Tag: Winter 2014
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Life at the table
Isabel AzevedoPorto, Portugal In the days when human time was organized differently and every hour had its meaning, meals were community events, mostly family events, where people met to socialize as well as dine. Someone took the task of preparing a meal seriously, paying attention to details, with dedication and without hurry. Feasts and simple…
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The unloved gut
Fergus ShanahanIreland “My brain, it’s my second favorite organ” pronounced Woody Allen.1 For many, it is the seat of the soul, the source of creativity and much more, whereas the heart represents passion, courage, and character. Fondness for other organs relates to warmth and honesty in the eyes, clarity in the skin, beauty in musculature,…
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Reading poems, saving lives
Dean GianakosVirginia, United States Men and women who tout the value of poetry like to refer to a stanza in William Carlos Williams’ famous love poem, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”, written in 1947: It is difficultTo get the news from poemsYet men die miserably every dayFor lackOf what is found there.1 If what the physician-poet…
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Scarification: Harmful cultural practice or vehicle to higher being?
Kenneth Felsenstein Bethesda, Maryland, United States Scarification is the act of “covering, disguising and transforming the body”1 by creating wounds in one’s own flesh in order to cause indelible markings. It is perhaps one of the most misunderstood body modification procedures done today, largely perceived in Western society as a tabooed and harmful cultural practice.2 Superficially…
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Lament to measles
Nazan BilgelBursa, Turkey I am the sorrowful, dull winter sunResting silently on the naked branches of the treesWarming and soothingVillages, roads, and mountain stones.I saw a village far awayBehind the mountains, you couldn’t know So described the poet Ceyhun Atuf Kansu himself when he saw so many dying children because of measles.1 Although a simple preventable…
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From Merdle to Madoff (Charles Dickens)
They found him sprawled out in his bath, ‘lying in it as in a grave or sarcophagus . . . the white marble at the bottom of the bath veined with a dreadful red . . . on his side an empty laudanum-bottle and a tortoise-shell handled penknife–soiled, but not with ink.’ ‘Separation of jugular…
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Schubert, Schumann, and the Spirochete
Their names sound Germanic and are somewhat similar, as are their portraits. They wrote beautiful music and rank high among the great composers of the romantic era. To confuse their names would constitute an unforgivable crime, especially in the eye of music lovers. Yet in 1956 fallible East German authorities issued a stamp featuring an…
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Anesthesia: Culture, technology, and the rise of the surgeon
Suzanne RagaNew Jersey, USA The introduction of new technologies such as surgical anesthesia has led to better methods of diagnosis and treatment, but it also shows that the relationship between medical theory and practice is not always a smooth one. Surprisingly, anesthesia was first used for non-medical purposes, indicating that in medicine theory does not…
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The boys’ club
Laura HirshbeinMichigan, Ann Arbor, United States In 1914, a group of fraternity men from the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, decided they needed more influence at the school. One of the students had an uncle on the faculty, and with his connections these men founded the Galens Honorary Medical Society, an…