Tag: Illinois
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“For their own sakes”: The Edinburgh Seven, Surgeon’s Hall Riot, and the fate of English medical women
Mariel Tishma Chicago, Illinois, United States Surgeons’ Hall, Edinburgh. Photograph of engraving in the 1890 edition of Cassell’s Old and New Edinburgh by James Grant. Photo by Peter Stubbs. Via Wikimedia. “There seems to be practically no doubt now that women are and will be doctors. The only question really remaining is, how thoroughly…
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Alexis Carrel: the sunshine and the shadow
Philip R. Liebson Chicago, Illinois, United States Alexis Carrel. Unknown photographer. 1912. From Popular Science Monthly Volume 81, on the Internet Archive. Via Wikimedia. Dr. Alexis Carrel (1873-1944) was as complex as his glass perfusion pump apparatus. A brilliant research surgeon, he won the Nobel Prize in Medicine before his fortieth birthday for his…
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Dr. Aufderheide and the mummies
Philip R. LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States Paleopathology, the study of early animal and human artifacts, offers a historical perspective of disease and injury in the distant past. It uses skeletal and mummified remains as the substrate for this analysis. The discipline is about 200 years old and initially the analysis was based on abnormalities of…
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Did Ernest Hemingway have the Celtic curse?
Philip R. Liebson Chicago, Illinois, United States Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1954. GPA Photo Archive. Via Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0 Considering Ernest Hemingway’s mishaps before he died in 1961 by a self-inflicted shotgun wound, it is surprising that he lived so long. He survived two plane crashes several days apart that left…
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The death of James Abram Garfield
Philip Liebson Chicago, Illinois, United States James Abram Garfield. By Ole Peter Hansen Balling. 1881. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Public Domain. The medical treatment of some US presidents and ex-presidents has been controversial. One example is George Washington, who in 1799 at age sixty-seven suffered from an acute throat ailment that was treated…
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Tutorial for surgeons by Lawrence Peter Berra
Jayant RadhakrishnanChicago, Illinois, United States Since the turn of this century, and more so over the past decade, surgeons at various stages of their careers have been dissatisfied with their work and the surgical lifestyle. The main reason for their dissatisfaction seems to be an ever-increasing burden of administrative work, leaving them with little time…
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Carl Gustav Jung
Anne Jacobson Oak Park, Illinois, United States Carl Jung. Photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Creative Commons. In the autumn of 1913, Carl Gustav Jung was traveling alone by train through the rust and amber forest of the Swiss countryside. The thirty-eight-year-old psychiatrist had been lately troubled by strange dreams and a rising sense of tension,…
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Oswaldo Cruz and the eradication of infectious diseases in Brazil
Robert PerlmanChicago, Illinois, United States In 1899, an epidemic of bubonic plague caused a crisis in the Brazilian port city of Santos. Ship captains were angry that their boats had to remain in quarantine and so denied that the disease was plague. They and others argued that this new disease was not as deadly as…