Tag: Summer 2018
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The founding of Rush Medical College
Joseph deBettencourtChicago, Illinois, United States Act I: Dr. Daniel Brainard Beneath the impressive shadow of Notre Dame, a young American cut a path through the winding cobblestone maze of the Île de la Cité to the doors of the Hôtel Dieu, Paris’ oldest hospital. The young man carried with him a diploma from a small…
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Clean eating and orthorexia as technologies of the self
Cristina Hanganu-Bresch Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA Photo by Dan Gold from Burst. Licensed under Creative Commons As numerous social and traditional media outlets and ads constantly remind us, our diets must be “clean”—a vague descriptor whose fuzzy boundaries can fit a plethora of surrogate terms: organic, natural, whole, non-GMO, unprocessed, gluten free, vegan, sugar-free, fat-free,…
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The art of playing with food
Sue Reeves London, United Kingdom Vertumnus by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1591) Arcimboldo (1527-1593) was an Italian painter most celebrated for his curious portraits of human heads composed of objects such as plants, fruit, and vegetables. The paintings have been described as “whimsical puzzle like portraits” and have retained their enchanting appeal over the years.1 Perhaps…
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Partners in healing: An early renaissance painting depicting the partnership of the divine with the physicians Cosmas and Damian
Susan Brunn PuettJ. David PuettChapel Hill, North Carolina, United States In many cultures the practice of healing was perceived as a combined effort by physicians and the divine. Florentine Renaissance hospitals had churches and cloisters in their complexes where displayed works of art reminded patients and their families of God’s curing powers. Meant to invoke…
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Loyal Davis, legendary neurosurgeon (1896–1982)
For more than thirty years, in an era less politically correct than ours, Dr. Loyal Davis reigned supreme as chief of surgery at the Northwestern University medical school in Chicago. He retired in 1963, but stories about him persisted as lively subjects of conversation and amusement, to be told with relish at meetings and dinner…
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The tuber that changed the world: a brief history of the potato
Jennifer Musgrave Bloomington, Indiana, United States “This unassuming tuber held within itself the ability to sustain life and, in its absence, take life away.” When Christopher Columbus set sail in 1492, he did not know that potatoes even existed. But the Columbian voyages to the Americas would initiate a domino effect allowing this unassuming…
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The impact of technology on healthcare
Singh Yadav Tamil Nadu, India Double doors swing open as paramedics rush a burn victim into the hospital’s Emergency Department. A nurse checks the patient’s pulse and vitals, while another takes a blood sample and deposits it to a nearby machine. A scanning device determines the wound size and depth and guides an attached…
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Robert M. Kark (1911–2002)
In the 1950’s, Robert Kark and his team of Robert C. Muehrcke, Victor Pollak, and Conrad Pirani became, for a short time, the dominant force in American nephrology by popularizing the use of kidney biopsy as a diagnostic tool. This technique had first been described by Scandinavian investigators with somewhat limited success, but the Kark team…
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William Stewart Halsted (1852–1920)
One of the greatest early American surgeons and one of the “big four” founders of the John Hopkins Medical School faculty, William Halsted was a curious personality, a loner and egomaniac recluse, aristocrat in his breeding, touchy and sharp tongued, an advocate of precision who had little interest in private practice and spent his life…
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Learning anatomy in medical school
Peter H. BerczellerDordogne, France An excerpt from Dr. Peter Berczeller’s memoir, The Little White Coat. On the second day of medical school, we were invited to meet the cadaver we would be working on for the next six months. I trooped up with the rest of the class into a large unheated space on the…