Tag: Peter Kopplin
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From eponym to advocate: The story of Stephen Christmas
Peter Kopplin Toronto, Canada The 1952 Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) had an unusual but fitting article. It was titled “Christmas Disease, a condition previously mistaken for haemophilia.”1 The seminal patient was five-year-old Stephen Christmas and the title suggested an unusual lack of British reserve. Rosemary Biggs and colleagues were giving the…
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Ernest Black Struthers: missionary life, kala azar, and military strife
Peter KopplinToronto, Canada In 1934 the third edition of Cecil’s A Textbook of Medicine contained a chapter by an academically obscure missionary in China.1 Russell Cecil, still editing the book by himself with only the help of a neurology colleague, chose Ernest Black Struthers to write about kala azar (visceral leishmaniasis). Most North American physicians…
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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…