Tag: JMS Pearce
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Sir Benjamin Brodie
JMS PearceHull, England Benjamin Collins Brodie (1783–1862) was born in Winterslow, near Salisbury. His father, Peter Bellinger Brodie, was the local rector. Having graduated from Worcester College, Oxford, he chose to educate Benjamin at home since he was unable to meet the fees of the public schools. Choosing medicine as his career, Benjamin ventured to…
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Serendipity
JMS PearceHull, England Serendipity has featured as an important factor in many discoveries and investigations in both medicine and science. Artists too, often refer to happy accidents that appear in their paintings. Amongst many well known medical examples of serendipity are: Fleming’s discovery of penicillin; Wilhelm Röntgen’s observations while studying cathode rays that the X-rays…
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Henry Vandyke Carter (1831–1897)
JMS PearceHull, England There is no better-known medical textbook than Gray’s Anatomy. No doctor’s interest can fail to be aroused by someone whose student career begins with the triennial essay prize of Royal College of Surgeons of England. Thus began the all too brief career of Henry Gray (? 1827–1861). The Wellcome librarian Noel Poynter…
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“The pissing evil” before insulin
JMS PearceHull, England There are many excellent descriptions of the history of diabetes, and of the nineteenth- and particularly twentieth-century discoveries of the secretion of insulin by the beta cells of the pancreatic islets of Langerhans.1,2 (See Table) However, the earlier history of diabetes is less known. The Egyptian papyrus (c. 1550 BC) discovered by…
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Inns or coffee houses?
JMS PearceHull, England Humans throughout history have resorted to drugs to stimulate or tranquilize their moods and feelings. Most were of herbal origin, the choice determined by their effects, local availability, and trading. But social factors and politics also played a part. Soon after the Republicans executed King Charles 1 in 1649, the dictatorial Oliver…
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Thomas Coram and the Foundling Hospital
Elizabeth SteinhartJMS PearceHull, England Nineteen years after good Captain Coram’s heart has been so touched by the exposure of children, living, dying, and dead, in his daily walks, one wing of the existing building was completed and admission given to the first score of little blanks [foundling children].—Charles Dickens, “Received, a Blank Child” in Household…
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The Pickering-Platt debate
JMS PearceHull, England Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC–43 BC), statesman, scholar, and philosopher once said: If no use is made of the labours of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge. It may therefore be worthwhile to recollect the aspects of hypertension highlighted by the famously protracted saga of the…
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René Descartes
JMS PearceHull, England René Descartes (1596–1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. So profound and diverse were his writings1,2 that this is no more than a slight sketch of his extraordinarily original ideas and his contributions to medicine. A year after his birth in Touraine, his mother died in childbirth and his grandmother cared…
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Jacques-Louis David’s portrayal of Lavoisier
JMS PearceHull, England In the 1780s, a period of rumbling social unrest in France, the lives of two famous men, a scientist and an artist, would interact. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794) is often associated with the discovery of oxygen; Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) was the preeminent neoclassical artist. Lavoisier was a French nobleman, justly celebrated for…
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William Harvey’s neurology
JMS PearceHull, England This distinguished physician, the greatest physiologist the world has seen, and the brightest ornament of our College.—William Munk1 William Harvey (1578–1657) was born in Folkestone, Kent, and attended King’s School Canterbury before proceeding to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He graduated MD from Padua (1602) and FRCP (1607) and was elected physician…