Tag: Tuberculosis
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Novalis: The white plague and the blue flower
Nicolas Roberto Robles Badajoz, Spain Novalis was the pseudonym and pen name of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr1 von Hardenberg, a poet, author, mystic, and philosopher of early German Romanticism. Young Hardenberg adopted the pen name “Novalis” from his twelfth-century ancestors who named themselves “de Novali” after their settlement Grossenrode, or Magna Novalis (Latin translation for Neubruchland…
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Doctor Johnson and his ailments
Samuel Johnson, one of the greatest English literary figures of all time, is remembered more for what he said than for what he wrote. Other writers may have been more successful or more profound, but none had as great a biographer as James Boswell.1 Boswell was twenty-two years old when he was first introduced to…
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Robert Louis Stevenson and hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia
Sally MetzlerChicago, Illinois, USA Famed Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) traveled to Monterey, California, in 1879 and lived for three months on the second floor of a white adobe boarding house called the French Hotel. Located on 530 Houston Street, the edifice is now known as the Stevenson House and serves as a major…
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What did Dorothy Reed See?
Sara NassarCairo, Egypt “They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.”1—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet Dorothy Mabel Reed Mendenhall opened the doors of medicine at a time when women were considered incapable of managing this “gory” field. Although Reed’s eponymous Reed-Sternberg cell was a pivotal discovery for the diagnosis…
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“The Sick Child” in Scandinavian art
Göran WettrellSweden Within Western figurative pictorial art there has long been an interest in showing sick children, their psychological attitudes, the effects on the family, and indeed the very reality of disease. One of the best known works on this subject is by Gabriel Metsu (1629-1667) of the Dutch Golden Age of painting. Titled The…
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Ford Madox Brown: His model and his medical grandfather
Few ladies would look their best when painted in bed with their hair down while recovering from a dangerous infection. But Emma Hill looks beautiful, resting, her coiffure immaculate, sheets unruffled, a flower in her hand. In 1848 while still in her teens, she had become the model and then mistress of Ford Madox Brown,…