Tag: Spring 2015
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Masters, Lindstrom, and decanal adventures
Marshall A. LichtmanRochester, New York, USA One of the responsibilities of the dean is to foster the relationship of alumni with the school. This effort can lead to enhanced financial support, but it can also bind accomplished graduates, who may or may not think fondly of their alma mater, to the school and its programs.…
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Lessons from the black hole
Columba Quigley London, United Kingdom Frida Kahlo, Wounded Stag The episode occurred some few years ago, when I was working in palliative medicine, caring for those with advanced and often incurable disease. As I walked onto the ward early one morning, a woman whom I had been seeing on a daily basis for symptom…
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Carlos Montezuma, MD
Raymond Curry Illinois, United States Photograph of Carlos Montezuma (standing second row, far right) Northwestern University Medical School, Class of 1888 Reunion Rochester, Minnesota, June 17–18, 1921 Carlos Montezuma (1865?–1923) was a unique figure and a fascinating study in the construction of a meaningful and influential life astride two often conflicting cultures. He…
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A fine notion
Ruth Z. DemingWillow Grove, Pennsylvania, USA Think of the worst disease imaginable. That’s what I’ve got. ALS, Lou Gehrig’s. One of 30,000 Americans. Me, a chaired professor of law at Temple University. Maple Oaks has a good reputation. I signed the reams of papers to get in. But, damn, it takes a long time for…
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When good doctors have bad outcomes: improving clinical practice in a results-oriented environment
Lloyd Klein Chicago, Illinois, United States The Doctor Luke Fildes Making good judgments that are patient-centered and evidence-based seem straightforward when evaluated from the executive perch, but the practitioner in the trenches knows that despite an extensive knowledge base and vast experience the myriad decisions, large and small, which constitute daily practice pose abundant…
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Patients and society: The big divide
J.M.S. Pearce United Kingdom But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature, is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences. John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), On Liberty, chapter 3, 1859 John Snow memorial and pub. Photo by Justinc on Wikimedia.…
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The stethoscope
Fiona RobertsonScotland, United Kingdom One of the most iconic tools of the medical profession is the stethoscope. Here we see René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec, a French physician, using his prototype monoaural stethoscope. It was a wooden cylinder one inch and a half in diameter, one foot long, and tapered at the end like a funnel. This embryonic…
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Helen Taussig: founder and mother of pediatric cardiology
Colin Phoon New York, United States Helen B. Taussig Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia On November 29, 1944, a landmark operation arose from the collaboration of three pioneers: Alfred Blalock, Helen Taussig, and Vivien Thomas.1 Now carrying the eponym of the Blalock-Taussig shunt, this was the first “blue baby” operation done during a…
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The truth in facts is a derelict ruin: Forging a self through fiction
Sara BakerAthens, Georgia, United States In his June 2, 2014 New Yorker article Inheritance,1 Ian Parker explores the connection between British novelist Edward St. Aubyn’s early traumatic life and his fiction. When we think of healing through writing, we usually think first of memoir and then perhaps of lyric poetry. Yet fiction offers advantages that…
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Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain: About a whistling pneumothorax and pulmonary tuberculosis
Peter Korsten Göttingen, Germany Originally intended as a novella, Thomas Mann’s (1875–1955) multilayered novel The Magic Mountain documents in fine detail the methods used to treat lung diseases and especially pulmonary tuberculosis at the beginning of the twentieth century. Mann’s protagonist, Hans Castorp, who intended to spend only three weeks in the sanatorium in the Swiss…