Tag: pneumonia
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How we love
Linda Clarke Guelph, Ontario, Canada Photo by James Sullivan The communities of health care and medicine are richly storied. For almost three decades, I have invited people in those communities to tell me their stories and they have been generous in their telling. A story told can be image-laden and many of those images…
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The talk
Akshay Khatri Valhalla, New York, United States Photo from Pixabay I walked into the emergency department with a sense of trepidation. The patient I was evaluating was Mrs. G, a woman whom I had cared for in the hospital a few months earlier. Now she was back from the nursing home with more shortness…
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A picture of ill-health: The illness of Elizabeth Siddal
Emily BoyleDublin, Ireland It is difficult to think of Ophelia, one of Shakespeare’s most famous characters, without bringing to mind the famous depiction of her by John Everett Millais. In Hamlet, the sensitive and fragile Ophelia is driven mad by grief after her lover Hamlet rejects her and kills her father Polonius. After very poetically…
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William Gorgas – Life and medical legacy
Mariel Tishma Chicago, Illinois, United States Portrait of William C. Gorgas. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0. The Panama Canal Zone in the early 1900s was described as “one of the must unhealthful places in the world.”1 Ridden with mosquitoes, the Isthmus of Panama was a hotbed of yellow fever, malaria, and pneumonia. Previous efforts…
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Percussion of the chest: Leopold Auenbrugger
Percussion for examination of the chest was first described in 1754 in a little book written in Latin as “a new discovery that enables the physician from the percussion of the human thorax to detect the diseases hidden within the chest.” At publication the book was ignored and percussion received little attention until popularized decades…
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Snakes and ladders
Shampa Sinha Sydney, Australia Life in the ICU is like a game of Snakes and Ladders. Illustration by Dr. Tirthankar Dutta “Can you tell me where you are, Mr. Pemberton?” I would ask the middle-aged man every morning as he was recovering from abdominal surgery. “Oh, I’m in New York,” he would answer with…
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“How the Poor Die” by George Orwell, 1946
The next moment . . . the doctor and the students came across to my bed, hoisted me upright and without a word began applying the same set of glasses, which had not been sterilized in any way. A few feeble protests that I uttered got no more response than if I had been an…
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My father’s glasses
Geoff Kronik Brookline, Massachusetts, United States I took them with me when I left the hospital that day, but five years later, I still have not put them on. Holding the glasses starts a movie in my memory, a biography of my father, but if I imagine wearing them a stranger appears on the…
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Research subject
Eric Cohen Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States Much has been written about clinical research and its societal benefit.1 But research can also confer unexpected individual benefits, as shown by the story of Mrs. G, the recipient of a kidney transplant. She had been feeling ill for several days, short of breath and coughing. So, her…
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Auscultation
Daly WalkerBoca Grande, Florida, United States In the hospital’s x-ray department, Dad and I entered a small room with a wall of lighted boxes. A man with dyed reddish hair sat, sipping at a mug of coffee and reading a magazine called The American Spectator. “Harry,” Dad said. “Meet my son, Bud. Bud, this is…