Tag: Uppsala
-
Daumier’s doctors
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.”– Reinhold Niebuhr Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) was a “fundamentally discontented” French social critic, painter, sculptor, and printmaker. He produced over 100 sculptures, 500 paintings, 1000 drawings, 1000 engravings, and 4000 lithographs.1 Balzac said of his work, “There is something of Michelangelo in him.” Daumier hated anything…
-
Dr. Jochem Hoyer’s singular act of altruism
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is ‘What are you doing for others?’”— Martin Luther King, Jr. Kidney transplantation is the preferred form of treatment for chronic, permanent renal failure. Transplanted patients have better long-term survival than patients receiving repeated hemodialysis. There is, unfortunately, a shortage of usable kidneys worldwide. In the…
-
“Avoid a remedy that is worse than the disease”
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden Overconfidence is an undesirable quality. It does not enhance a physician’s approach to learning, nor to changing when change is needed. How a doctor diagnoses or treats a condition today may cause future generations of physicians to wonder, “What were they thinking? Did they not think about potential long-term effects?” Such future…
-
Fascist Italy: The Battle for Births
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “It’s up to you to create a generation of soldiers and pioneers for the defense of the empire.”– Benito Mussolini, to the women of Italy1 “Women are a charming pastime…but they should never be taken seriously, for they themselves are rarely serious.”– Benito Mussolini2 Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain, and fascist Italy needed…
-
When Papa Doc treated yaws
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Our Doc who is in the National Palace for life, hallowed be Your name by present and future generations. Your Will be done in Port-au-Prince and in the countryside…” — Translation of part of the “Catechism of the Revolution” that was recited daily by Haitian schoolchildren François Duvalier, M.D. (1907–1971) was the…
-
A tangled web: Stealing newborns in twentieth-century Spain
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “We were Europe’s baby supermarket and babies were stolen for sixty years.”1— Inés Madrigal Twentieth-century Spain was a politically unstable, highly divided nation. In 1931, King Alfonso XIII abdicated after the results of elections were interpreted as a plebiscite on abolishing the monarchy.2 What followed was “one weak government after another.”3 In…
-
Movie review: Kings Row—Assassins in white coats
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Above all, I must not play God.”—Revised Hippocratic Oath2 Kings Row (1942) is a film set in a small American town in the early nineteen-hundreds. It features two doctors who are best avoided as well as a bright young man called Parris sent by his wealthy grandmother to study medicine in Vienna.…
-
Tashima syndrome
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Let us now praise famous men.”— Ecclesiasticus 44:1 It has been a tradition in medicine to name a disease, a syndrome, a new treatment, or a surgical instrument after the person who describes it in the medical literature or invents it. Thus, we have Alzheimer’s disease, von Recklinghausen disease, Fanconi syndrome, Cornelia…
-
The sixtieth anniversary of the “Battered Child Syndrome”
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterward.”—Arthur Koestler, novelist and journalist In 1962, Dr. C. Henry Kempe and colleagues at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver published their groundbreaking article, “The Battered Child Syndrome,” in the Journal of the American Medical Association.1 The article alerted…