Tag: Avi Ohry
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Edward Granville Browne and Jakob Polak on Persian medicine
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel The Cambridge physician-orientalist Edward Granville Browne has described in detail further aspects of Islamic and in particular Persian medicine (9th to the 11th century) in his book Arabian Medicine.1,2 He had studied medicine at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, earned his M.B. degree in 1887, and through his work and lectures was responsible…
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On quadruple amputations
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Recently I read “How Losing My Limbs Turned Me into a Different Kind of Cook.”1 It is the story of Yewande Komolafe, whose two-decade career as a cook came to an abrupt end when a catastrophic sickle cell crisis led to bilateral below-the-knee and upper limb amputations. Cooking was at one…
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On clubfoot, orthopedics, art, and history
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel A clubfoot,1 or congenital talipes equinovarus (CTEV), is a birth defect in which the foot is inverted. If untreated, children with TEV often walk on their ankles, or on the sides of their feet. The condition occurs about one in every 1,000 live births. Recently, I watched an excellent French film,…
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Physicians as inventors
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel “Research is four things: brains with which to think, eyes with which to see, machines with which to measure, and money.”—Albert Szent-Györgyi, 1937 Inventions can be created either following a sudden enlightenment (for which Claude Bernard coined the term être frappé—to be punched or after a long investigation). Relatively few physicians…
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Famous physicians from Geneva, Switzerland
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Geneva, Switzerland is associated with many famous physicians and scientists. Some have been memorialized in street names, buildings, and institutions. Michael Servetus (ca. 1511–1553), a physician and theologian who lived most of his life in France,1 fled to Geneva after being condemned by Catholic authorities in France for the publication of…
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Friedrich Welwitsch, physician and botanist (1806–1872)
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel I believe not too many people have heard of the Austrian physician-botanist Friedrich Welwitsch (1806–1872; Friderik Velbic in Slovene). He studied in Vienna and practiced medicine in Slovenia and Moravia. In 1839 he gave up medicine and concentrated on botany, moving to Portugal and becoming director of the botanical gardens. He studied first…
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On extracampine hallucinations and Alexander Selkirk
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel In what may be justifiably described as the “third man factor syndrome,” some people may experience the hallucination that another person is present with them in the room. The long-term war correspondent Sebastian Junger described such a phenomenon when, during an emergency surgery for a ruptured aneurysm, he had imagined that…
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Pauline Chaponnière-Chaix
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Pauline Chaponnière-Chaix (1850–1934) was a nurse and activist born in Geneva, Switzerland. After her husband died, she went to Paris to join the House of Deaconesses of Reuilly, a Protestant religious community founded in 1841 that provided outreach to the poor. Chaponnière-Chaix worked with children whose parents were in prison or in other…
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V.V. Veresaev, another forgotten physician-author
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Dr. Veresaev was born in Tula as Vikenty Vikentyevich Smidowitz in 1867, son of a famous Polish-Catholic physician father and a Russian mother. Raised and educated in Russia, his father established a free-of-charge hospital in Tula. First to introduce sanitary and hygienic principles to the city, his father ironically died in…
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Artists at war
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), author and poet, served as a nurse during the United States Civil War. In 1862, she worked at the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown, Washington, DC, where she found appalling conditions. She attended the wounded, fed them, and assisted at operations until she contracted severe typhoid fever herself. She…