Tag: Spring 2017
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Kirkleatham Hospital
Stephen MartinMahasarakham Art and architecture in historic almshouses provided aesthetic pleasure, improved self-esteem and attended to spiritual need. An example of early Enlightenment philanthropy in the English village of Kirkleatham, Cleveland, provides major humanitarian lessons for the planners of today. East Cleveland was used to progressive thinking. A remarkable socio-geographical commentary on the area was…
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The morbid poet: Gottfried Benn, the morgue and the mysterious postcard
Annette TuffsHeidelberg, Germany “Worst of all: not to die in summer, when everything is bright and the earth is easy on the spade.” So wrote the German poet Gottfried Benn (1886–1956), three years before his death, in the poem “What’s Bad”.1 But if the wrong timing of one’s death is the very worst thing, what…
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Fog
Nicholas FeinbergNew York City, New York, United States Outside their window, the sky is dark and the streets are empty. Fog slides off the lake and turns the pavement slick and black. The wet air is a blanket that quiets the city. Silence fills the space between the buildings and pours into the bedroom where…
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Which weighs upon the heart
Murad KhanKarachi, Pakistan I seldom see patients without an appointment, which for an initial patient can take up to an hour, often longer. Fortunately for this couple, the booked patient rang in to say he could not come because of some transport problem, so I was able to see them. “Doctor saheb- we have come…
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At the turning point
Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece Eva was born the year I entered medical school; our life paths would cross two decades later. She went through school, played volleyball regularly, married, and lived a normal and carefree life. Then in her early twenties she gradually began getting breathless and increasingly tired, and had dizzy spells, fainting episodes, palpitations,…
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The divine leaf: Physick and the cause for physick
Lynn Veach SadlerBurlington, NC, United States Columbus is believed to have rebuked his crew for sharing the Indians’ “drinking” of the smoke of tobacco through toboca/tobaga pipes and chewing its dried leaves. He was among the first to discover its addictiveness. The Whites in his wake also smoked the calumet and received, legend claims, knowledge from…
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Charite hospital
Annabelle SlingerlandLeiden, the Netherlands On November 14, 1709, King Frederik I of Prussia planted a small seed that over the following three centuries grew, branch by branch, into one of the foremost medical research and treatment centers in the world. Plague House, 1709 In 1709 a malignant outbreak of bubonic plague that had almost depopulated…
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The flu vaccine: Transparency, uncertainty, and trust in medicine
Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece A few years ago the fear of ‘pandemic flu’ was spread widely all over the world, causing what has been termed an “emotional epidemic.”1 The disease itself, its social dimensions, and the ways it was publicly handled could form the subject for an academic thesis. Those events led me to a series of…
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The girl on the gurney
Diana PiWestlake, Ohio, United States A month before my gig as senior medical resident at Bellevue Hospital was up, I spent a morning in the New York City morgue. Why? I lost a patient. A young man with end-stage AIDS, a prisoner from Rikers Island. The morgue, a stone’s throw from Bellevue Hospital, was what…
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Outsourced clinical trials and ethical implications: India the most preferred global clinical trial hub
Persis NaumannPittsburg, Pennsylvania Introduction Pharmaceutical research is a complex social enterprise. With the proliferation of corporate globalization in the healthcare industry, pharmaceutical companies from western developed countries have increasingly offshored and outsourced global biopharmaceutical clinical trials to developing countries. The power of global pharmaceutical industries is extensive. It is important to understand the structure of…