Tag: Fall 2016
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Clinical teaching
The early part of the student’s clinical career is always the most important. Every doctor knows that the initiation into clinical work is one of the most difficult intellectual and personal trials of the student’s career. The best help that the clinical teacher can give to his students during the early part of their career…
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The approach to the patient
Whilst the frontiers of medicine are always advancing the discipline of clinical methods remain unchanged in essentials. Our task as clinicians is to observe accurately and comprehensively, to reason soundly about observations made, to learn the principles and practice of medicine and to appreciate how these can be applied to clinical problems; to approach the…
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Baker-bates-isms
For Liverpool graduates of a certain vintage who may still remember the great man; Baker-Bates’ advice on retiring from the hospital. It was to buy a dog six months before retirement and on retirement present the dog to the telephonist. “It will be the only one to recognize you when you visit four weeks later”.…
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Liverpool before the Beatles
George DuneaChicago, Illinois, United States In the winter of 1962-1963 I spent a few months working as locum registrar in several hospitals in Liverpool. It was a cosmopolitan city inhabited by people of many origins but predominantly by the descendants of those who had escaped the horrors of the Irish potato famine, who characteristically dined…
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Health flash: Humanize medicine, the time is now
Wali ZahidPakistan Having spent two weeks in Lahore hospitals watching my sister being treated for a fatal disease, I had time to think about some of the fundamental flaws of modern medical practice and education. I concluded that medical education and practice needed to change, and that I was going to start a global movement to humanize…
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The thickening of blood
Nod GhoshChristchurch, New Zealand It begins when you are a child, in the pre-antibiotic dawn of an Indian summer, one of six siblings, five of whom will eventually die of broken heart valves or diabetes. But let us say for now, you are a child, a child who loves to dance, to play in the…
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Anatomical Heart Illustration #1 and #2
Paul RoopraiHamilton, Ontario, Canada Artist statement Anatomical Heart Illustration #1 and #2 are digital renderings created in Adobe Photoshop CS6. The artworks are personally meaningful to me and were inspired by a woman I met in a volunteer placement while in the Health Sciences program at McMaster University. The patient suffered a stroke and a…
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A poem about plagiarism
Sergei JarginMoscow, Russia (After Edgar Allan Poe) Not Pushkin am I, neither Poe,So great is not my fame.I am a humble Russian poet,S. Jargin is my name. To plagiarize is worse than stealWe love the Copyright,And by quotations we revealThe source from which we write. Great Bear is roaring in morassAnd rising up upright,Reminding Russian…
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Redemption
Charles HalstedDavis, California, USA I’m high on crack and going eighty,black rainy night, oncoming lights,back seat guy shouts out: “Look out!” too late.I cannot breathe, my chest’s come tight.Pain cuts my guts, knifes through to my back.Ambulance screams, tears through the night.ER docs crowd me, I’m under attack.Up to the OR, all’s black, nothing’s right.My…
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My son getting an MRI
Bonnie SalomonLake Forest, Illinois, USA I sit in the hallway with old magazinesfrom last winter, listening to the buzzand chirp of the enormous magnetattracting and spinning his hydrogenprotons that were once part of me,ageless interstellar dust, the remainsof stars and galaxies that have cometo rest in his body, flat on the examtable. I can do…