Tag: Obstretics
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Book review: The Doctors Blackwell
Elizabeth CoonEelco WijdicksRochester, Minnesota, United States Edith Lutzker celebrated the centennial anniversary of the struggle of five British heroines in her 1969 groundbreaking book Woman Gain A Place in Medicine. Much less has been written on women physicians in Europe and Asia, but the Italian universities admitted women to study and teach medicine beginning in…
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Becoming a doctor in Chicago (c. 1954)—Clerkships at Michael Reese Hospital
Peter BerczellerEdited by Paul Berczeller An excerpt from Dr. Peter Berczeller’s memoir, The Little White Coat. After Cook County, my group and I moved over to Michael Reese Hospital—a pile of old buildings on the near South Side—for our surgical clerkship. Each of us was assigned to a resident and told to stick to him…
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Infertility in Nigeria and the race for parenthood
Princewill UdomPort Harcourt, Nigeria Infertility is a growing problem in Nigeria. In one study, researchers found that female gender-related causes accounted for 42.9% of infertility, in contrast to male causes, which were about half that number.1 Common causes are broadly categorized into genetic, physiological, endocrine, and lifestyle factors. One consequence of this problem is a…
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Loyal Davis, legendary neurosurgeon (1896–1982)
For more than thirty years, in an era less politically correct than ours, Dr. Loyal Davis reigned supreme as chief of surgery at the Northwestern University medical school in Chicago. He retired in 1963, but stories about him persisted as lively subjects of conversation and amusement, to be told with relish at meetings and dinner…
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Enough
Laura LoertscherPortland, Oregon, United States The last food you ever ate was a cup of orange sherbet from the nurses’ station. I saw no reason to make you NPO. After all, you were eating for two. Did you know this would be your last meal? You came to the hospital on a late Friday afternoon,…
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Bob Edwards and the perils of publicity
James DrifeLeeds, United Kingdom The physiologist Robert Edwards began thinking about human in-vitro fertilization (IVF) in the 1950s and first suggested it in print in 1965. Thirteen years later Louise Brown, the world’s first IVF baby, was born in Oldham, United Kingdom. Today that sequence of events seems logical, even inevitable, but it very nearly…