Tag: Howard Fischer
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James Ensor’s Bad Doctors
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Je crois être un peintre d’exception.” (I believe myself to be an exceptional painter.)1– James Ensor The Belgian artist James Ensor (1860–1949) used his paintings as social criticism. He despised the church, courts, judges, lawyers, art critics, civil authorities, and doctors.2 He saw them as self-satisfied members of an elite that ignored…
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Book review: The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Well, son, I’ll tell you:Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.”– Langston Hughes, “Mother to Son” At the start of the twentieth century, Dr. Hermann Biggs, chief of the New York City Department of Health, declared that tuberculosis (TB) was a reportable communicable disease. The city would be able to count…
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Louis Jolyon West, M.D.: A dangerous doctor
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.”– The Nuremburg Code, Section on Permissible Human Experiments (1946)1 Louis J. West, M.D. (1924–1999), was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a poor immigrant family. He enlisted in the US Army during World War Two, was sent to medical school at the…
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Saving the starving Soviets with Spam
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Without Spam, we wouldn’t have been able to feed our army. We had lost our most fertile lands.”1– Nikita Khrushchev In 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the USSR. The “breadbasket” agricultural regions of Southern Russia and the Ukraine were quickly occupied, causing a food crisis for the USSR. Russian soldiers’ food rations consisted…
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Jeremy Bentham: Dead but not gone
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “How little service soever it may have been in my power to render to mankind during my lifetime, I shall at least be not altogether useless after my death.”1– Jeremy Bentham The English polymath Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was a philosopher, jurist, and social reformer. His collected works started to be assembled in…
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Pippi Longstocking: Escapist fiction for children, a clinical case description, or a feminist icon?
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Think for yourself is the mantra she whispers in children’s ears. Don’t believe the teachers, the police, the child welfare workers…”1– A resumé of Pippi Longstocking’s philosophy Pippi Longstocking (or Pippi Långstrump in the original Swedish) is a fictional nine-year-old girl. She has great self-confidence, superhuman strength, and much joie de vivre.…
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Women’s equality in the Viking era: The tooth tells the truth
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden Women had “relatively free status” in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark during the Viking Era (700–1000 AD), based on the criteria of economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment.1,2 For instance, paternal aunts, nieces, and granddaughters had the right to inherit property. In the absence of male relatives,…
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Honeymoon rhinitis: My love is like a red, red nose
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “I’m pretty sure that…you will admit that a good rousing sneeze…is really one of life’s sensational pleasures.”– Robert Benchley (1889–1945), American humorist “Honeymoon rhinitis” is a condition that includes nasal congestion, sneezing, and rhinorrhea (runny nose) during sexual arousal or sexual intercourse.1,2 Men and women are both affected. The first report of…
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Agatha Christie’s poisons: Better dying through chemistry
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Everything is a poison. Nothing is a poison. It is all a matter of dose.”– Claude Bernard, French physiologist (1813–1878) Agatha Christie (1890–1976) wrote sixty-six detective novels, fourteen collections of short stories, and three plays. She is the best selling fiction writer ever published, with two billion books sold. Her works have…
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The Manneken Pis: Still peeing after all these years
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Belgium’s culture of excretion goes back centuries.”1– Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, art historian and professor at the University of Paris Artists in the low countries did not hesitate to depict human bodily functions. The great Netherlandish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525–1569) had scenes of defecation in his paintings2 in the sixteenth century. The…