nervous system - Hektoen International

Henry Miller

July 22, 2022

JMS Pearce Hull, England Henry Miller. From the author’s personal collection. There are many eminent figures in the worlds of medicine and neurology, most of them distinguished by their clinical skill, academic prowess, scientific originality, or success in establishing major institutes of teaching and research. Henry Miller (1913–1976), though not a laboratory investigator, was […]

Book review: The Imaginary Patient: How Diagnosis Gets Us Wrong

June 30, 2022

Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom Cover of The Imaginary Patient: How Diagnosis Gets Us Wrong. Making the right diagnosis is central to the medical encounter. A doctor always started off by taking a history, examining the patient, and sometimes performing additional tests. But when a creditable diagnosis could not be made, the medical profession […]

Robert Bentley Todd

February 3, 2022

JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom Fig 1. Todd prize for Clinical Medicine (left). Medal by Joseph Shepherd Wyon, 1861. Science Museum, London, United Kingdom. Via Google Arts & Culture. Robert Bentley Todd (right). Mezzotint by G. Zobel, 1860, after D. Y. Blakiston. Wellcome Collection. Public domain. Students of King’s College Hospital London are […]

On suffering and its depiction in William Carlos Williams’s “The Yellow Flower”

October 8, 2021

Negin Rezaei Tehran, Iran Passport photograph of William Carlos Williams. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. Circa 1920. Via Wikimedia Eric Cassell observed that physical pain and suffering are two distinct experiences and that pain is only one of the infinite number of sources that may cause suffering in […]

Ode to baroque and other musical genres

June 14, 2021

George Christopher Ada, Michigan, United States The Lute Player. Caravaggio. 1596. Wildenstein Collection. Via Wikimedia. Imagine a musical style that is emotionally evocative yet highly organized, thereby conferring structure to emotion; that gives artistic expression of the fusion of emotion and reason; that mimics biology at cellular through ecological levels through its organized complexity; […]

William Halse Rivers Rivers

May 19, 2021

JMS Pearce Hull, England Figure 1 WHR Rivers in public domain, from Wikimedia William Rivers MD FRCP FRS (1864-1922) William Rivers (Fig 1) was a most unusual man, a polymath with careers in neuroscience, ethnology, and psychology. But above all—notwithstanding or perhaps because of personal nervous constraints—he was a man of originality and great […]

Two odes to Santiago Ramón y Cajal

April 26, 2021

Lazaros C. Triarhou Thessalonica, Greece (Left) Reproduction of the original Spanish version of the poem in the memory of Ramón y Cajal by “Rafael de Córdoba” (aka Marcos Rafael Blanco Belmonte) from the periodical Blanco y Negro, published in 1934. (Right) A handwritten ode to Ramón y Cajal by Manuel Laza Zerón, dated February […]

Walter Russell Brain DM FRCP FRS (1895–1966)

October 20, 2020

JMS Pearce East Yorks, England Lord Brain. From The Royal London Hospital. Source Russell Brain (Fig 1) was born at Clovelly, Denmark Road, Reading, on 23 October 1895, the only son of Walter John Brain, solicitor, and his wife, Edith Alice. A quiet, reserved man of enormous intellect and integrity, he was revered as […]

Samuel Solly—distinguished surgeon and educator

July 13, 2020

Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, UK Samuel Solly. Wood engraving, 1871. Credit: Wellcome Collection. (CC BY 4.0) Samuel Solly was born in St. Mary Axe, London, on May 13, 1805. He attended school in Walthamstow, East London, where his contemporaries included the future British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.1 In May 1822 he became an apprentice to […]

Gordon Morgan Holmes MD., FRS.

October 17, 2019

JMS Pearce Hull, England Figure 1: Gordon Holmes “Beneath the exterior of a martinet there was an Irish heart of gold” Wilder Penfield Gordon Holmes (1876-1965) was born in Castlebellingham, Ireland. He was named after his father, a landowner, descended from a Yorkshire family that had settled in King’s County (County Offaly) in the mid-seventeenth […]