Tag: ophthalmologist
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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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Rejuvenation: “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” from The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
James L. Franklin Chicago, Illinois, United States Ch’ io sono quell gran medico Dottore enciclpedico, Chiamato Dulcamara, . . . Rigiovnir bramate? I’m noted as a scientist, Practitioner and specialist. I’m Doctor Dulcamara … Would you like your youth recaptured? L’Elisir d’Amore (The Elixir of Love), music by Geatano Donizetti, Libretto by Felice Romano,…
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No complaints, only symptoms
Peter Arnold Sydney, Australia “No complaints, only symptoms,” I told my cardiologist this year. How dare I complain? I am eighty-four. Thirty-two years have passed since my quintuple coronary artery bypass; eighteen years since a diagnosis, in one of eleven biopsy samples, of invasive prostate cancer—left untreated, because so few of us die from it; five…
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Albert Einstein headed off at the “Nobel pass” by Alvar Gullstrand
Jayant Radhakrishnan Darien, Illinois, United States Photograph of Albert Einstein in his office at the University of Berlin. c1920. Accessed via Wikimedia. Allvar Gullstrand. Unknown artist. The National Library of Medicine. Allvar Gullstrand was a brilliant ophthalmologist and the second of eleven surgeons who have received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. He was…
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Waiting for the darkness to lift
Sheila Klass New York, New York, United States Amsler chart with macular degeneration From early childhood I wanted to be a writer and tell stories. But Mama and Papa, impoverished and struggling to survive at the end of the Great Depression, scoffed at such ideas and insisted I should be enrolled in a commercial…
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Monet and his cataracts
Peter KopplinToronto, Ontario, Canada In January 1923, the elderly artist Claude Monet struggled restlessly in his room after his cataract surgery. He got up and tore at his bandages.1 His family put it down to his temperament. But an elderly man in his eighties, immobilized, recovering from surgery with limited sight in the left eye…