Tag: Spring 2020
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Strange complications of vaccination
In this caricature James Gillray makes fun of the supposed complications of using the cowpox vaccine to prevent patients from getting the smallpox. Several people are shown having cows emerge from their hands, mouths, or buttocks, or develop horns that sprout from their heads. This is obviously not a very safe vaccine! Spring 2020 |…
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Ode to my stethoscope
Hilton KoppeLennox Head, Australia Poet’s note My Littman stethoscope has accompanied me on my journey in medicine across five decades into premature medical retirement. It was definitely more difficult to lay down my stethoscope than it had been for me to recommend medical retirement to many of my patients. This poem includes a liberal sprinkling…
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Dr. Samuel Sarphati
Annabelle SlingerlandLeiden, the Netherlands Times of confusion and uncertainty can also be fruitful grounds for seeds to root, rise, and bloom. One such seed was Dr. Samuel Sarphati, who created New Amsterdam on the banks of the river Amstel. Amsterdam in the early nineteenth century was already renowned for its prosperous canal belts, streets lit…
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Amputations
Amputations were gruesome affairs before the advent of anesthesia. In the civilian population they would have been done mainly for ischemia, gangrene, and infections. In the image shown on the left, the man standing in the background wears a letter tau to indicate that he had suffered from St. Anthony’s fire, ergotism. He presumably has…
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A physician and a pregnant patient
A very pregnant young woman, not feeling her best, is sitting with a doctor in consultation. Another woman in the background is holding a container full of urine that the doctor will examine. But presumably the doctor has already determined what ails the patient, for he is writing a prescription. The ubiquitous chamber pot is…
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Giovanni Cortesi—Renaissance surgeon of Bologna and Messina
We owe our gratitude to Dr. Paolo Savoia from the Department of History at King’s College London for his learned review of the life of Giovanni Batista Cortesi (1552–1643), a remarkable early Italian surgeon and physician who deserves to be better known. According to Dr. Savoia, the story of Giovanni Cortesi reads like a fairytale—how…
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Saints Damian and Cosmas removing a bullet from a man’s chest
The renowned third century saints Cosmas and Damian were also doctors, often shown in paintings replacing a gangrenous leg with a healthy one. Here the two saints are performing an operation to remove a bullet from a patient’s chest. The creator, Antoine de Favray, was a French artist who worked for the Knights of Malta…
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Ambroise Paré shown amputating a leg on the battlefield
One of the many of Amboise Paré’s surgical innovations was to tie off the blood vessels severed during amputations rather than cauterize them to stop the bleeding. This approach yielded greatly improved results but was much more time consuming because as many as fifty ligatures may have been needed during one amputation. In this painting…