Tag: Winter 2016
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A Night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury: syphilis among the British aristocracy in William Hogarth’s marriage à-la-mode
Sally MetzlerChicago, Illinois, USA William Hogarth’s famous series Marriage à-la-mode parodies English society, particularly their arranged marriages and often dissolute lifestyle. He peppered his satire of upper-class matrimony with a moralizing tone and made clear visual references to syphilis and its treatment in the mid-eighteenth century. Regarded as one of the greatest British artists of his…
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Art and Medicine
JMS PearceEast Yorks, England Art has been said to deepen compassion for suffering.1 Paintings have been interpreted as “metaphors for human feelings . . . they are nonliteral symbols of the inner life.”2 Paintings trigger emotions and insights, “generating associations and tapping new, different, or deeper levels of meaning.”3 It is inherent in all the arts…
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Fratricide
Hemal Sampat No bleeding this month.It is how I announced myself.A child arrivedAnd Mom and Dad were overjoyed. Years pass.One day, no more bleeding.No more children to come. Then, bleeding again.It is how he announced himself.A different child arrivedBorn of Mom alone. Tan-colored, like meBut unwelcome. He grows where I grew:In the endometrium.He feeds off…
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The Pump
W.D. Bumsted-Hind The pump works,but it’s leaking in a few places.It’s not very efficient. It’s been worked on several times,but they can’t seem to fix it. Can’t you try some stronger couplings?Can’t you just use a backflow preventer?How about a compression fitting?No?Why not?Keep trying.Try harder. It keeps leaking. The experts tell us this isn’t an…
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Alden Nowlan, the schizotypal poet
Shane NeilsonHamilton, Ontario, Canada I suspect a psychiatrist would have pronounced me a victim of dementia praecox or some such thing.1—Alden Nowlan Applying a psychiatric diagnosis to the dead is a mug’s game. Alden Albert Nowlan (1933–1983), the critically acclaimed Canadian poet, novelist, and playwright, might agree, if one considered the bitter evidence of his…
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A twice-told tale: Nabokov and Moore on mental illness and parents’ suffering
Carol LevineNew York, New York, United States Mental illness casts a wide net, enmeshing patient, family, and doctors. When the patient is young, the main characters are usually parents, who struggle with love, guilt, fear, and despair. Yet families are often secondary, sometimes shadowy, characters in clinical accounts. Fiction allows parents to be the primary…
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Heinz Lehmann and the dawn of psychopharmacology
Benjamin Chin-YeeToronto, Ontario, Canada In the spring of 1953 at the Verdun Protestant Hospital in Montreal, the psychiatrist Heinz Lehmann initiated the first trial of chlorpromazine in North America, treating “psychomotor excitement” in patients with diagnoses ranging from manic depression to schizophrenia.1,2 Within weeks, the drug proved a remarkable success: patients’ delusions, hallucinations and thought…
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Star Wars and medical progress: A lesson to be learned from fiction
John MassieMelbourne, Australia In the Star Wars galaxy far, far away, technological progress had long ago dispensed with people in the care of the injured and sick. Of course this was a good thing, as people make mistakes and mistakes are costly. Costly, not just in a financial sense, but to the victim, too. Reliance…
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George Bradford Brainerd: Innovator of laryngeal photography
Rebekah AbramovichNew York, New York, United States Innovations in medical technology emerge at times from unexpected sources. How does one document the larynx? The voicebox, as it is sometimes called, is the hollow muscular organ that forms an air passage to the lungs and holds the vocal cords. The solution arose out of one man’s…
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Fool the Axis
Kelley YuanMemphis, Tennessee, United States Before the advent of penicillin in 1928, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) had plagued armies in the field for centuries. In World War I alone, syphilis and gonorrhea resulted in the discharge of more than ten thousand American soldiers and consumed seven million person-days from the war.1 In World War II…