Tag: Charles Dickens
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Children at play in the East London Hospital for Children
The first hospital for children in London was established with ten beds in 1866 during a terrible cholera epidemic. It relied entirely on charity, was enlarged in 1875 and subsequently expanded, merged, and incorporated into larger facilities until it was closed after the introduction of the National Health Service in 1948. At the time it…
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A Dickensian medical education
Gregory RuteckiLyndhurst, Ohio, United States My four grandparents were Polish immigrants who came to America in the early twentieth century. They had no formal education, neither in Poland nor in their new home in Chicago, but worked hard and saved money to pay for the college education of their grandchildren. Life was not easy for…
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A hospital for sick children
Joseph deBettencourt Chicago, Illinois, United States An artist’s rendering of the original Great Ormond Street Hospital building in 1882, before it was demolished. “49 Great Ormond Street, London, in course of demolition.” J.P. Emslie, 1882, Wellcome Collection, UK Wellcome Collection. Down a narrow street in an old London neighborhood sat a large, forgotten house.…
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Madame Defarge: The psychology of vengeance
Sarah Jane I. IrawaParañaque City, Philippines “And with these hands I keep a memoryOf the ones who’ve done such wrongUntil the judgment comes and all of us are freeI knit a picture of the way it ought to be.”1 In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens sketches a portrait of Madame Defarge, “a woman of…
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The medical journey of Charles Dickens
Lea MendesLisboa, Portugal At the time of the London Great Exhibition of 1851, the United Kingdom was the wealthiest and most industrialized country in the world.1 The most popular and quintessential Victorian writer was Charles Dickens (1812–1870), who had written Oliver Twist (1838) and A Christmas Carol (1843). As for the medical aspects of his…
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From Merdle to Madoff (Charles Dickens)
They found him sprawled out in his bath, ‘lying in it as in a grave or sarcophagus . . . the white marble at the bottom of the bath veined with a dreadful red . . . on his side an empty laudanum-bottle and a tortoise-shell handled penknife–soiled, but not with ink.’ ‘Separation of jugular…
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“Super” heroes: Special powers in deaf characters
Paul DakinLondon, United Kingdom In 2012 Marvel Comics produced a cover featuring New Hampshire Senator Lou D’Allesandro’s four-year-old grandson Anthony as Blue Ear, a superhero wearing a hearing aid. Anthony refused the prosthetic because superheroes did not wear them. His mother contacted the company hoping to find an inspirational example and received the specially-created artwork…