Tag: Winter 2017
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The Isenheim Altarpiece and “homeopathic” hospital art
Katrina GenuisCanada Art found in hospitals generally has the aim of comforting the viewer. Presumably, ill patients or exhausted on-call physicians who amble past pastoral countryside scenes or watercolour flowers are reminded that despite their current difficultly there is great beauty in existence. But residences for the sick have not always contained artwork that is…
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Hawthorne’s The Birthmark: a failure to find a perfect future in an imperfect present
Sylvia Karasu New York City, New York, United States In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Birthmark, 1 Aylmer, “a man of science” leaves the somber, factory-like atmosphere of his laboratory to marry the beautiful Georgiana. Aylmer “had devoted himself, however, too unreservedly to scientific studies ever to be weaned from them by any secondary passion,” and…
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The first general hospital of Baghdad
Hussain Al-SardarEngland, United Kingdom In 1872, Midhat Pasha, the governor of Baghdad, noticed the high prevalence of disease among the city’s population as well as the abuse of patients by conjurers, quibblers, and equivocators. He built the first hospital in the city on the Al Kargh side of the river Tigris, which divides the capital…
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The Hogmouths of Habsburg
Craig BlackstoneBethesda, Maryland, United States Coins are miniature works of art. Since portraits of prominent individuals have graced coins for millennia, images forged in precious metals in the distant past can represent disease even now. Indeed, the earliest artistic depictions of disorders such as goiter and trichoepithelioma were on ancient Greek, Roman, and Parthian coins.1…
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Choose your poison: The curious case of Dr. Waite
Lisa Mullenneaux New York, NY, USA Portrait of Arthur W. Waite With mahogany dining rooms, wall safes, a chauffeur’s lounge, and a curved façade designed to catch summer breezes off the Hudson River, Manhattan’s Colosseum apartments set a new standard of elegant living. Newlyweds Clara and Arthur W. Waite chose one of the deluxe full-floor,…
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Stephen Hales: the priest who pioneered clinical physiology
JMS Pearce Hull, United Kingdom As a student I learned about Stephen Hales as the parish priest who first measured blood pressure — in a horse’s leg. The mists of time and waning memory have made his several astonishingly original works unknown to many. Samuel Johnson’s famous dictionary made few references to individuals, but…
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Scarification: Harmful cultural practice or vehicle to higher being?
Kenneth Michael Felsenstein Bethesda, Maryland, United States Scarification is the act of “covering, disguising and transforming the body”1 by creating wounds in one’s own flesh in order to cause indelible markings. It is perhaps one of the most misunderstood body modification procedures done today, largely perceived in Western society as a tabooed and harmful cultural practice.2…
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Echocardiogram: The first ultrasound picture of the moving heart
Göran WettrellSweden The developments in ultrasound and microwave technology during World War II stimulated further research in the early 1950s. Ultrasound had been predicted to be useful in visualizing the organs of the human body, and with the beginnings of cardiac surgery there arose a need for better preoperative diagnosis, especially for correcting mitral stenosis…
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Aging in (another) place: Magda Szabo’s novel Iza’s Ballad
Carol Levine New York, New York, United States Imprint II. Copyright 2017 Kelsey Hochstatter Represented by Third and Wall Art Group LLC, Seattle WA In Hungary in the early 1960s, Izabella (Iza) Szöcs is a physician, and a very good one, according to her patients and peers. Her specialty is rheumatology, but she makes…