Tag: Summer 2025
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Thomas Hume’s recollections of the public execution of William Burke
Daniel PatroneOneonta, New York, United States In the early nineteenth century, the rapid advancement of anatomical science created a surging demand for human cadavers. Given the woefully inadequate legal supply of cadavers, this demand fueled the rise of a lucrative but illicit industry of graverobbers or “resurrection men” who supplied bodies to anatomists through unscrupulous…
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Lord Melbourne (1779–1848): Mentor of Queen Victoria
Lord William Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s well-known prime minister, descended from the great landed aristocracy that had ruled Great Britain for most of the eighteenth century. Some of their members had sat in Parliament for many years, including one who never opened his mouth during his forty-year tenure.1 For most of his life, Lord Melbourne had…
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The deaths of the Romantic poets
The deaths of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron, all occurring within five years of each other, form a tragic trilogy in the history of English Romantic poetry. Each died young, and their ends reflect the turbulence, idealism, and fragility that marked their youthful spirits as well as an era in English poetry.…
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József Antall: Hungarian medical historian and political leader
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, England In the Taban region of Budapest, at the foot of the castle district of the city outside the Semmelweis Museum of Medical History, stands a statue of József Antall, a famous medical historian who became the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Hungary in 1990 following the end of Communist rule…
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What the elders fed us
Caleb WamangaKakamega, Kenya Before the rain starts, the vine creeps across the yard. Mboga ya kienyeji (traditional vegetable), the green leaf that rounded off a meal, was what we called them. It is a gift that is never announced, never wrapped, but always there when a child seems pale or a woman staggers back from…
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The medical interests of Sir Walter Raleigh
Christopher DuffinLondon, England Sir Walter Raleigh (1552–1618; Fig. 1) was a prominent character in Elizabethan England. A one-time favorite of the Queen, he led a rich and varied life as an adventurer and explorer, statesman, soldier, and author. Less well-known is his interest in alchemy and medicine. In 1591, Raleigh married one of the Queen’s…
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The “Blue Death:” Cholera’s reign of terror
Richard de GrijsSydney, Australia Cholera—the “Blue Death” and, in the words of one witness, “one of the most ghastly experiences a disease could inflict on a human being”1—emerged in the early 1800s from the Ganges delta, traveling along the routes of global trade2 and religious pilgrimage.3 This waterborne disease could transform proud vessels into floating…
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Gustav Klimt (1862–1918): Medical aspects
The renowned Austrian painter Gustav Klimt lived and worked in Vienna during a period of unprecedented medical advances. The capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had become a world center for innovation in clinical medicine, therapeutics, and surgery. It had also become the site of a new understanding of psychiatry and psychology, in great part due…
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V.V. Veresaev, another forgotten physician-author
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Dr. Veresaev was born in Tula as Vikenty Vikentyevich Smidowitz in 1867, son of a famous Polish-Catholic physician father and a Russian mother. Raised and educated in Russia, his father established a free-of-charge hospital in Tula. First to introduce sanitary and hygienic principles to the city, his father ironically died in…
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The very prejudiced H.L. Mencken and his medical views
A century has gone by since Henry Louis Mencken wrote his diatribes, some of which he actually called Prejudices, now highly distasteful and taboo. He himself was born in Baltimore in 1880, spoke only German as a child, and during both wars thought the Germans should win. He studied at the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and…