Tag: JMS Pearce
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A note on early microscopes
JMS PearceHull, England Letters, however small and dim, are comparatively large and distinct when seen through a glass globe filled with water.1Seneca (c. 4 BC – AD 65) The Dutch spectacle maker Zacharias Janssen (1585–c. 1632) and his father Hans are thought to have made one of the earliest (c. 1600) compound microscopes, which had…
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Principles and Practice of Medicine: Sir Stanley Davidson
JMS Pearce Hull, England Davidson’s The Principles & Practice of Medicine, 1956 edition. A textbook of medicine is a single work covering all the major specialist topics, aimed principally at the undergraduate medical student. What constitutes a good textbook of medicine is plainly a subjective judgment; it would be invidious to select one of…
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Forensic medicine and Sir Bernard Spilsbury
JMS PearceHull, England A forensic autopsy performed to establish the cause of death is an ancient practice.1 In Europe it was preceded by conventional pathology, as started by Herophilus of Chalcedon (335–280 BC). Medicolegal autopsies to solve legal problems were first performed in Bologna in 1302. During the Middle Ages, physicians’ opinions were sought to…
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John Coakley Lettsom
JMS Pearce Hull, England Dr. John Coakley Lettsom with his family. From the History of the Medical Society of London. John Coakley Lettsom (aka Lettsome) MD FRCP Ed., FRS (1744–1815) is remembered as the physician who founded The Medical Society of London and for his monograph Reflections on the General Treatment and Cure of…
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From poppy to morphine and heroin
JMS Pearce Hull, England Among the remedies which it has pleased almighty God to give to man to relieve his sufferings, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium. – Thomas Sydenham, 1680 The controversial pharmaceutical company Farbenfabriken Bayer AG* had an important role in the development of morphine, heroin, and aspirin,…
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Poets at the Craiglockhart War Hospital
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kindom In the First World War, the writer Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) (Figs 1 and 2) received the Military Cross for bringing back wounded soldiers under heavy fire.1 He was admitted to the Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh in 1917,2,3 where he befriended Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) and described his emotional reactions in “Repression…
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The Foundling Hospital and Dr. Richard Mead
JMS Pearce Hull, England [Mead] physician who lived more in the broad sunshine of life than almost any man – Dr. Samuel Johnson (Boswell’s Johnson IV. 222) Fig 1. The Foundling Hospital, Holborn, London. Engraving by B. Cole, 1754, after P. Fourdrinier, 1742. Wellcome Collection. The Foundling Hospital in Lamb’s Conduit Field in…
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Robert Hooke and Micrographia
JMS Pearce Hull, England Fig 1. Cells in cork tree bark. From Hooke’s Micrographia via the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It is perhaps rash to attempt to appraise the work of Robert Hooke (1635–1703), but renewed attention is merited to a great scientist whose contribution to medicine and science has not been adequately acknowledged. Robert Hooke…
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Raynaud’s phenomenon
JMS PearceHull, England In 1862, Maurice Raynaud (1834–81) of Paris provided one of the finest descriptive accounts in clinical medicine in his doctoral dissertation on episodic digital ischemia. Yet lasting recognition came only after his death. He described twenty-five patients, twenty of whom were female, and with astonishing accuracy deduced the pathophysiology: In its simplest form,…