Tag: chloroform
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The satirical side of William Osler, M.D.
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “But whatever you do, take neither yourself nor your fellow creatures too seriously.”1– William Osler, MD “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest…”– Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, in Hamlet, Act V Scene I, by William Shakespeare William Osler, MD (1849–1919), called “the father of modern medicine,”2 was…
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Hans Christian Andersen, James Young Simpson, and ether frolics
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom In May 1847, the widely admired writer of literary fairy tales and stories Hans Christian Andersen (Fig 1) left Copenhagen on a tour of Germany and Holland and arrived in London on June 23. There he was enthusiastically received by Joseph Hambro, a Danish entrepreneur, banker, whom he knew from…
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Memories of a West Virginia coal camp
Calvin KuninColumbus, Ohio, United States This is a brief account of my experience as a physician at a coal mining camp in rural West Virginia. It is based on my memory of events that took place almost seventy years ago but remain vivid in my mind. The adventure began the day I graduated from medical…
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Lawson Tait, father of aseptic surgery and gynecology
Robert Lawson Tait was fifth in a dynasty of pioneers who helped transform surgery from a primitive craft to a sophisticated life-saving art. They all worked for a time at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary—James Syme (the “Napoleon of Surgery”), Robert Liston (“time me, gentlemen”), James Simpson (“made childbirth painless”), and Robert Lister (“antiseptic surgery”)—and with…
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James Simpson, who made childbirth painless
A large, jolly man with broad shoulders, large hands, blue eyes, and a charismatic personality, James Young Simpson was said to have been the most popular man in Edinburgh since the death of Sir Walter Scott.1 Born in 1811 at Bathgate, he was the seventh son of a village baker in a poor family housed in…
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Banishing that dread of being cut
Samuel SpencerReading, Berkshire, UK In 1863, Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson was returning to camp after routing Federal armies at Chancellorsville, when he was mistaken for a Union cavalryman by his own sentries. In his long military career Jackson had been lucky enough to escape the bullets of Mexican grenadiers, Seminole guerrillas, and the cannonballs…