Tag: Ambroise Pare
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Silas Weir Mitchell and causalgia
JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom Fig 1. Silas Weir Mitchell. Photo by Frederick Gutekunst, 1881. National Library of Medicine. Via Wikimedia. Public domain. 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…
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Diane de Poitiers, a case of mammary narcissism
A Lady in Her Bath, by Francois Clouet, 1571. National Gallery of Art, Washington. The woman in partial undress shown by Francois Clouet as A Lady in Her Bath is believed to be the famous mistress of the French King Henry II, Diane de Poitiers.1 Born in 1499 in the château of St. Vallier on…
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Ambroise Paré shown amputating a leg on the battlefield
One of the many of Amboise Paré’s surgical innovations was to tie off the blood vessels severed during amputations rather than cauterize them to stop the bleeding. This approach yielded greatly improved results but was much more time consuming because as many as fifty ligatures may have been needed during one amputation. In this painting…
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Christ at the bedside
Jesus sits by the bedside of the girl he has just raised from the dead. He is holding the girl’s hand and looks tenderly into her eyes. He has just truly affected a cure, unlike the physicians of old confined by necessity to the dictum of “guérir parfois, soulager souvent, consoler toujours”*—usually attributed to the…
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The rebirth of medicine
Constantina Pitsillides Hull, United Kingdom Introduction Andreas Vesalius De humani corporis fabrica, 1543 page 190 The great scientific advances of Western medicine trace their roots to the Renaissance, the period of thought that rejected medieval monasticism and rediscovered the cultures that preceded it. The ancient Egyptians and Greeks had some notions on how the…