Tag: Avi Ohry
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On culinary tasting and a genetic syndrome
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Laurent Grimod de La Reynière1,2 (1758–1837) studied law in Lausanne and on returning to Paris made his name by writing reviews for the Journal des théâtres in 1777–78 and some for the scandal chronicle Correspondence secrète, politique et littéraire. He survived the French revolution “partly because Danton and Robespierre liked him,…
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Israel Spach the biographer and the Lithopedion of Sens
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Israel Spach (Israele Spachio, Spachius) (1569–1610), was raised and studied in Strasbourg and later in Paris under Jean Riolan the Elder.1 He finished his medical studies at the University of Tübingen under Andreas Planer in 1581.2 In 1589 he returned to Strasbourg, where he married3 and lived until his death. The…
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The Mauriacs
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Dedicated to the memory of Dr. Howard Fischer (1947–2024). Three persons bearing the name Mauriac are remembered to have achieved a place of distinction in French literature and medicine. The most famous of these was François Charles Mauriac1 (1885–1970), “a French novelist, dramatist, critic, poet, and journalist,” author of A Kiss…
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Emilie Chamberlin-Conklin-Warner (1887–1968)
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel The American poet Emilie Chamberlin-Conklin-Warner is one of the few non-physicians who received a prize or citation from the American Medical Association (AMA). Her Religion Marches1 is a collection of thoughtful, humorous, or sad poems about the life and work of physicians. Among them we find: “A Call to Service,” “Mountain…
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Mordecai B. Etziony: Canadian historian of medicine and ethicist
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Mordecai Etziony was born in 1904 and worked in the Department of Medicine at the Jewish General Hospital and Jewish Hospital of Hope, Montreal. He submitted his dissertation to McGill University in 1931 under the title “The problem of ’emotions’ with particular reference to the emotional life of the child.” He…
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Nicholas Cusanus
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Non-medical scientists and scholars often contribute substantially to medicine. Nicolaus Cusanus (1401–1464), also known as Nicholas of Cusa and Nikolaus Krebs von Kues, was a German cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, philosopher, jurist, mathematician, and astronomer. In Padua he earned a doctorate in canon law in 1423. He became a…
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On blue and blues
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel As a child born with blue eyes, I wondered why I don’t see the world around me in a blue color. Later in life, as an amateur jazz drummer, I was passionate about the popular song “Blue Moon” (1934), Jobim’s “No More Blues”, and blue jeans. The blue color dominates our…
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On Voltaire, Akakia, De Maupertuis, and another Akakia
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel When in 1718 François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778) was released from incarceration at the Bastille, he changed his name to Voltaire. Soon he became an “enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher, famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation…
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Nonsense poetry
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Recently, I read the Israeli professor Rony Reich’s translation of German nonsense poetry (Deutsche Unsinnpoesie), and among them, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Lügenmärchen (Lying Fairy Tales). I translate from the Hebrew: …Three wished to catch a hare,On crutches they came—a team.One was deaf,The second blind, the third mute.And the fourth could…
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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…