Tag: Winter 2015
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An ancient oath with modern significance
Emmanuel Ugokwe SIA Africa and Society for Young Writers, Nigeria Southeast and SouthSouth Hippocrates of Kos Engraving by Peter Paul Rubens, 1638 About 400 BCE Hippocrates, commonly known as the father of medicine, wrote the Hippocratic oath. That noble, ethical creed still guides the medical profession. Is that what you have been taught? If so, you…
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Latin and medicine
Noah DeLoneMiami, Florida, United States Language is the cornerstone of our ability to communicate as humans and underlies the prose of our medical discourse. The words we select can be indicative of our background, training, and intentions. It should come as no surprise that a robust knowledge of one’s own language is essential to good…
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Beyond negativity
Lynn SadlerPittsboro, North Carolina, United States My husband Emory and I have traveled to China five times since participating in the (Eisenhower) People to People’s Citizen Ambassador Program from May 21 through June 2, 1995. Then we were members of a “Biofeedback Delegation to the People’s Republic of China” and visited educational and medical facilities and tourist…
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Fluorescence
Leah KaminskyMelbourne, Australia The art of medicine cannot be inherited, nor can it be copied from books. – Paracelsus My youngest daughter has a lizard called Limmy living on her bedside table. Each time I kiss my girl goodnight, stroke her long, blonde curls and turn off the light, Limmy’s reptilian outline glows with a…
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Manifestations of madness in King Lear
Anoushka SinhaNew York, United States In his satirical masterpiece The Praise of Folly, the influential Dutch humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam attributes a Janus-like quality to madness, which he describes as two divergent manifestations: “one that which the Furies bring from hell” and “another…that proceeds from Folly.”1 Given the essay’s encomiastic title, it should come as…
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Lifeline Express: the magic train hospital of India
Satish SarosheIndore, India, United States Lifeline Express, colloquially known as the Magic Train Hospital of India, is the world’s first modern technologically advanced hospital-train. Established in 1991 and completing twenty-three years of service, it has travelled the length and breadth of the country, bringing medical aid and relief to the remotest and most inaccessible areas…
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Royal Victoria Military Hospital Netley
Samuel ParishNaples, Florida, United States Hospitals are built to respond to the health needs of a community. In the military, the state of healthcare is often not realized until a crisis stretches the limits of the health system. The crisis most often is war. Such was the case in mid-19th century Great Britain. The Crimean…
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The Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation
Rubina Naqvi This is a true story about a tertiary care hospital located in a country of 230 million people, which has no well-designed health facility program, especially for poor people with chronic ailments. Every year in this unfortunate country some 260 women per 100,000 live births die in childbirth, and 69.70/1000 infants die every year from…
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Bimarstan al-Mansouri
Mona Youssef Cairo, Egypt Around 1248 AD, when Islam was at its prime and the Nile was wide, and its seven delta branches coursed through the land with a heavy network of connecting channels in place of the two branches left today, there was the Bimaristan al-Mansouri, with water channels from the Nile running through the hospital…
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The Montreal Neurological Hospital
Louise Fabiani Montreal, Canada The time was 1928 and the patient was a forty-three year old mother of six. After nearly thirty years of headaches and seizures, she had started to have problems with her right eye. A young neurosurgeon examined her and found evidence of a right frontal-lobe tumor, which had to be removed…