Tag: 19th century
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August Von Platen, inspiration for Death in Venice
Nicolas Roberto RoblesBandajoz, Spain Weil da, wo Schönheit waltet, Liebe waltet Because where beauty reigns, love reigns – Sonette aus Venedig. August von Platen was a German poet whose death inspired Thomas Mann to write Death in Venice. Descended from an impoverished noble family, he attended the Cadet School at Munich from ages ten to…
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“For their own sakes”: The Edinburgh Seven, Surgeon’s Hall Riot, and the fate of English medical women
Mariel Tishma Chicago, Illinois, United States Surgeons’ Hall, Edinburgh. Photograph of engraving in the 1890 edition of Cassell’s Old and New Edinburgh by James Grant. Photo by Peter Stubbs. Via Wikimedia. “There seems to be practically no doubt now that women are and will be doctors. The only question really remaining is, how thoroughly…
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R. Austin Freeman and the Victorian forensic thriller
Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece Many people today are acquainted with well-known books and television series of forensic crime fiction. The modern detective fiction writer is expected to provide detailed descriptions of autopsies, current technology, pharmacology, and toxicology. Yet, even in this relatively new version of the old genre of police fiction, there is nothing new under…
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Paul Pierre Broca
JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom Fig 1. Paul Pierre Broca. US National Library of Medicine. At the turn of the nineteenth century, knowledge of how the brain worked was largely conjectural. Intelligence, memory, language, and motor and sensory functions had not been localized. The physiologist Flourens, promoting the notion of “cerebral equipotentiality,” concluded,…
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Theodor Meynert
JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom Fig 1. Theodor Meynert. Photo by Ludwig Angerer. Before 1880. Via Wikimedia. Theodor Meynert (1833-1892) (Fig 1) was an eminent if eccentric neuropathologist and psychiatrist. His original work had an impact not just on medicine but on the philosophy of the mind and the “history of materialism.”1 Modern…
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Dr. Susan LaFlesche Picotte: tradition, assimilation, and healing
Mariel Tishma Chicago, Illinois, United States Fig 1. Susan La Flesche Picotte. 1889. Drexel University College of Medicine Legacy Center Archives & Special Collections. Published with permission. “My office hours are any and all hours of the day and night.” — Susan LaFlesche Picotte1 It was August of 1889 and Dr. Susan LaFlesche Picotte…
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Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann and Der Struwwelpeter
Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden Heinrich Hoffmann: The Struwwelpeter; Frankfurt am Main: Literary Institute Rütten & Loening, 1917 (400th edition); Copy of the Braunschweig University Library Call number: 2007-0968. Via Wikimedia. “Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.” — B.F. Skinner Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann (1809-1894) was a general practitioner in Frankfurt.…
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Franz Joseph Gall and phrenology
JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom Fig 1. Franz Joseph Gall. By Zéphirin Félix Jean Marius Belliard. Via Wikimedia. For many reasons the work of Gall, when stripped of its excrescences, constituted an important landmark in the history of neurology. -Macdonald Critchley4 In the times of Galen, the location of the mind and spirit…