Tag: Spring 2018
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The symbolic portrait of Mozart’s patron Dr. Ferdinand Dejean
Stephen MartinDurham, United Kingdom Dr. Ferdinand Dejean (1731–1797) grew up in the Bonn Court alongside Beethoven’s father and trained as a surgeon.1,2 For ten years he worked on Dutch East India Company ships from Persian Gulf islands to Sri Lanka, in Bengal, India and in Batavia – now modern-day Jakarta, Indonesia. He married Anna Maria…
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The anatomy of Michelangelo (1475–1564)
JMS PearceEast Yorks, England Michelangelo Buonarroti was an exception to the rule that the qualities of many brilliant artists and composers are realized and extolled only after death. He was recognized by contemporaries as a genius, a “Hero of the High Renaissance,” the only artist of whom it was claimed in his lifetime that he…
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Haunted by a living spirit
Bernardo NgSan Diego, California, United States Witchcraft has been present in the Mexican culture for centuries, both in and out of the context of disease, with witches practicing either white or black magic. The most nationally recognized site for witchcraft is the city of Catemaco, Veracruz, on the Gulf of Mexico. The white magic witches,…
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Finding Peace
Zachary JacobsSan Francisco, California, US The ocean wind gusts,heady and thick,chapped lips speckledwith briny grit.Gulls yammer in protest of the breeze,fits of throaty birdsongamid the whisper of the sea.She sits.Sand conforms lovingly to her hips,toes wriggling in its cool embrace,as the sun succumbs to the horizon,its warmth, long forgotten,slurped up greedily by time,relentless,and fleeting as…
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Heroes need medical care too
Liam FarrellRostrevor, Ireland I was driving along a quiet country road when I saw the first bluebell, its delicate beauty a promise of spring. I stopped to relish the moment, to live in the now. Birdsong, the wind rustling through hedgerows, and the disheveled dryad loveliness left me humbled. In the distance a cuckoo sang,…
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Hands
Laura WhiteRochester, Minnesota, United States I have long been ambivalent toward my prematurely wrinkled hands. This is a combination of my mother’s distaste for her own mitts – I am so sorry you got my hands – and the various comments of others referencing “old lady hands” and similar sentiments. My self-hand-concept has been historically unglamorous. I have…
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Thank you for your service
Jack RiggsMorgantown, West Virginia, USA As a reservist, I had heard those words on numerous occasions. I appreciated and understood that those words were not directed specifically towards me, but rather to the uniform that I was wearing. Although I had spent twenty-five years in uniform, I felt unworthy and undeserving of those words. I…
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Looking glass land
Christy D. Di FrancesBoston, Massachusetts, USA I It begins the way stories often end: that excruciatingly one-sided conversation with some loved one or another. His grandmother. Finally something seems to awaken her from the obscurity of her world. “Do ye ken where he’s gone?”i She frames the question in a conspiratorial whisper, her eyes such…
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People or numbers: healing and efficiency
Damiano RondelliChicago, Illinois, United States In a rare text from 1793, the Italian physician Luigi Angeli instructed young doctors on how to approach a patient: “. . . once you questioned the patient about his disease, or the remote causes of this, and after you observed the quality of his temper, age, once clarified the…
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Distant memories of medical school – 1950–1954
Martin DukeMystic, Connecticut, United States How sweet the silent backward tracings!The wanderings as in dreams—the meditation of oldtimes resumed—their loves, joys, persons, voyages.— Memories by Walt Whitman (1819–1892)1 It is now more than sixty years since I was in medical school (1950–1954). Most of the classes I attended and many of the people I came…