Tag: JMS Pearce
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Robert Remak remembered
JMS PearceHull, England This article is based in part on an older publication, Lancet 1996.2 The name of Robert Remak (1815–1865) is linked eponymously to several neurological observations. They include Remak’s band, Remak’s fibers, and Remak’s ganglion.1 His father was a cigar merchant, in a ghetto in the Polish town of Poznan.2 He studied medicine…
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Dr. William Hall and rickets
JMS PearceHull, England Today, few Western doctors have seen children suffering from rickets, an extremely common crippling scourge of children recorded since the second century AD. Whistler, Boot, and Glisson in the seventeenth century described the clinical features. Its cause was a mystery. In a letter written around 1664, Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) describing rooks/crows,…
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University of Padua School of Medicine
JMS PearceHull, England The four great early schools of medicine were in Alexandria, Bologna, Pavia, and Padua. Herophilus and Erasistratus initiated rational anatomy and physiology at the Alexandrian school of medicine founded c. 300 BC. In the second century AD, they were succeeded by Rufus of Ephesus—the medical link between Hippocrates of Cos, Galen of…
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Measles again
JMS PearceHull, England “Measles is tearing through the UK, spooking health chiefs and parents alike.”– Daily Mail, 25 Jan 2024 Measles is notoriously infectious. Ninety percent of people exposed to an infected person will contract the disease. In many countries, because of misguided anti-vaccine activists, Measles Mumps Rubella (MMR) vaccination rates have fallen in recent…
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Tea with Walter de la Mare by Russell Brain
JMS PearceHull, England “The little nowhere of the brain” Many physicians have dabbled in literature and the arts, or as “medical truants” have abandoned medicine for such ventures. A unique collaboration of medicine and literature was the friendship and exchange of diverse stories and speculative ideas of human experience between the eminent neurologist Walter Russell…
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The vision of a visionary: JMW Turner RA
JMS PearceHull, England “The artist who could most stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature.”– John Ruskin The preeminent artist Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) was born in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London, the only son of William Turner, a wigmaker, and Mary Ann Marshall. He entered the Royal Academy schools aged fourteen and…
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Italy’s Lady of the Cells: Rita Levi-Montalcini
JMS PearceHull, England Rita Levi-Montalcini began her scientific career as an oppressed Jewess in fascist Italy. She ended it in triumph as the neurobiologist who discovered nerve growth factor, a political activist, and a researcher until her death at the age of 103.1 Born in Turin in 1909, Rita Levi-Montalcini was raised by an authoritarian…
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Physic
JMS PearceHull, England Amongst the General Medical Council records of 300 medical specialties hides “physician”, a word we all use with but little thought about its origins. Samuel Johnson defined physician as one who professes the art of healing.1 He also included physician as A man skilled in any profession; or Any able or learned…
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Napoleon’s final illness
JMS PearceHull, England Napoleon Bonaparte was born on the French island of Corsica on August 15, 1769. His colorful life, illnesses, and military exploits have been extensively recorded.1 On 17 October 1815, after the forty-five-year-old Napoleon’s famous defeat near Waterloo, the allies banished him to St. Helena, a subtropical island in the South Atlantic Ocean,…