Tag: George Dunea
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Francis Glisson and his capsule
Francis Glisson (1597–1677) was a highly successful physician, so famous in London that in 1668 he was consulted along with Ashley Cooper and Thomas Sydenham to advise whether the future Earl of Shaftesbury should undergo surgery to drain a perihepatic abscess. In 1650, he published a comprehensive account of infantile rickets (“Glisson’s disease”). Four years…
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A gastrointestinal quartet
These four individuals, despite their promising, euphonious names, did not write great operas. They were mere anatomists and worked on the area where the pancreas and gallbladder ducts meet to enter the duodenum. The most senior of the group was the German Johann Georg Wirsung (1589–1643). While working in Padua in 1642 and dissecting an…
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Sir Peter Medawar and the discovery of acquired immune tolerance
At Oxford during World War II, Peter Medawar and his colleagues made the remarkable observation that patients pre-treated in early life with embryotic cells did not reject skin grafts from unrelated donors. This gave rise to the concept of acquired immunological tolerance and revolutionized the field of organ transplantation as well as changed our understanding…
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Notes made after a medical meeting in Rhodes a long time ago
It is time to relax between presentations, away from medical crowds, from lectures and posters, from science, medical education, and eager pharmaceutical representatives. It is also a respite from sleet and snow, and there is no need to wear a coat, for the sun shines almost all day. This is also an opportunity to learn…
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Alexander von Humboldt, famous scientist and humanist
Born in 1769 into an aristocratic family in Berlin, Alexander von Humboldt was one of the most influential scientists and explorers of the nineteenth century, renowned for his work in geography, natural history, meteorology, and ecology. After first studying at the Universities of Frankfurt on the Oder and at Göttingen, he intended to pursue a…
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Charles Dickens and his doctors
Charles Dickens, one the greatest authors in the English language, featured in his novels medical doctors, students, and related professionals. They do not play an important role in his plots, but are interesting because they exemplify how medical practice was conducted two hundred years ago. Some of his doctors were benevolent and generous, others incompetent,…
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Hittite medicine
Some 3,000 to 7,000 years BC there lived in southern Ukraine or perhaps northern Anatolia a people we now know as the Indo-Europeans.1,2 They were the ancestors of most of the linguistically related nations of Europe and Western Asia, and eventually they split into Eastern and Western groups. The latter comprised the Hittites, a now…
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The modern drug treatment of hypertension
1. Introduction The history of hypertensive therapy with drugs goes back to around 1900 or even earlier, when physicians began to prescribe a variety of medicines such as sodium thiocyanate, nitrites, alkaloids of ergot, pyrogens, rauwolfia, veratrum virile, barbiturates, bismuth, bromides, hexamethonium, or tetramethylammonium chloride. Most of these agents were ineffective and many were poorly…
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Love potions and aphrodisiacs
The ancient gods lived high atop Mount Olympus. They loved, quarreled, and meddled in human affairs. They had amongst them a goddess of love whom the Romans called Venus and the Greeks Aphrodite. In time, these names followed different trajectories. Venereal became what you get after a night with Bacchus and Venus. Mons Veneris, or…
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Carlo Forlanini and his artificial pneumothorax for tuberculosis
Tuberculosis is an ancient disease that long ago earned the appellation of ‘‘Captain Among these Men of Death.” It remained untreatable until the nineteenth century, when physicians and patients turned to spas or sanitaria offering regimens of rest, diet, and carefully supervised exercise.1 The first sanatoria in North America opened in 1884 in Asheville, North…