Tag: Vignettes
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Passing sentence
Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece The man facing me across the desk is outwardly calm. He gives an innocent enough history of a vague pain in his back which eventually led his family physician to send him for a chest film. Something did not look right, and a computed lung scan followed. This was the reason for…
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Book review: Saving Freud: The Rescuers Who Brought Him to Freedom
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “A nation that produced Goethe could not possibly go to the bad.”– Sigmund Freud, 1930 In March 1938, Austria became part of the Greater German Reich. Nazi antisemitism and the exclusion of Jews from society began at once. Dr. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the creator of psychoanalysis, could no longer deny what was…
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The discovery of urea and the end of vitalism
Mostafa ElbabaDoha, Qatar In history, ancient chemistry is known as “alchemy.” It is different than modern chemistry since it was mixed with philosophy and pseudoscience, although it is considered a protoscience. Alchemy failed to explain the nature of matter and its transformations. However, by experimentation and recording the results, alchemists set the stage for modern…
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Additional French surgeons
By the close of the fourteenth century, France emerged as the preeminent center of European surgical practice. Its early pioneers included Theodoric Borgognoni of Lucca (1205–1296), who played a pivotal role in elevating surgery from a craft to a respected medical discipline; Guido Lanfranc of Milan (1250–1315), who further refined surgical techniques; and Henri de…
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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it…
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Thomas Guy and his statue
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, England Thomas Guy was probably the greatest charitable benefactor in eighteenth-century Britain. At his death, he had amassed a fortune of over two hundred thousand pounds (worth around 500 million pounds in today’s money). His largesse was directed primarily at Guy’s Hospital in Southwark, London. As a governor of St Thomas’s Hospital,…
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Unequal encounter: An initiation
Hugh Tunstall-PedoeDundee, Scotland In October 1961, I started at Guy’s Hospital Medical School in London for three years of clinical training. I was at the very bottom of the clinical hierarchy and put straight onto a surgical ward as a first-year ward clerk responsible for clerking admissions, junior to the third-year senior dressers on the…
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Musings from my first, on doctor-patient relationships
Hugh Tunstall-PedoeDundee, Scotland It was my very first patient. I had started my clinical training at Guy’s Hospital medical school in 1961 in London by being put straight onto a surgical ward. The patient was a Bermondsey Cockney dock worker who had a benign tumour to be removed—a neurofibroma. I examined him and read it…
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Rene Favaloro—Father of cardiac bypass surgery
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, England Over the last century, there have been many important contributions to medicine made by Argentinians. Of these Rene Geronimo Favaloro’s must surely be of the greatest, and his work on cardiac bypass surgery has saved countless of lives. Born of Sicilian ancestry on July 12, 1923, in La Plata, Argentina, Favaloro…
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Herophilus, the true father of anatomy?
Philip LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States Although Andreas Vesalius has been considered the modern father of anatomy, long before his time there lived a Greek anatomist and physician, Herophilus (?335–255 BC), who was accused of human vivisection. He may be the true father of anatomy because of his contributions to the understanding and differentiation of organ…