Tag: Spring 2023
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Art, anhedonia, and family psychodynamics in the creativity of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Stephen MartinThailand There are interesting questions about how the mental phenomenology of the great writer Nathaniel Hawthorne1 drove his work. His supreme narrative gift and engaging observation were shadowed by anhedonia, which is a complete or partial lack of the ability to experience pleasure and a hallmark of clinical depression. In modern criteria,2 major depressive…
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Fear of being buried alive
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Cremation eliminates all danger of being buried alive.”– “Short reasons for cremation,” an Australian pamphlet, c. 1900 It has been said that one of our most common fears is being buried alive.1 Someone is mistakenly thought dead, placed in a coffin, and buried. We will not discuss other forms of alive burials,…
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Marie François Xavier Bichat (1771–1802)
In the universal Pantheon of the medical greats, Xavier Bichat is remembered as “the father of modern histology.” Yet he never used a microscope. He studied the human organs with his naked eye and evaluated them for their physical features (such as elasticity, transparency, and hardness). He postulated that each organ was not a homogenous…
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Forensic medicine and Sir Bernard Spilsbury
JMS PearceHull, England A forensic autopsy performed to establish the cause of death is an ancient practice.1 In Europe it was preceded by conventional pathology, as started by Herophilus of Chalcedon (335–280 BC). Medicolegal autopsies to solve legal problems were first performed in Bologna in 1302. During the Middle Ages, physicians’ opinions were sought to…
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The paradoxical life and art of Robert Colescott
Mildred WilsonMichigan, United States In 1975, satirist Robert Colescott turned the art community on its head with Eat Dem Taters, a parody of van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters.1,2 He and other postmodernist painters of the period would appropriate images from other artists’ paintings, questioning the concept of originality,2 and his George Washington Carver Crossing the…
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Dipinto di blu: Turning blue in a Florence hospital
Giulio NicitaFlorence, Italy We were in the middle of the 1970s in Florence, Italy. We had concluded the long, tedious years of university study. Real work awaited us in Villa Monna Tessa, a large early 1900s four-story building. It housed several departments of Medicine as well as Urology. The edifice, once an elegant patrician residence,…
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Drs. Joseph Bell, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Osler, and the method of Zadig
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “The whole of medicine is observation.”– William Osler, M.D. M. de Voltaire, the pen name of François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), was an Enlightenment historian, philosopher, and writer. He opposed France’s absolute monarchy and the power of the church. He wrote 2,000 books and pamphlets, was imprisoned twice, and was once exiled to England…
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Pavel Ivanovich Jacobi (1841–1913)
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Pavel Ivanovich Jacobi (1841–1913), largely forgotten and rarely featured in the psychiatric literature, was a Russian socialist who made as great an impact on the treatment of the mentally ill as Jonathan Swift in Dublin, Phillipp Pinel in Revolutionary France, Father William Tuke and his sons in England, and Vincenzo Chiarugi…
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Mental health issues in medical students: The prejudice and the injury
Amairani Gómez RodríguezPuebla, Mexico I had my first panic attack at seventeen. Biochemistry was a total headache; no matter how hard I studied, it was never enough to pass. As a school overachiever, I had never experienced failure. I felt an existential pressure. My supportive family never demanded high marks or my being the top…