Tag: Hekint
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Up to date orthopedics
This image of how to treat fractures of the elbow was published in Industrial medicine and surgery in 1919. The arm is held with the elbow fully flexed, and motion under supervision is encouraged after about five days. Currently these fractures are treated similarly, but there is a tendency to have a different degree of…
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Painting an honest image
Rachel FleishmanPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, United States I send my colleague home to kiss her children, then go to the nursery to meet my patient. The obstetrician shows me the newborn’s penis; it will not stop bleeding. Together, we wrap it with a special gauze. Surgicel. The bandage turns a dark black, adhering to the bloody ridge…
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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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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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Scurvy before James Lind
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom Cures of disease are still relatively uncommon. Scurvy is an example of a disease well recognized but whose cause eluded doctors for centuries until an empirical curative remedy and later a specific cause were discovered. In more recent times Koch’s discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in phthisis or consumption in 1882,…
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Human heart in Descartes’s De Homine
The famous philosopher René Descartes had an interest in physiology. But although he is known to have carried out dissections and even vivisections, he was a theoretician and not an experimentalist. In 1643 he wrote that having read William Harvey’s 1628 De Moto Cordis he agreed with the theory that the blood circulated through the…
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An interrupted dissection
The increasing interest in teaching anatomy by dissecting the human cadaver had a sordid side—the practice of body snatching, the illegal removal of corpses from graves, often by organized gangs of so-called resurrectionists. Body snatching was first recorded in Italy as early as the fourteenth century and as the centuries went on it became widespread…
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Pediatric nurse
Nurses are often the first point of contact for patients entering the medical system. They perform essential work, and often spend more time with patients then physicians do, ensuring treatment is performed and the body heals. Their essential work can include tending to children who may simply need a moment of attention, as in this…