures. Thus the German surgeon Wilhelm Baum spent one year after obtaining his doctorate (1822) as a surgical assistant to von Graefe in Berlin. He then studied…
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Musical evenings on HMS Bounty
Stewart JustmanMissoula, Montana, United States Dispatched to Tahiti in 1787 to gather breadfruit trees to be transplanted to the West Indies, HMS Bounty was a small ship with every possible inch allotted to botanical cargo. Spare too was the crew, which included no marines who might have acted as Lieutenant William Bligh’s bodyguards in the…
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The illness of King George III
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom The Hanoverian King George III (1738–1820) was a diligent man of wit and intelligence, a man who enhanced the reputation of the British monarchy until he was finally stricken by illness. When this drove him from regal duties, politicians realized they missed his calming effect on their squabbles.1 In many…