Tag: 20th century
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The secret medical school in the Warsaw Ghetto
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden In September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The invaders quickly started to repress the Jews of Poland and confiscate their property and businesses. In November 1940, the Jews of Warsaw were confined to a walled-in area of about three-and-one-half square kilometers. About 400,000 to 500,000 people, the second largest Jewish community in…
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Who is “Dr. Filth”?
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden Bob Dylan’s song “Desolation Row” (1965) is full of recognizable names, both real (Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Einstein) and fictional (Cinderella, Romeo and Juliet). There is also a “Dr. Filth,” whose identity is a subject for discussion.1 He is introduced with the lyrics: Dr. Filth, he keeps his world/inside of a leather cup/But…
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O Superman
John Rasko Carl Power Sydney, Australia Christopher Reeve comes to South Park to demonstrate all the hope and horror of embryonic stem cells. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, “Krazy Kripples,” South Park, season 7, episode 2 (2003). The creation of human embryonic stem cells in 1998 sparked enormous excitement.1 The superpower that embryos possess—the…
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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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“Am not I a fly like thee?” Drosophila melanogaster and the human genome
Marshall A. Lichtman Rochester, New York, United States A fruit fly displaying its large red eye. Among Thomas Hunt Morgan’s many contribution to the burgeoning science of genetics, he observed some male fruit flies had a mutant white eye. By cross-breeding males with mutant white eyes with females with the dominant trait and, subsequently,…
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Maligning Macleod and “Bettering” Best: the discovery of insulin as depicted in film before Michael Bliss
James R. Wright Jr. Calgary, Alberta, Canada JJR Macleod circa 1928. Credit: University of Toronto. Via Wikimedia. In 1921, Fred Banting and Charley Best, working under the supervision of JJR Macleod, made crude pancreatic extracts from duct-ligated dog, fetal bovine, or whole adult bovine pancreata and used these to treat diabetes in depancreatized dogs.…
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Sister Kenny: The forgotten Nightingale
Anand Raja Devaraj SushamaKerala, India Medical practices flourish and fall out of favor with time. Some become the norm only to turn redundant later; others prevail after a hard battle for acceptance. A campaign is even more arduous when the proponent is outside the establishment. Sister Elizabeth Kenny and her eponymous polio treatment, the “Kenny…
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Novice doctor at Guy’s Hospital in 1964
Hugh Tunstall-PedoeDundee, Scotland, United Kingdom Initiation My initiation as a novice doctor at Guy’s Hospital, London (Fig 1) was as junior partner to the legendary King of Surgery and Queen of Nursing. It was 1964. Clinical students in London medical schools with first degrees at Cambridge University went back there for their final exams, predominantly…