Tag: Winter 2016
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Justice denied: The Katyn massacre, Kosciusko squadron, and the Polish soul
Gregory RuteckiOhio, United States “The Nazi terror intensified…Poland became the home of humanity’s Holocaust, an archipelago of death-factories…executions…and exterminations which surpassed anything…in…history.”1 —Davies “Germany…killed the prey (Poland)…Russia will seize that part of the carcass…Germany cannot use. It will play the…role of hyena to the German lion.”2 “I…order to kill without mercy men, women and children…
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A memorable veteran
Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece It was nine o’clock on a Monday morning and this was my last outpatient clinic. By the end of the week I would be finishing my hospital duties and return home after several years of training in Britain. The first patient that day was a very pleasant seventy-five-year old man who walked…
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Think like a surgeon
Violet KieuMelbourne, Australia I was on a quest to become a surgeon. Now I am simply on a quest to survive surgical training. Getting into surgery was the easier part. Getting through, in comparison, is now the challenge. The very first year as a surgical registrar changed my life. It restructured my mental schema of…
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Locard’s principle and the surgeon
Sukanya SamChennai, India It is near-most bliss, a somber quietitude, from the moment the surgeon scrubs, which takes about ten minutes, soaping up past his elbows, calmly lathering up, fingers interlocking and then not, covering every inch and then rinsing with saline—holding up his hands methodically, allowing the liquid to fall sequentially from his hands…
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Operation Cooperation
Denis GillDublin, Ireland Operation Smile is one of those medical charities that amply demonstrates the power of military organization and the ability of skilled surgeons, especially orthopaedic, plastic, and ophthalmological surgeons, to parachute into foreign places and change lives forever. We physicians care for and treat people: surgeons can cure them. I have had the…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…