Tag: JMS Pearce
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Some Dickensian diagnoses
JMS PearceHull, England What a gain it would have been to physic if one so keen to observe and facile to describe had devoted his powers to the medical art.– British Medical Journal obituary, 1870 A huge biographical literature relates the turbulent life of Charles Dickens (1812–1870) (Fig 1) from its humble, poverty-ridden beginnings to…
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Luigi Rolando
JMS Pearce Hull, England Likened to the small intestines, in ancient times the gyri of the brain were named “coils” by Greek physicians and anatomists. Vesalius in the sixteenth century amplified the description in the celebrated De humani corporis fabrica. Thomas Willis in Cerebri anatome (1664) radically changed the accepted view that cognitive and…
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Huntington’s chorea
JMS PearceHull, England In the history of medicine, few writers can have received a finer accolade than that bestowed by William Osler on George Huntington. Osler commented: “In the whole range of descriptive nosology there is not to my knowledge, an instance in which a disease has been so accurately and fully delineated in so…
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Douglas Argyll Robertson and his pupils
JMS Pearce Hull, England Figure 1. Argyll Robertson pupil reactions. Diagram by Chainwit. on Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. In my student days, the Wasserman reaction (WR), though not specific, was performed almost routinely in patients on medical wards to detect syphilis. Several direct and serological tests of varying sensitivity and specificity have now replaced…
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Wernicke-Korsakoff encephalopathy: A historical note
JMS PearceHull, England Before Sergei Sergeivich Korsakoff described the psychosis that bears his name, Carl Wernicke reported a closely related and often coexistent syndrome. It is variously named Wernicke-Korsakoff encephalopathy, syndrome, or psychosis. Two more different personalities would be hard to imagine. Wernicke’s encephalopathy The crucial clinical account of Wernicke’s encephalopathy is found in the…
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Physicians and photosynthesis
JMS Pearce Hull, England Fig 1. Portrait of J.B. van Helmont, 1683. Wellcome Collection. Public domain. The importance of plants in nutrition and in the environment of human and animal species needs no emphasis. How plants obtain their food and how they grow were unsolved mysteries until photosynthesis was discovered. It was generally believed…
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Francis Bacon’s natural philosophy and medicine
JMS Pearce Hull, England Fig 1. Novum Organum Scientiarum, 2nd edition, 1645. EC.B1328.620ib, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Via Wikimedia. Public domain. Lord Bacon was the greatest genius that England, or perhaps any country, ever produced. – Alexander Pope, 1741 The early seventeenth century was a time when natural philosophy, the precursor of modern…
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Koch’s postulates revisited
JMS Pearce Hull, England Van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1722), a Dutch botanist, using his early microscope observed single-celled bacteria, which he reported to the Royal Society as animalcules. The science of bacteriology owes its origin to two scientists of coruscating originality, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. Pasteur may be described as master-architect and Koch as master-builder…
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John Walker, vaccinator extraordinaire
JMS Pearce Hull, England Medicine has bred many odd but audacious characters, eccentrics, polymaths and “truants.” One might argue that those characteristics attracted such people to careers in medicine: a chicken and egg dilemma. Conversely, some have argued that modern regulated uniformity has infected medicine and stultified originality. A little-known medical eccentric and heretic…
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John Bostock and hay fever
JMS Pearce Hull, England Fig 1. Bostock’s paper to Medico-Chirurgical Transactions of London, 1819. Before the 1800s, hay fever, now estimated as affecting 5–10% of Western populations, was not widely recognized by physicians. James MacCulloch MD FRS, a doctor and geologist, in 1828 was the first to use the term hay fever, which he…