Tag: Summer 2025
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Below deck and breathless: Pneumonia’s toll on seafarers
Richard de GrijsSydney, Australia In the tight, damp quarters of historical tall ships on the open sea, pneumonia was a common occurrence. More than just an unfortunate illness, it was often a death sentence, preying upon the weakened and crowded bodies of sailors, soldiers, convicts, and emigrants. Although less sensational than scurvy and not as…
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Brushstrokes and benevolence: Thomas Sully, Samuel Coates, and the Pennsylvania Hospital
Sally MetzlerChicago, Illinois, United States Artist Thomas Sully was born in 1783 in the remote English village of Horcastle, but he would gain fame and fortune in the city where the greatest minds came together to sign the United States Constitution: Philadelphia. Lauded as the “Athens” of North America,1 Philadelphia lured artists seeking commissions from…
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Caravaggio: Beauty and crime intertwined
Born in Milan in 1571 and orphaned by the plague in 1577, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio made his way to Rome in 1592, where he enrolled the lowlife of the city, its prostitutes, thieves, and other undesirables, in order to paint the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and the Apostles and saints of the New Testament and…
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Titian: The mastery of color and the perils of paint
Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1488/90–1576) hailed from Pieve di Cadore, near Venice. He trained first in the workshop of the mosaicist Sebastiano Zuccato and subsequently with the acclaimed Giovanni Bellini, while his close relationship and collaboration with the influential Giorgione greatly shaped his early style. Titian’s early commissions included the Scuola di San Antonio frescoes in…
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The Pickering-Platt debate
JMS PearceHull, England Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC–43 BC), statesman, scholar, and philosopher once said: If no use is made of the labours of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge. It may therefore be worthwhile to recollect the aspects of hypertension highlighted by the famously protracted saga of the…
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The Celts, early inhabitants of Europe
The Celts, a collection of Indo-European tribes, shared common linguistic and cultural traditions. They controlled extensive territories across Europe from 1200 BCE to 400 CE, spanning from Ireland and Scotland to Anatolia and from the Netherlands to Spain and Italy. Greek and Roman observers frequently wrote about the Celts in negative terms but also expressed their admiration for them. The main Celtic…
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Sir Edward Elgar, pioneer of English music
Sir Edward Elgar raised English music to prominence at a time when it was dominated by continental composers. Renowned for his The Dream of Gerontius oratorio (1900), Enigma Variations (1899), the Pomp and Circumstance marches (1901–1930), a Violin Concerto (1910), a Cello Concerto (1919), two symphonies, and many other compositions, he became one of the…
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Dr. David Hosack, physician to Alexander Hamilton
In the early 1800s, when Napoleon had established his hegemony over most of Europe but was utterly ignored by Jane Austen in her novels, barber-surgeons took care of most of the bodily needs of their clients. They shaved their beards, pulled their teeth, drew their blood, lanced boils, applied leeches, and amputated limbs if necessary.…
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Medicine’s “Naming of the Parts”: Less instrumentalism and more aesthetics?
Alan BleakleyPlymouth, United Kingdom The English poet Henry Reed first published “Naming of the Parts” in 1942. English schoolchildren of my generation, born soon after WWII, learned this poem by heart. But we were too young to know, and perhaps our English teachers failed to notice, that the poem is full of sexual innuendo. Ostensibly,…
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A hole in the head and a world of skill
Richard de GrijsSydney, Australia In the dim confines of a ship’s sickbay during the golden age of piracy, the sound of waves might have been interrupted by the rasp and twist of a surgical drill biting into bone. Trepanning—the act of boring into the skull to relieve the pressure on the brain following head trauma—was…