Tag: Fall 2019
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Photography in medicine
Doctors adopted the idea of using photography in medicine within one year of its invention. In 1840 at the Charité Hospital in Paris, Alfred François Donné photographed sections of bones and teeth by making daguerreotypes through a microscope. Between from 1848 to 1858 the British psychiatrist Hugh Welch Diamond photographed patients in an asylum and…
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Improving the ophthalmoscope
Christian Georg Theodor Ruete (1810-1867) studied in Göttingen, Germany, and became full professor there in 1846 and in Leipzig from 1852 to 1867. He conducted extensive research on eye disorders and made modifications to the ophthalmoscope that Hermann von Helmholtz had invented in 1851, adding a concave focusing mirror that allowed a better view of…
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Cells of an embryo
The layers of cells in an embryo, also known as germ layers, develop in stages to create all the parts of the living body. This image from 1874 illustrates exactly that. Showing the differing shapes of differing embryos, but matching the colors of each system across them, creates an effective tool. For example, the yellow…
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Lucas van Leyden: ear surgery
This surgeon is shown operating on the ear of a young man in an environment quite different from a modern surgical suite. He may be merely lancing a boil, but his patient looks unhappy. It is also obvious from their clothes that there is quite a difference in class between the two. With his fur…
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Primitive surgery
This 14th century woodcut from the Ashmolean Museum offers a view of what a surgeon’s office looked like at that time. We can see the patient, with boils, welts, or wounds peppering his skin, attended by the surgeon. On the far left a woman stands ready to assist. She holds some kind of a tool…
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Litmus paper and other pH indicators
To many a physician the word litmus brings back unpleasant memories from medical school, something to do with Bunsen burners, incomprehensible lectures on acid-base balance, or experiments going wrong and exploding in the chemistry lab. Litmus itself is a mixture of organic substances obtained from lichens and used as an acid-base indicator—even in nature, such…
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Lady Mary Wortley Montague: variolation against smallpox
Born in 1689, Lady Mary Wortley Montague was the most colorful Englishwoman of her time—an eccentric aristocrat, writer, and poet. In 1715 while still a young woman, her beauty was marred by a severe attack of smallpox. She had eloped in 1710 rather than accept an arranged marriage, and in 1715 her husband became British…
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Staining the cells of the nervous system
Camillo Golgi (1843 –1926) was an Italian biologist and pathologist, now recognized as the greatest neuroscientist of his time. He studied and worked at the University of Pavia, where he developed a technique of using potassium dichromate and silver nitrate to stain cellular components black. Using this stain he was able to discover the organelle now known as the Golgi apparatus, consisting…
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Half-skull
Sophia Wilson New Zealand Photo © Chris Downer / Twelfth century headache / (cc-by-sa/2.0) a ghost shrieks at the window, threatens to break through, shatter eye-cover. throbbing fingers infiltrate soft crevices; neuronal mass pulsates. knife twists, gristle-turning; stoat gnaw, rat’s claw. mind summersaults to snap-trap pain, can’t let go its axon’s branch. cerebral crevices convolute;…