Tag: Greece
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Sacrifice
Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece The supine and inert feminine form has been reduced to a few square centimeters of uncovered skin between the jaw and the sternum. Strategically placed green surgical drapes shroud the rest of the body. A series of electronic tracings on various monitors, each accompanied by its own distinctive warning note, remind us…
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Doctor-patient reunions
Anthony Papagiannis Thessaloniki, Greece The upper half of the face I could see behind the Covid-dictated mask did not tell me much, but the surname she gave rang a clear bell. I had seen several members of a family of the same name in the past, and looking into the computer registry I recited them to…
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Moral judgment in medicine: “Sensibility of heart”
Jack CoulehanStony Brook, New York, United States I want to reflect on the role of emotions, or “sensibility of heart,” in medical judgment. I take the term “judgment,” in general, to refer to the human capacity of assessing, analyzing, and reaching a conclusion with regard to any point or course of action. Any specific conclusion…
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Ancient Greek plague and coronavirus
Patrick BellBelfast, Northern Ireland Introduction Homer’s Iliad, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War have been termed “the three earliest, and arguably most influential, representations of the plague in Western narrative.”1 This essay uses these historical sources to examine attitudes toward plague in ancient Greece and parallels in the modern response…
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A wrong time to die
Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece Death is the one absolute and unexceptional certainty in life. In the Bible we read that there is a time for everything, including a time to die [Ecclesiastes 3:2]. Is there ever a “right” time to die? Faced with such a question, we often consider that anyone who has achieved their aims…
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Anatomica: The exquisite and unsettling art of human anatomy
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom The first known anatomy book was written around 300 BC by Diocles, a Greek philosopher and physician who based his work on animal dissections. Andreas Vesalius’ De Humani corpori Fabrica from 1543 was the first major work based on dissections of human cadavers. It dispelled many myths and challenged the…
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Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace (1815–1852)
JMS Pearce Hull, England It is undeniable that computer science and technology play an important part in medical investigation and research, and universally in the transmission of information. Everyone remembers Charles Babbage, (1791-1871) (Fig 1) inventor of the computer and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, but an almost equally important figure has been largely overlooked.…
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Abram Belskie: Sculptor of medical medallions
Enrique Chaves-CarballoKansas City, Kansas, United States Abram Belskie was born in London on March 27, 1907. He studied painting and sculpture at the Glasgow School of Art and received a scholarship to further his studies in Europe. In 1929 he moved to New York City, where he assisted sculptor John Gregory for three years in…
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Young, pretty, and not quite right
Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece Unless we are in pediatrics, we start in clinical practice with our patients tending to be in the age range of our parents, or even older. Increasingly, as the grey in our temples is promoted to silver, their mean age gets closer to ours, and the percentage of younger patients keeps rising.…