Tag: Winter 2016
-
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…
-
Fratricide
Hemal N. Sampat No bleeding this month. It is how I announced myself. A child arrived And 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 arrived Born of Mom alone. Tan-colored, like me…
-
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.…
-
Alden Nowlan, the schizotypal poet
Shane Neilson Hamilton, Ontario, Canada I suspect a psychiatrist would have pronounced me a victim of dementia praecox or some such thing1 – 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…
-
Star Wars and medical progress: a lesson to be learned from fiction
John Massie Melbourne, 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,…
-
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…
-
Cadavers for dissection
Mary V. SeemanToronto, Ontario, Canada At the beginning of the twentieth century, medical students in Europe found it very difficult to obtain what at the time was considered essential: adequate numbers of cadavers for an anatomy class. Morgues permitted access to unclaimed corpses, but there were never enough. In every medical school in Europe, there…
-
Andreas Vesalius: An anatomical pop-up
Anna LantzStockholm, Sweden At the end of the 1530s, loose-leaf anatomical pop-ups began to appear in Germany. The idea quickly caught on and soon spread to other European cities. Normally these anatomical fugitive sheets were sold in pairs and represented a seated man and woman surrounded by a short Latin or vernacular text giving the…
-
Mondino de’ Liuzzi
Anna LantzStockholm, Sweden Mondino de’ Liuzzi (c. 1270–1326), or Mondino, was a professor of practical medicine at the University of Bologna, where he introduced human anatomy and dissection, a subject that had not been taught in Europe since antiquity. During the dissections, Mondino would read aloud from his own manual, Anatomia, which was written in…
-
Bernardino Genga – The artistic nature of an anatomist
Alexandra MavrodiGeorge K. ParaskevasThessaloniki, Greece No other field of medicine is as strongly attached to art as anatomy. Because it relies so heavily on using images, anatomy has always greatly depended on the participation of the artists. Its anatomical atlases, influenced especially during the Renaissance by the prevailing fashions in art, were created not only…