Tag: Avi Ohry
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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…
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Credé’s maneuver
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Carl Siegmund Franz Credé (1819–1892) was a German gynecologist and obstetrician born in Berlin. In 1852, he became director of the Berlin School of Midwives and head of the maternity division of the Berlin Charité Hospital. Later, he moved to Leipzig. Credé is known for the Credé maneuver, a technique to…
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John Allan Wyeth
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel The 1952 book The Scalpel, the Sword by Ted Allen and Sydney Gordon is the story of Dr. Norman Bethune (1890–1939), a Canadian chest surgeon who made important contributions in the fight against pulmonary tuberculosis, as well as surgical contributions to China during the war with Japan. However, there is a book with a…
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A tale of two physicians and Albert Göring
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Hermann Epenstein Ritter von Mauternburg (1850–1934) was a physician and merchant who played a significant role in the lives of anti-Nazi activist Albert Göring and his family. He was their family doctor, a close friend, and godfather to Albert and his older brother, Hermann. The brothers spent many holidays with him…