Tag: Moments in History
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Otto Kahler, Bence Jones, and multiple myeloma
Dr. Otto Kahler (1849-1893) was inducted into the pantheon of eponymy for reporting in 1889 the details of a patient suffering from multiple myeloma. Born and educated in Prague, Kahler became a professor of medicine in his home town, but in 1889 moved to a similar professorial position in Vienna. Influenced during a sabbatical in…
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The ligament of Vaclav Treitz
Vaclav Treitz (1819–1872) was born in Bohemia, studied humanities at the Charles University in Prague, and obtained his medical degree there in 1846. He then furthered his education at the New or Second Vienna School under the great luminaries of the time, Karl Rokitansky, Joseph Skoda, and Ferdinand von Hebra. He specifically worked in anatomy…
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Erasistratus
Erasistratus (304–250 BC) founded a school of anatomy in Alexandria, where he described the valves of the heart; concluded that the heart functioned as a pump; and distinguished between arteries and veins. He believed that the arteries were full of air and that they carried the “animal spirit”; appears to have almost discovered the circulation of the blood; and carried…
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Stephen Hales: Belief and blood pressure
Joseph deBettencourtChicago, Illinois, United States “It would but ill become us in this our State of Uncertainty, to treat the Errors and Mistakes of others with Scorn and Contempt, when we ourselves see Things but as through a Glass darkly, and are very far from any Pretensions to Infallibility”— Stephen Hales, Haemastatics Stephen Hales’ father…
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Gerard van Swieten and his reforms
A massive statue in Vienna shows the empress Maria Theresia, imperial in bronze as she had been in life, surrounded by her generals and by an ennobled Dutch physician, the Baron Gerard van Swieten. She had recruited him from the medical department of the great Herman Boerhaave in Leiden, and he had come to Vienna…
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The philosopher’s dementia: Immanuel Kant
To be the world’s greatest philosopher in the prime of life is no guarantee against developing the ravages of dementia in old age. This is what happened to Immanuel Kant, a little man scarcely five feet tall followed by a devoted servant with an umbrella, who would take his daily walk at so regular an…
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Saul Farber on St. Helena
Peter BerczellerDordogne, France I went to see Saul Farber in his new office in the spring of 2000. For some forty years he had been our chief, our role model, the long-term creative force behind the department of medicine and indeed the entire medical school, the man who personified the core values of our institution.…
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Percussion of the chest: Leopold Auenbrugger
Percussion for examination of the chest was first described in 1754 in a little book written in Latin as “a new discovery that enables the physician from the percussion of the human thorax to detect the diseases hidden within the chest.” At publication the book was ignored and percussion received little attention until popularized decades…
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The most loathsome disease of the emperor Galerius
“His disease was occasioned by a very painful lingering disorder. His body, swelled by an intemperate course of life to an unwieldy corpulence, was covered with ulcers, and devoured by innumerable swarms of those insects who have given the name to a most loathsome disease.” — Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman…
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Isidor Snapper: A colorful but tyrannical chief
The great professor of medicine with the Charles Boyer accent would make ward rounds followed by some thirty students living in constant fear of being publicly humiliated. “You,” he would say, “where do you come from?”—and wherever it was he would then pronounce that “in the country of the blind the one eyed man is…