Tag: Spring 2024
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Fugu—Japanese delicacy or death?
In Japan, fugu has been a “captain of these men of death” for generations, causing an exitus that is “rapid and violent.” There is at first numbness around the mouth, then paralysis, and, as with curare, consciousness persists until the very end. The poison interferes with the transmission of signals from nerves to muscles by…
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Quaerens and the Dreamy States
JMS PearceHull, England We are such stuffAs dreams are made on, and our little lifeIs rounded with a sleep.—Shakespeare, The Tempest IV.1 Dreamy states are well known as brief aberrations of awareness and of altered thought that are a commonplace, normal experience. As a manifestation of epilepsy, they have been recorded by famous literati as…
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The self-destructive urge
JMS PearceHull, England Preservation of life is often an unwritten axiom of medical practice. Sections on therapeutics in medical books and papers usually assume the obvious: aim to preserve or extend life. They rarely discuss the alternative harm or good that results from allowing nature to take its course unhampered. There are elements in humans…
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Lydia Sherman, serial poisoner
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden Poisons were easily obtainable in the nineteenth century, sold for use as household cleaners, vermin control, and in agriculture. By the 1820s, Americans feared being secretly poisoned, “and considered the incidence of murder by poison to be quite high.”1 This “poison panic” was fed by prominent, well-publicized trials. The high incidence of…
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Book review: Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, England The subjects of ageing, death, and immortality have long preoccupied human thoughts and culture. The ancient Egyptians practiced mummification out of a belief in an afterlife. Buddhists and Hindus believe in reincarnation with the immortal soul living on in another body. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam also have rites and rituals that…
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Willebrand disease discovered in a girl from the Aland archipelago
In 1924 the Finnish physician Erik von Willebrand was consulted about the case of a five-year- old girl from the self-governing autonomous Swedish-speaking region of the Aland archipelago in the Baltic Sea. Born on February 1, 1870, in Vasa, Finland, von Willebrand had graduated in 1896 from the faculty of medicine of the University of…
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Onions: Soup, medicine, and crocodile tears
What should well-educated persons be expected to know about onions? They have probably eaten them since childhood, or perhaps had to help their mothers in the kitchen and shed crocodile tears even though they did not feel particularly sad. If chemically inclined they might have wondered what ingredient was responsible for their tears. They may…
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The curious history of autologous blood transfusions: Syringes and cheesecloths
Denis ChenNewcastle-under-Lyme, United Kingdom Autologous blood transfusion, the infusion of a patient’s own blood, is a relatively recent procedure. It was preceded historically by the classical descriptions of the blood by Hippocrates1 and Galen2; by the discovery of the circulation of blood by William Harvey and the description of the red blood cells by microscopist…
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Earliest instance of Alzheimer’s disease as defense in a 1924 homicide trial
Saty Satya-MurtiJoseph LockhartSanta Maria, California, United States In the mid-twentieth century, few doctors and even fewer members of the public had ever heard of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Interest focused on senile dementia and arteriosclerotic vascular dementia while presenile dementia was thought to be uncommon and received little attention.1 Yet as early as 1906, Alois Alzheimer…
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Is Betteridge’s law valid?
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “[I am]…best-known for something that was intended as a throwaway remark.”1—Ian Betteridge Ian Betteridge, a technology journalist, stated in 2009, “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no.’” He meant, of course, only yes-or-no type questions. His idea was that if the writer or publisher…