Tag: England
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Some Dickensian diagnoses
JMS PearceHull, England What a gain it would have been to physic if one so keen to observe and facile to describe had devoted his powers to the medical art.– British Medical Journal obituary, 1870 A huge biographical literature relates the turbulent life of Charles Dickens (1812–1870) (Fig 1) from its humble, poverty-ridden beginnings to…
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Huntington’s chorea
JMS PearceHull, England In the history of medicine, few writers can have received a finer accolade than that bestowed by William Osler on George Huntington. Osler commented: “In the whole range of descriptive nosology there is not to my knowledge, an instance in which a disease has been so accurately and fully delineated in so…
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Wernicke-Korsakoff encephalopathy: A historical note
JMS PearceHull, England Before Sergei Sergeivich Korsakoff described the psychosis that bears his name, Carl Wernicke reported a closely related and often coexistent syndrome. It is variously named Wernicke-Korsakoff encephalopathy, syndrome, or psychosis. Two more different personalities would be hard to imagine. Wernicke’s encephalopathy The crucial clinical account of Wernicke’s encephalopathy is found in the…
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Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield: Inventor of the CT scanner
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, England The name Godfrey Hounsfield is not familiar to most healthcare professionals, yet his invention of the CT (Computerized Tomography) scanner is one of the greatest radiological advances since Röntgen discovered X-rays in 1895. Nearly all modern hospitals have a CT scanner, which enables doctors to make a more accurate diagnosis, especially…
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It always comes down to medicine
Matthew TurnerWashington, United States For six days, the brigands held a knife to the city’s throat. Outside a handful of settlements far to the northeast—which any of the city’s inhabitants would firmly tell you didn’t count—Charleston was the jewel of England’s possessions in the New World. The wealth that the port city generated had fattened…
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John Walker, vaccinator extraordinaire
JMS PearceHull, England Medicine has bred many odd but audacious characters, eccentrics, polymaths and “truants.” One might argue that those characteristics attracted such people to careers in medicine: a chicken and egg dilemma. Conversely, some have argued that modern regulated uniformity has infected medicine and stultified originality. A little-known medical eccentric and heretic was John…
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Walter Edward Dandy
JMS PearceHull, England In the history of American neurosurgery, two names stand out from the rest: Harvey Cushing (1869–1939) and Walter Edward Dandy (1886–1946). Sadly, they were inveterate rivals. Dandy was undoubtedly a brilliant pioneer of both neurosurgical research and practice. He was born in in a small house on 5th Street, Sedalia, Missouri, an…
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William Blake
JMS PearceHull, England William Blake (1757–1827) (Fig 1) was and still is an enigma. He was born on November 28, 1757, one of seven children to James, a hosier, and Catherine Wright Blake at 28 Broad Street in London.1 He once remarked: “Thank God I never was sent to school / To be Flogd into…
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Early surgery of meningocele
JMS PearceHull, England A variety of dysraphic states, recorded since antiquity, (Fig 1)1 are caused by the failed closure of the neural tube during the fourth week of embryonic life. They include hydrocephalus, Chiari malformations, and various types of spina bifida with meningocele or meningomyelocele. Nicolaes Tulp (1593–1674)—subject of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson—in Observationes Medicae…