Tag: schizophrenia
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“What’s a soul?”: Richard Selzer finds the spirit in the flesh
Mahala Stripling Fort Worth, Texas, United States Richard Selzer at the Elizabethan Club, 2004. Photo courtesy James L. Stripling. When he was a child, Dickie Selzer asked his father, “What’s a soul?” Julius replied, “No such thing.” When his inquisitive son pressed him further, he gave this answer: “Oh, a little bag of air,…
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Movie review: Kings Row – Assassins in white coats
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Above all, I must not play God.”— Revised Hippocratic Oath2 Kings Row (1942) is a film set in a small American town in the early nineteen-hundreds. It features two doctors who are best avoided as well as a bright young man called Parris sent by his wealthy grandmother to study medicine in…
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The mystique of psychiatry: a closer look
Lawrence ClimoLincoln, Massachusetts, United States As a retired psychiatrist, I have been thinking about the mystique that surrounds our profession. Psychiatrists seem to trigger three provocative associations that set them apart from other physicians. The first, sometimes interpreted as a wish, is that psychiatrists read minds and therefore know what is concealed or hidden inside…
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Psychiatric care at the historical Athens Mental Health Facility
Cherron Payne Farmington, Connecticut, United States Athens Asylum for the Insane, Athens State Hospital Administration Building, Circa late 19th Century to early 20th Century. Ohio University Archives. When I was an undergraduate student at Ohio University in Athens, my friends and I would often hike to an intriguing place called the Ridges, overlooking the picturesque…
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A note on handedness
JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom Handedness (chirality) refers to the preferential use of one hand over the other. It is a matter of degree; it is seldom absolute. Population left and right preference existed in the Neanderthals (lived from 400,000 to about 40,000 years ago) onwards. Only homo sapiens amongst the great apes…
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Arthur Bispo do Rosário: Creation in psychosis
Rebecca Grossman-KahnMinneapolis, Minnesota, United States In a sprawling, cavernous art museum in Buenos Aires, I turned a corner and my eye caught on what appeared to be, from across the room, cardboard. As I walked closer to the display, I saw a large brown rectangle plastered with smaller blue rectangles in two rows. Each blue…
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Medicine and cinema—A cultural symbiosis
Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom Fig 1. Poster for Chaplin film City Lights. 1931. Via Wikimedia. Public domain. For doctors and lovers of cinema, 1895 was an important year. On November 8, 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen, a fifty-year-old professor of physics, discovered X-rays in his laboratory in Wurzburg, Germany. On March 22 1895, the…