Tag: University of Vienna
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Viktor Frankl: The meaning of a life
Anne JacobsonOak Park, Illinois, United States Not long before the Dachau concentration camp was liberated in April 1945, Viktor Emil Frankl was seriously ill with typhus and writing feverishly on stolen scraps of paper, determined to keep himself and his ideas alive. Faced with the prospect of his own death and helpless as a physician…
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Ludwig van Beethoven: music and medicine
Michael YafiChaden YafiHouston, Texas, United States December 2020 marked the 250th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven. The causes of the composer’s deafness and his death at the age of fifty-six have remained unknown, even after an autopsy carried out soon after his death. Beethoven was also known to have mood swings, which…
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Dr. Fanny Halpern, a psychiatric go-between of 1930s Shanghai
Richard ZhangPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, United States On September 20, 1935, a lengthy advertisement in one of Shanghai’s most popular newspapers, the Shen Bao, celebrated the recent opening of the Shanghai Puci Sanatorium (上海普濨療養院).1 The sanatorium would later be known in Western histories as The Mercy Hospital for Nervous Diseases. The advertisement lauded the Puci Sanatorium, headed…