Tag: Neurology
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Multiple [disseminated] sclerosis
“Disseminated sclerosis was described pathologically in the 1830s by Cruveilhier in Paris and Carswell in London, but clinical accounts were sketchy. It was known only to the cognoscenti and regarded as a great rarity. Charcot was the first to diagnose the disease during life, and from 1860 onwards Charcot and Vulpian, and later Charcot writing…
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Death from uremia
“Your grandmother is doomed,” [the doctor] said to me. “It is a stroke brought on by uremia. In itself, uremia is not necessarily fatal, but this case seems to me hopeless. I need not tell you that I hope I am mistaken.” [Then] there was a moment when the uremic trouble affected her eyes. For…
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Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland
Rayda JoomunMauritius To Deelshad Reezuana,The most beautiful Alice I met,May you rest in peace in Wonderland… “Thus grew the tale of Wonderland: / Thus slowly, one by one, / Its quaint events hammered out / And now the tale is done, / And home we steer, a merry crew, / Beneath the setting sun”¹ As a child, I got lost…
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Somnambulance and other surprises
Brent RussellMarietta, Georgia, United States In one of the odder experiences of my life, I woke up in the middle of the night to find my wife prodding my face with her fingers. “What are you doing?” I asked. “I’m trying to see whether you have tusks,” she replied. Apparently, she already had seen that…
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The human brain: writer of our stories
Jaleed GilaniKarachi, Pakistan “What if I told you that this world around us, this richly textured world, were all just an illusion constructed in your head?” asks eminent neuroscientist David Eagleman in the brilliant documentary The Brain with David Eagleman.1 He then questions, “What if I said that the real world has no smell or taste…
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Discovering migraines
Catherine LanserMadison, Wisconsin, United States My headaches started after my first period when I was a freshman in high school. They were dull, daily, aching headaches that were manageable. I usually just took some acetaminophen and they went away. But none had been as bad as the one gripping me on one memorable day. I…
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Left-handedness: Is it the winner’s curse?
Isuri WimalasiriKandawela Estate, Ratmalana, Sri Lanka Most human beings, some 85% to 95%, are right-handed, and the remainder consists mainly of left-handers and a negligibly small number of ambidextrous people. Hand orientation is decided during intrauterine life, but if a child shows hand preference before the age of eighteen months this it is considered abnormal…
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“I shouldn’t know you again if we did meet”: prosopagnosia
Sylvia KarasuNew York City, New York, United States Watching Black Narcissus, the eerily unsettling film1 about an order of nuns cloistered in an isolated, windswept convent perched within the Himalayas, I am struggling to differentiate one nun from another. I see the nuns’ faces clearly but their hair is not visible. Hair is the first…
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Classicism and Sir Charles Bell’s Engravings of the Nerves
Allister NeherMontreal, Quebec, Canada Readers of medical humanities journals have become accustomed to seeing articles on anatomical illustration and its indebtedness to the techniques and conventions of the fine arts. As diverse as connections between these two areas can be, they are often more complicated than we might expect, especially when we examine the circumstances…
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Joseph Babinski of the Babinski Sign
In 1848 populist revolutions swept across Europe, in Germany, France, and Italy—and also in Poland, where an uprising to gain independence from Russia was ruthlessly suppressed. To escape the repression that followed, Aleksander and Henryieta Babinski fled to France. Their son Joseph was born there in 1857, in Paris—not in Poland or even in Chile…