Tag: Spring 2015
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Smallpox vaccination in the satirical work of James Gillray
Godfrey Pearlson United States The Cow-Pock—or—the Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation! —vide. the Publications of ye Anti-Vaccine Society James Gillray, 1757-1815 James Gillray (1756-1815) was a skilled artist/draftsman and a full-time caricaturist, immensely popular in his own day, both in terms of sales of his prints and engravings in London and of contemporary…
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A flu that brought nations to a standstill
Jennifer A. Summers London, United Kingdom Policemen in Seattle, US, wearing masks made by the Red Cross, during the influenza pandemic, December 1918. National Archives at College Park, College Park, Maryland, United States. The year was 1918 and after four grisly years of the First World War, the longed-for peace was within the grasp…
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Mysterious muse
Juliet HubbellLittleton, Colorado, United States Few muses are both beautiful and dead, but one such modern muse is L’inconnue de la Seine, a young woman whose drowned corpse so inspired the Parisian morgue personnel who received her body in 1902 that a death mask or masque mortuaire was made of her serenely smiling face. In…
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Dear doctor
Melanie ChengMelbourne, Australia It was her mother’s doing. After all, it was her mother who taught her how to read. Not just in the literal sense—with Little Golden Books a good year before she started school—but in the broader sense of the word, through the sharing of musty, broken-backed treasures. Entire summer holidays could be…
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Mikhael Bulgakov’s “The Steel Windpipe” in A Country Doctor’s Notebook
Michael BloorUnited Kingdom Anton Chechov (1860–1904) is Russia’s most famous literary doctor, but another of Russia’s great twentieth century authors also practised medicine. Mikhael Bulgakov (1891–1940) was the banned author of The Master and Marguerita, first published twenty-six years after his death, a novel credited as a progenitor of magic realism and as the inspiration…
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Where no birds sing: tuberculosis in Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”
Putzer HungSt. Louis, Missouri, United States O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,Alone and palely loitering?The sedge has wither’d from the lake,And no birds sing. O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms!So haggard and so woe-begone?The squirrel’s granary is full,And the harvest’s done. I see a lily on thy browWith anguish moist and fever dew,And on thy…
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Better than booze
Ruth DemingWillow Grove, Pennsylvania, United States The following is a work of fiction. “Mom, Laura’s invited me to sleep over? Can I go?” “Sure, Lisa. Just make sure you’ve done your homework.” “I finished it.” Laura Kennedy was my best friend since childhood. We lived next door to one another in the wealthy community of…
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Looking back 175 years
Biji T. KurienOklahoma, USA It was a time when surgery was performed in the raw. Obviously a horrendous nightmare for both patient and surgeon, it was performed only in do-or-die situations. The odor of pus in various stages of decomposition pervaded hospitals. Deaths from various diseases and surgery were common. Treatment of ailments with mercury…
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Mingling medicine and medals
Ira RezakStony Brook, New York, United States When I was nine or ten, my grandfather gave me a Dutch two and a half guilder, which looked like a dollar but which I soon found out could not be spent in Brooklyn. After frustration came curiosity about the strange language, coat of arms, and denomination that…
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The arsenic eaters of Styria
John ParascandolaMaryland, United States In 1851, the medical world learned of the curious practice of arsenic eating among peasants in Styria (now a region of Austria) through an article in a Viennese medical journal by Swiss physician, naturalist, and traveler Johann Jakob von Tschudi. The stimulus for this paper was a trial involving a poisoning…