Tag: Physiology
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Roget and his Thesaurus
JMS PearceEast Yorks, UK There was much more to Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869)(Fig 1) than his indispensable Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (Fig 2).1 But little is remembered of his illustrious career in medicine and scientific discovery, which is surprising since in these endeavors he was highly regarded in his time.2 This may stem…
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Origins of the knee jerk
JMS Pearce East Yorks, England Reflex hammers are the icon or hallmark of every neurologist. How important are the reflexes they elicit? What is their mechanism? The advent of modern technology has made it easy to forget how important the skills and means in eliciting physical signs were to clinicians of the nineteenth and early twentieth…
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Using Latin to settle medical pronunciation debates
Raymond NoonanBrooklyn, New York, United States Author’s note: Original Latin words are written in italics, with macrons (ā) indicating long vowels. Equivalent Latin-derived medical terms are given without italics. Acute accents (á) are sometimes used to indicate stress accent in both English and Latin. Informal phonetic spelling that should be familiar to most readers is…
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John S. Bristowe: Victorian physician and polymath
Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, UK John Syer Bristowe was a Victorian physician and polymath who served his alma mater, St. Thomas’ Hospital, with great distinction. He was born into a medical family on 19 June 1827 in Camberwell in Southeast London.1 One of his brothers, Thomas Bristowe, became a Conservative Member of Parliament from 1885-1892. In…
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Ernest Henry Starling and the birth of English Physiology
JMS Pearce Hull, England Science has only one language, quantity, and only one argument, the experiment-EH Starling Ernest Henry Starling (1866-1927) (Fig 1) was an outstanding figure in the development of physiology whose prolific contributions made him one of the foremost scientists of his time. He was born on 17 April 1866 at 2 Barnsbury Square,…
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A lesson in physiology
Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece The contours are quite familiar, both to the eye and the touch. My hand strokes its counterpart, its twin sibling: they have been working together ever since I first saw the light of the day in this world. They have washed, clasped, clapped each other, tugged and pulled and strained together. They…
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Bloody women
M.K.K. Hague-YearlMontréal, Québec, Canada Sitting with little fanfare inside a twentieth-century red hardcover binding is a single leaf whose bibliographic record contains brackets of uncertainty: “[Calendar for Austria, 1496.] [Kaspar Hochfeder, Nürnberg? 1495.]” The catalogue offers only a basic description: “The woodcut occupying the whole lower portion depicts a zodiac man, two bloodletting scenes, a…
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Albrecht von Haller, physiologist and polymath
Medicine was only one of the many interests of Albrecht von Haller. He was physician, anatomist, botanist, and physiologist, wrote poetry, studied religion and philosophy, and has been called the father of physiology and founder of hemodynamics.1,2 Born in 1708 in Bern, Switzerland, into a family of priests and magistrates, he was a weak and…
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W.H.R. Rivers and the humane treatment of shell shock
Soleil ShahLondon, UK “Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity.” – Hippocrates War neurosis, or “shell shock” as it was referred to in the twentieth century, could be considered the signature injury of World War I. These disorders involved nervous ailments with no apparent organic lesion. Symptoms included…