Tag: Education
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Sewing for surgeons
Evelyn LeeWinston-Salem, North Carolina, United States It started with my mother’s simple question the summer after my freshman year of college: “Want to take a sewing class with me?” Initially, I said no. As a pre-medical student, I felt I needed to spend my summer doing something that would benefit my medical path, not a…
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The practice of looking inward
Florence GeloPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, United States I am a medical humanities educator and museum docent. I use art images to teach clinical skills to family medicine residents. Images grab residents’ attention and simplify emotional learning by making it more engaging and accessible. A painting can transform the theoretical into vivid imagery. During a gallery tour at…
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A personal memory of Davy Smyth Torrens
John Brock-UtneStanford, California, United States Davy Torrens was born in Northern Ireland in 1897 near Coleraine. His parents were farmers of Scottish stock. From the age of ten, he was seen to be a wizard in fixing all the wall clocks in the surrounding areas. Torrens did very well in school and won a scholarship…
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Reminiscences of a medical student in Australia
Some years ago a tourist shown the shopping Galleria in Milan asked the guide why the ceiling paintings illustrating the world’s continents did not include Australia. The guide explained that Australia had yet to be invented. She was clearly misinformed in that the British had established the penal colony at Botany Bay some one hundred…
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Medical teaching from ancient civilizations to the nineteenth century
Patrick FiddesAustralia The perception that medicine’s contemporary teaching practices were introduced by innovative Modern Era1 physicians does not recognize the original contributions of ancient forefathers. Medicine’s earliest teaching records exist in ancient Sanskrit. They provide “detailed information concerning the training of doctors”2 in Akkadian where “the master’s interpretation of texts were preserved as [an] oral…
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Unequal encounter: An initiation
Hugh Tunstall-PedoeDundee, Scotland In October 1961, I started at Guy’s Hospital Medical School in London for three years of clinical training. I was at the very bottom of the clinical hierarchy and put straight onto a surgical ward as a first-year ward clerk responsible for clerking admissions, junior to the third-year senior dressers on the…
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Musings from my first, on doctor-patient relationships
Hugh Tunstall-PedoeDundee, Scotland It was my very first patient. I had started my clinical training at Guy’s Hospital medical school in 1961 in London by being put straight onto a surgical ward. The patient was a Bermondsey Cockney dock worker who had a benign tumour to be removed—a neurofibroma. I examined him and read it…
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A migrant worker’s journey to becoming a brain surgeon
Saahas KumbamuSt. Johns, Florida, United States A year ago my parents gifted me Becoming Dr. Q: My Journey from Migrant Farm Worker to Brain Surgeon,the autobiography of Dr. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa, co-written by Mim Eichler Rivas. The book chronicles the remarkable journey of Dr. Q from Mexican migrant farm worker in Mendota, California to an esteemed…
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On Hortons among history
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel I believe I met Dr. Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, in 1999 in Glasgow during the two-day symposium on Medicine & Literature on the 400-year anniversary of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. On that occasion, I also met and chatted with Professor William Bryan Jennett CBE…