Tag: Avi Ohry
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The two Kandinskys
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) was a Russian painter, art theorist, co-founder of the “Blue Rider” art movement, pioneer of abstract painting,1 and part of the Fauvism and Bauhaus of Weimar movements. Neuroscientists regard him “as one of the most prominent examples of a synesthetic artist.”2 Kandinsky postulated a fundamental synesthesia between color and…
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Notable achievements by people who have lost an upper limb
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Working for the last fifty years in rehabilitation medicine and playing the drums in two jazz bands, I have always looked for stories of people who, in spite of chronic illness or disability, have accomplished much in art, music, politics, or science.1-3 Some of these include those who have achieved without…
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On Hortons among history
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel I believe I met Dr. Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, in 1999 in Glasgow during the two-day symposium on Medicine & Literature on the 400-year anniversary of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. On that occasion, I also met and chatted with Professor William Bryan Jennett CBE…
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Dr. Frank Billings (1854–1932), physician and educator
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Dr. Frank Billings (1854–1932) was “one of the most conspicuous figures in American medicine,” rembered for developing the doctrine of focal infection from bacteria of the Streptococcus pneumococcus group via the teeth, tonsils, and other portals.1-3 Born in Wisconsin, he worked as a young man as a farmer and schoolmaster before…
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Limping into victory
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel There were people with disabilities in history who were not “limping into oblivion,”1 but rather paved their way to accomplishments and victories.2 The emperor Claudius, who may have had cerebral palsy or dystonia, reigned in the first century AD. During that time, the Roman Empire expanded greatly. He decreed that if…
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Two composers named Arlen
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel “Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony,must investigate discord.”– Plutarch (AD 46–120), Demetrius, sec I Harold Arlen,1 composer of popular music, was born in 1905 in Buffalo, New York, as Hyman Arluck, the child of a Jewish cantor. After singing in a local synagogue choir, he…
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David Macbride: On scurvy and the art of tanning
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel David Macbride (1726–1778) of the county of Antrim, Northern Ireland, was an Irish physician who contributed to the treatment of scurvy1 and to the art of tanning.2 In his youth, he was apprenticed to a local surgeon and served for a short time as a surgeon’s mate on a Navy hospital…
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The “Republic of Letters” and Jacob Spon
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel The European intellectual community in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was interested in establishing a metaphysical “Republic of Letters” (Res Publica Litterarum or Res Publica Literaria).1-2 It was to be “a great and swirling progression of learning”3 such as that in ancient Greece and function as a network of scholars…
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John Ruhräh, poliomyelitis pioneer and medical historian
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel “The best sailors are those who have studied the charts and records of those who have sailed before.” – John Ruhräh John Ruhräh was a pediatrician and medical historian born to German parents in Chillicothe, Ohio, on September 26, 1872. After completing medical studies at the College of Physicians and Surgeons…
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Important figures in the history of neuropsychiatry
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel The life of William Alwyn Lishman (1931–2021) was dedicated to neuropsychiatry.1-2 His classic textbook, Organic Psychiatry (1978), is a foundational book for neurologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and physiatrists. Lishman was the first UK professor of neuropsychiatry whose “abiding message was that neuropsychiatry was not a subspecialty but the whole of psychiatry—biopsychosocial—with the…