Tag Archives: Doctors Patients and Diseases

Patients without borders: Cardiac surgery, activism, and advocacy

July 29, 2022

Annabelle Slingerland Leiden, Netherlands   “Inspired by the media on the Dutch Heart Patient Organization” by Yasmine Hilhorst. In the 1970s, a “patients without borders” organization made it possible for people with severe heart disease to be flown to other countries for treatment that was unavailable in their home country. It was a decade after […]

Herbert William Page and the railway spine controversy

July 7, 2022

Jonathan Davidson Durham, North Carolina, United States   Figure 1. Herbert William Page. Archives of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. The first passenger railway journey resulted in the death of a prominent British politician.1 During the 1830s and 1840s,2 railway travel became a popular means of transport in Victorian Britain. By the 1850s, […]

Medicine’s pandemonium of paradoxes

May 27, 2022

Fergus Shanahan Dublin, Ireland “Paradox of Medical Progress” graph by author.   “You live and breathe paradox and contradiction, but you can no more see the beauty of them than the fish can see the beauty of the water.” – Michael Frayn (Bohr to Heisenberg), Copenhagen1   The language of medicine is loaded with misnomers, […]

“Avoid a remedy that is worse than the disease”

May 12, 2022

Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   Hair loss in child with tinea capitis infection. CDC, 1970. Public domain. Overconfidence is an undesirable quality. It does not enhance a physician’s approach to learning, nor to changing when change is needed. How a doctor diagnoses or treats a condition today may cause future generations of physicians to wonder, […]

The sixtieth anniversary of the “Battered Child Syndrome”

April 4, 2022

Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   An intraparenchymal bleed with overlying skull fracture from abusive head trauma. May 29, 2016. James Heilman, MD, via Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. “The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterward.” — Arthur Koestler, novelist and journalist   In 1962, Dr. C. Henry Kempe and colleagues at the […]

Orion H. Stuteville: a surgeon’s surgeon

March 28, 2022

Jayant Radhakrishnan Darien, Illinois, United States Bangalore Jayaram Mysuru, Karnataka, India   There is no controversy that Hera became angry at Tiresias and turned him into a woman. However, there are two versions of the cause of her anger. It was either because Tiresias struck a couple of copulating snakes or because he sided with […]

Humans with tails

March 24, 2022

Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   A human tail. From “Tail-like Formations in Men. After the Researches of Dr. Bartels, Prof. Ecker, Dr. Mohnike, Dr. Ornstein, and Others.” Popular Science Monthly, vol. 40, January 1892. Via Weird Historian. Public domain. “…he had been born and had grown up with a cartilaginous tail in the shape of […]

Wedding anniversary

February 18, 2022

Paul Rousseau Charleston, South Carolina, United States Woman treating a patient in an intensive care unit. U.S. Government photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Ryan M. Breeden. U.S. Navy Medicine on Rawpixel. Public domain.   Things fall apart; the center cannot hold…and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned… — W. B. Yeats, The […]

Drama in brief

January 26, 2022

Anthony Papagiannis Thessaloniki, Greece   Winter foliage. Photo by author. Four years earlier I had had the sad duty to announce her debut as a protagonist on the stage of cancer. Now I was witnessing the last act. She came to the first visit with her elder sister, an old acquaintance from our student days […]

Furniture of bones

December 22, 2021

D. Brendan Johnson Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States   Selvportrett i helvete [Self Portrait in Hell]. Edvard Munch. 1903. Munchmuseet. Via Wikimedia. “Would you like the new patient?” My senior resident offered me the next admission, a patient being stabilized in the emergency department after a suicide attempt. As a fresh medical student in the beginning […]