Tag: Summer 2019
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We are all hospitalized (metaphorically speaking)
F. Gonzalez-CrussiChicago, Illinois, United States Among the many species of adversity that unavoidably befall us during life, to become a hospitalized patient is not the slightest. Today, hardly anyone is exempted: life begins and ends inside hospital quarters. We are born in some obstetrics suite and die amid beeps of life-supporting equipment, the hiss of…
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Spherocytosis
Andrea LolloNew York, New York, United States “Hereditary spherocytosis is a common inherited disorder that is characterised by anaemia, jaundice, and splenomegaly.”1 It was odd, of course, for a ten-year-old to have gallstones. It was even stranger for me to miss a full week of summer camp to sleep on the couch, swimming in and…
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William Richard Gowers MD., FRS.
JMS PearceHull, England The name Gowers is a name hallowed in the minds of most neurologists as one of the great founders of neurological medicine in the Victorian era. He is probably best remembered for his A Manual of Diseases of the Nervous System (1886) (Fig 1.), a rich source of wisdom and clinical description…
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Vampires and the Tuberculous Family
Sylvia PamboukianMoon Township, PA An isolated village, a series of mysterious deaths, a mob in the graveyard at midnight—it sounds like the climax of a thrilling vampire story. However, these events occurred in 1892 Rhode Island at the gravesite of tuberculosis victim Mercy Brown five years prior to the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).…
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Burnout: Are we looking at it through the wrong lens?
Elizabeth CerceoCamden, New Jersey, United States The epidemic of burnout seems to afflict ever more populations as it insidiously creeps into the workplace of everyone from nurses to teachers, from medical students to seasoned clinicians, from Amazon to Apple. As physicians, we are trained to identify a condition, make a diagnosis, and prescribe a treatment.…
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George Bernard Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma
In the first act of Shaw’s play, several doctors come to congratulate Sir Colenso Ridgeon, recently knighted for discovering that white blood cells will not eat invading microbes unless they are rendered appetizing by being nicely buttered with opsonins. Patients supposedly manufacture these opsonins on and off, and would be cured if inoculated when their…
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It’s elementary: The addictions of Sherlock Holmes
Kevin R. LoughlinBoston, Massachusetts, USA One might ask, why write about the addictions of a fictional character? The answer is that there is often a fine line between reality and fiction. The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens recently quoted a survey that found 20% of British teenagers thought that Winston Churchill was a fictional…
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Maria Lorenza Longo and the birth of the “Incurabili” Hospital in Naples
Marco LuchettiMilano, Italy In the Middle Ages hospitals were charitable institutions that took care of those that could not afford a doctor at home, such as the poor, elderly, orphans, and single mothers. In Naples there was an urgent need for a large facility with many doctors where “incurable” people could be treated for free.…
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Cranium: The symbolic powers of the skull
F. Gonzalez-CrussiChicago, Illinois, USA Of all bodily parts, the head has traditionally enjoyed the greatest prestige. The Platonic Timaeus tells us that secondary gods (themselves created by the Demiurge) copied the round form of the universe to make the head, divinest part of our anatomy. In order to avoid its rolling on the ground like…