Tag: Fall 2013
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Michael Reese Hospital – Beginnings
Excerpts from the book All Our Lives: A Centennial History of Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center, 1881-1981, Sarah Gordon, ed. The first Michael Reese Hospital opened in 1881 at 29th Street and Groveland Park Avenue (renamed Ellis Avenue) in Chicago, at a cost of $60,000 donated from a charitable fund derived from the will of Michael…
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The rise and death of Chicago’s Michael Reese Hospital
Charles ShapiroChicago, Illinois, United States Michael Reese and the Jewish presence in Chicago In the 1840s Jews poured into Chicago. The emigration continued for several decades. Those coming from Eastern Europe tended to settle on the west side of the city where land was cheaper. They were relatively educated in the affairs of the day.…
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Penicillin’s unique discovery
Emmanuel UgokweNigeria Southeast & South South Scottish-born Alexander Fleming spent almost his entire life as a doctor in London, studying the problems of infection and the use of antiseptics. In 1922 he made a remarkable observation. He took a test tube containing water mixed with inoffensive bacteria that turned the water milky. To this he…
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A changing paradigm for medical research: the evolution of the clinical trial
Kayvon ModjarradBethesda, Maryland, United States This history of science follows a convoluted path of imperceptible intellectual drifts and sudden philosophical shifts. Scientific milestones are, therefore, the result of gradually building thought processes. This is as true for advances in the methods of scientific inquiry as it is for the content of scientific discovery. Tracing the…
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A disease of society: cholera through the ages
Khameer Kishore KidiaUnited Kingdom Cholera is something else, it is the invisible, it is the curse of the olden days, of times passed, a sort of evil spirit that comes back and that surprises us so much that it haunts us, because it belongs to what appears to be a forgotten age. Doctors make me…
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Passionate medicine: The emotional fight against epidemic disease
Tom Koch Toronto, Canada Great medicine is driven by great passion, by a sense of outrage at the indignity that a disease visits on its victims. Across history the search for a solution to epidemic diseases has been rooted not in a desire for acclaim, prestige, or a prize, but first and foremost in the researcher’s…
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“Uncertain disease”: The science of nostalgia
Kevis GoodmanBerkeley, California, USA William Cullen, the well-esteemed Edinburgh physician and professor of medicine at Glasgow and later Edinburgh, shared the “love of system” praised by no less than Adam Smith, who—not coincidentally—happened to be Cullen’s patient and friend.1 Cullen set out to gather all existing medical nosologies (the disease classifications that imitated Linnaean botanical…
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Polymathy in decline?
J.M.S. PearceUnited Kingdom Try to know something about everything and everything about something.— Attributed to TH Huxley (1825–95) Polymaths are rare and interesting people. Their fund of learning enlightens conversation, provokes new ideas, and excites our imagination and understanding. The ancient Greeks concentrated on natural philosophy, (which roughly transmutes into “science”) the study of natural…
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Charlie
Gaetan SgroPittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States It is a mild Saturday morning in the fall. A breeze is blowing leaves and garbage past the entrance to My Brother’s House, a shelter on South 15th Street, and the sun is shining brightly off the inside of the open door. The door’s black paint is scratched through in…
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Laundry
Susan BeckFort Collins, Colorado, United States Smell is the sense below the surface; tangled like seaweed, moving in currents, unfurling in the depth of the open ocean. “Why does poverty smell like laundry detergent?” I never expected an answer. The long and tangled history of the question began in Baskerville, North Carolina, when I was…