Tag: epilepsy
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Quaerens and the Dreamy States
JMS PearceHull, England We are such stuffAs dreams are made on, and our little lifeIs rounded with a sleep.—Shakespeare, The Tempest IV.1 Dreamy states are well known as brief aberrations of awareness and of altered thought that are a commonplace, normal experience. As a manifestation of epilepsy, they have been recorded by famous literati as…
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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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Gonzalo R. Lafora: Spanish neuropsychologist and neuropathologist
Enrique Chaves-CarballoOverland, Kansas, United States Gonzalo Rodríguez-Lafora (1886–1971) was a Spanish neurologist best known for his description of intracytoplasmic inclusion bodies (Lafora bodies) in myoclonic epilepsy. Lafora was born in Madrid on June 25, 1886. At the age of four, he moved to Puerto Rico when his father became a lieutenant colonel in the Spanish…
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Franz Liszt and Lisztomania: “Le concert, c’est moi”
Elizabeth ColledgeJacksonville, Florida, United States Much has been written about the hysteria accompanying Beatlemania, and before that, the frenzies generated by Elvis, Sinatra, and similar artists, primarily musicians. But before the Beatles, before Elvis, before Frank, there was Franz Liszt, whose 1844 concert in Berlin shocked the musical world and generated the term and medical…
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Dr. Désiré-Magloire Bourneville: a man ahead of his time
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale.”– Rudolf Virchow, M.D. Désiré-Magloire Bourneville, M.D. (1840–1909), was born into a family of modest means. He earned his medical degree in 1865 in Paris. He is known today, if he is remembered at all, as the…
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Robert Bentley Todd
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom Students of King’s College Hospital London are familiar with the Todd Prize in Clinical Medicine and with Todd Ward. Robert Bentley Todd’s father, Charles Hawkes Todd, was a well-known surgeon of 3 Kildare Street Dublin. His mother was Elizabeth Bentley, a relative of the poet Oliver Goldsmith, who was himself…
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Edward Lear
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom How pleasant to know Mr Lear!Who has written such volumes of stuff!Some think him ill-tempered and queerBut a few think him pleasant enough. Edward Lear 1879 Hundreds of famous people from every branch of life have been diagnosed or suspected—sometimes on dubious evidence—as sufferers from the symptom epilepsy. Edward Lear…
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The good, the bad, and the regrettable
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Man . . . cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.”— Frederick Nietzsche What follows is a description of different aspects of studying medicine at an old, highly regarded Catholic university in Europe a half-century ago. The Good For…
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Was Moses an alchemist?
S.E.S. MedinaBenbrook, Texas, United States “And he took the (golden) calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and scattered it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it.” -Exodus 32:20. In the event depicted above, Moses had just returned with the Ten…
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Psychiatric care at the historical Athens Mental Health Facility
Cherron PayneFarmington, Connecticut, United States When I was an undergraduate student at Ohio University in Athens, my friends and I would often hike to an intriguing place called the Ridges, overlooking the picturesque Hocking River and the Appalachian gem of Ohio University in Southeastern Ohio. The Ridges was not solely a picturesque hillside, but a…