Tag: Hodgkin’s disease
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The first effective chemotherapy for cancer
Marshall A. LichtmanRochester, New York, United States Sulfur mustard gas had no influence on the outcome of the battle at Ypres during World War I despite the many deaths and severe injuries it inflicted. Since then, chemical weapons have been used in conflicts at least fifteen times between 1919 and 2016—in the Iraq-Iran War, by…
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The Quaker and the Jew, an enduring and impactful friendship: Thomas Hodgkin and Moses Montefiore
Marshall A. LichtmanRochester, New York, United States In 1832, a paper entitled On Some Morbid Appearances of the Absorbent Glands and Spleen was read to the Medico-Chirurgical Society of London by its secretary, as Thomas Hodgkin (1798–1866) was not yet a member. In it, Hodgkin described the clinical histories and gross postmortem findings of seven…
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What did Dorothy Reed See?
Sara NassarCairo, Egypt “They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.”1—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet Dorothy Mabel Reed Mendenhall opened the doors of medicine at a time when women were considered incapable of managing this “gory” field. Although Reed’s eponymous Reed-Sternberg cell was a pivotal discovery for the diagnosis…
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Doctors like eponymity
Denis GillDublin, Ireland I must confess to liking medical eponyms. As a medical student in 1960s Dublin, we were taught the names of famous Irish physicians of the Georgian period (1780–1840), a time when Dublin was famed for its bedside teaching. Their names evoked an interest in the history of medicine and in clinical signs.…
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Father’s Day on the 12th floor
Maggie SchwarzNew York City, New York, USA “Are you guys watching basketball? Would anyone mind if I brought my dad in here to watch tennis at 3:30?” It is a rainy Father’s Day in the visitor’s lounge on the twelfth floor of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The few boys occupying the lounge tell me it…