Tag: Inventor
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A Silent Voice: A case study of suicidality
Ryan XiaSan Francisco, California, United States During the COVID-19 pandemic, deaths from suicide surged as social isolation disrupted daily routine and promoted feelings of loneliness and anxiety.1 The pandemic shed light on risk factors that increase one’s likelihood of committing suicide,2 such as the loss… Read more
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Of toerags and spice boxes: Sanitation at sea
Richard De GrijsSydney, Australia At 5 P.M. it blew rather fresh, but so steady that the Top Gallant sails were not taken in. The Purser went into the weather round House about this time, which is fixed in the Galley, on the Ships Bows. While… Read more
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Errare humanum est
Bob ScottScotland “Erring is human; not to, animal”– Robert Frost, The White-tailed Hornet Why is it so difficult to face up to our shortcomings? It is more than 300 years since Alexander Pope wrote1 that a defining characteristic of humankind was to err, while granting… Read more
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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… Read more
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No one is speaking
Nina SokolDenmark A translated excerpt from the poetry collection No One Is Speaking by Danish writer Birte Kont, depicting when her husband underwent cancer treatment. The collection has received considerable praise in Denmark in its honest portrayal of what loved ones and close kin endure… Read more
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Grave robber or father of experimental surgery: A look into the life of John Hunter
Julius BonelloKathy SlaterPeoria, Illinois, United States That the true idea of Life existed in the mind of John Hunter, I do not entertain the least doubt.– Samuel Taylor Coleridge The silence of the graveyard was broken by the grunts of laboring men and the sound… Read more
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Joshua Chamberlain: The last casualty of the US Civil War
Julius BonelloCassandra PalmerPeoria, Illinois, United States “The inspiration of a noble cause involving human interests wide and far, enables men to do things they did not dream themselves capable of before, in which they were not capable of alone. The consciousness of belonging, vitally, to… Read more
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Nicolò Manucci, physician at the Court of Prince Shah Alam in seventeenth-century India
Stephen MartinThailand A teenage stowaway on a ship from Venice in 1653 had an unusual route into medicine. He was Nicolò Manucci (1638–1720, Fig 1). The earliest image of him gathering medicinal herbs in India is in the style of a Moghul imperial artist, probably done… Read more
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A conspicuous eye problem in sickness masks from Southeast Nigeria
Peter de SmetNijmegen, Netherlands The Ibibio and Igbo peoples in southern Nigeria commemorate their deceased ancestors in masquerades, in which beautiful masks depict good ancestors, while ugly masks portray those who roam about as spirits inflicting illness and misfortune if moral laws are broken. These… Read more
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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… Read more
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Renal reminiscences
Medical conferences are an opportunity to travel and to meet. During the early days when renal transplantation, dialysis, and biopsy revolutionized nephrology, I had the opportunity to meet many members of the new discipline. I once listened to Jean Hamburger lecture about kidney transplants. I… Read more