Tag: George Dunea
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Poison at the dinner table
Putting poison in food has long been an expeditious way of disposing of one’s enemies. The many poisons traditionally available for this purpose include hemlock, aconitum, arsenic, cyanide, belladonna, and strychnine. Using food tasters to avoid such an undesired outcome was once a reasonably effective measure, as perhaps was King Mithridates’ approach of building tolerance…
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Pica: Eating starch and clay
The habit of eating non-nutritious or nonfood substances goes by the name of pica and strikes one as a rather peculiar phenomenon. It applies most commonly to people consuming starch or clay, but at different times and in different areas people have also eaten paper, dirt, soap, cloth, hair, ice, pebbles, charcoal, chalk, hair, or…
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The history of apples is the history of mankind
The apple has been intertwined with human civilization for thousands of years. References to apples can be found in history, literature, religion, and folklore. The wild ancestor of the modern apple tree, Malus sieversii, originated in Central Asia and was domesticated some 4,000 years ago as Malus domestica. The former still grows wild in Central…
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John Douglas of the “high” stone operation
John Douglas was born in 1675 in Baads near Edinburgh. He had six brothers, the most famous being the anatomist James Douglas, remembered eponymously for describing the Pouch of Douglas (an extension of the peritoneal cavity into the pelvis). Another brother, Walter, served from 1711 to 1714 as governor general of the Leeward Islands, where…
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C. Walton Lillehei, father of open-heart surgery
Dr. Clarence Walton Lillehei (1918–1999) was born in Minneapolis, received his medical degree from the University of Minnesota in 1942, and spent his entire career on the staff of the University of Minnesota Medical School. In the early 1950s he began to experiment with cross-circulation, a technique in which the blood vessels of a patient…
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Francisco Graña, eminent Peruvian neurosurgeon
Francisco Graña (1879–1959) was a Peruvian neurosurgeon who once removed a subdural hematoma using 2,000-year-old tools, including a saw of volcanic obsidian glass and a bronze chisel, borrowed from the Peru National Museum of Archaeology. Born into a family of medical professionals, Graña studied medicine at the National University of San Marcos in Lima, graduating…
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James Hardy, heart and lung transplant pioneer
James D. Hardy was an American surgeon who performed the world’s first human lung transplant in 1963 and human heart transplant in 1964. Born in Alabama in 1918, Hardy obtained his medical degree from the University of Alabama in 1942. He served in the army during World War II, then returned to the University of…
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Yurii Voronoy, Ukrainian kidney transplant pioneer
Yurii Yurijevich Voronoy was born in 1896 in a village in the region of Poltava in Ukraine, where his father was a professor of mathematics. In World War I Voronoy was a volunteer corpsman in the Ukrainian contingent, and after the war he studied medicine in Kyiv. He then joined the department of surgery in…
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John Woodall, author of The Surgeon’s Mate
John Woodall was a seventeenth century English physician and Paracelsian chemist known for his writings on medicine and health. Born around 1570 in Warwickshire, he was apprenticed at the age of sixteen to a London barber surgeon but did not finish his apprenticeship. From the age of nineteen in 1589, he gained experience as a…
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The Madonna of Impruneta: Icons and processions
The Madonna of Impruneta is an icon showing the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus. Its origins can be traced to the year 1060, when some woodcutters found it in the woods of Tuscany and brought it to the church at Impruneta. According to an alternative version, a man named Biagio coming back from Rome…