Tag: Howard Fischer
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Forty years a watchdog: Sidney Wolfe, M.D.
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Somebody has to look out for the people who are being manipulated by hospitals, doctors, insurance and drug companies.”– Sidney Wolfe, MD, 1993 Sidney Wolfe, MD, (1937–2024) was the co-founder in 1971 of the Health Research Group (HRG), a consumer and health advocacy lobbying organization. After earning his medical degree from what…
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George Orwell: Obsessed with rats
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Of all the horrors—a rat.”– George Orwell, 1984 It is said that author George Orwell (1903–1950), born Eric Blair, was “obsessed” with rats.1 Rats are mentioned in his novels, essays, diaries, and letters. As he got older, he became more rat-obsessed. He has been called “a kind of literary pied piper dancing…
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Robert Klopstock: Kafka’s fellow patient, friend, and doctor
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “If I had known then what I know now, Franz would be sitting here talking to us.”– Robert Klopstock, M.D., to Kafka scholar Angel Flores, early 1940s Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was born to a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague. He got a law degree at his father’s insistence but worked as a…
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Optography: Recorded on the retina
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Sharpness is a bourgeois concept.”– Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004), French photographer The discovery in 1876 that certain cells in the retina change color on exposure to light intensified the comparison of the human eye to a camera. The retina was no longer thought of as merely a membrane, but rather a screen, or…
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Ming the clam: Methodical measurement of the maturity of the Methuselah of mollusks
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Clams don’t carry birth certificates.”– Samantha Larson, National Geographic1 The maximum human lifespan is about 120 years, and research continues to find ways to increase that maximum. Knowing the maximum lifespan of other species and how they manage to achieve it may be of value. Zoologists have two strict criteria when defining…
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Loving them to death: Animal hoarding disorder
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “The Lord said to Noah… ‘Take with you seven pairs of every kind of clean animal…and one pair of every unclean animal…and also seven pairs of every kind of bird.’”– Genesis 7, in the Old Testament Between 2–6 % of people are hoarders.1 They excessively acquire unneeded items, often without space to…
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Dying young: Bob Marley (1945–1981)
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “In the community of living tissues, the uncontrolled mob of misfits that is cancer behaves like a gang of perpetually wilding adolescents. They are the juvenile delinquents of cellular society.”– Sherwin Nuland, MD, How We Die Bob Marley (1945–1981) was a Jamaican singer, songwriter, musician, and the son of a Jamaican mother…
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Book review: Saving Freud: The Rescuers Who Brought Him to Freedom
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “A nation that produced Goethe could not possibly go to the bad.”– Sigmund Freud, 1930 In March 1938, Austria became part of the Greater German Reich. Nazi antisemitism and the exclusion of Jews from society began at once. Dr. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the creator of psychoanalysis, could no longer deny what was…
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Codpiece evolution: From function to fantasy
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Pretty personal palaces for penises”– Zaria Gorvett, in Smithsonian A codpiece (from Middle English cod, meaning bag or scrotum) was a triangular piece of cloth covering the male genitals, held in place by buttons or ties that attached to the man’s hosiery. In fourteenth-century Europe, men’s hose consisted of two separate legs,…
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René Descartes found that Sweden was hazardous to his health
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden René Descartes (1596–1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. He obtained a law degree in 1616 at his father’s insistence, but in 1618 became an officer in the army of the Dutch Protestant States. He is thought to have influenced the work of Isaac Newton and also created the foundations of…