Tag: Winter 2014
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Healing through laughter
Farrah BuiNew Jersey, United States “If there is one thing to know about me, it’s that I refuse to ever eat honey again,” Ben explains to the audience. Immediately, looks of confusion and raised eyebrows appear among the faces in the crowd. “Don’t worry, it’s not just cause I have diabetes!” he tells them as…
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Portrait of a peasant
Alexandru Gh. SonocSibiu, Romania This peasant is shown wearing a green shirt, decorated on the shoulders with a red line and at the neck with a white lace collar, as well as a wide brown hat. He is disfigured by a tumor on the right side of his face. A second tumor is located on…
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Medical art from the Brukenthal Museum, Sibiu, Romania
Alexandru SonocSibiu, Romania Several works in the European collection of the Brukenthal National Museum are of interest to the history of medicine. Most of them are works by Dutch and Flemish painters, mainly from the 17th-century: The Summer by Jakob Jordaens, The Trapped Peasant by Adriaen van der Venne, The Bloodletting and The Diagnosis by…
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The Summer
Alexandru Gh. SonocSibiu, Romania On the right side, darkened perhaps to suggest an approaching storm, a woman with bare breast is looking up to the left. On the left side a younger woman is holding a child on her left arm, pointing down with the right hand. Between both women another one in a wide straw…
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Architecture and the French hospital
Sarah HartleyGarches, France Until I left England to work in France, it had never occurred to me that the architecture of a hospital was intimately linked to geography and that its cultural history was literally written on its walls. Walking around Parisian hospitals, usually with a hospital plan in my hand in a desperate attempt…
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The brain
Jorge LazareffLos Angeles, California, United States I saw the painting at the warehouses at 50 Moganshan Road, which have been transformed into a sui-generis art district. The layout of the place allows for a chaotic meandering, from a wide space with art on the walls and solicitous employees standing by screen desktops, to a maze…
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Screenwriting: psychiatry in reverse
Stephen PottsEdinburgh, United Kingdom Introduction The subject matter of medicine is inherently dramatic. Decisions taken by professionals who are highly skilled, but still human and therefore flawed, are applied to suffering patients in situations of pressure and can have radically diverse outcomes: life or death; disability or cure: a healthy baby born to a healthy…
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Sectioned
Shaili JainMenlo Park, California, United States Liverpool, Great Britain, 1999 In 1999, during my residency in Liverpool, England, I had the experience of observing a supervising psychiatrist make a home visit to a severely mentally ill patient and arrange for her involuntary hospitalization, a process referred to in England as sectioning.1 I was greatly impressed…
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If Cleopatra were alive today, she would be diagnosed as a borderline personality
Jonathan LewisChicago, Illinois, United States For anyone with the temerity to write about Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf has this amusing warning: “Shakespeare is flyblown; a paternal government might well forbid writing about him…one may hazard one’s conjectures privately, make one’s notes in the margin; but, knowing that someone has said it before, or said it better,…