Tag: Winter 2022
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Recognition at last
Jayant RadhakrishnanDarien, Illinois, United States “Though she be but little, she is fierce.” — William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream The adage “out of sight, out of mind” appears to have been coined for microbes. We only think about them when they cause havoc, as in the current pandemic. Lately the situation seems to be…
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Drama in brief
Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece Four years earlier I had had the sad duty to announce her debut as a protagonist on the stage of cancer. Now I was witnessing the last act. She came to the first visit with her elder sister, an old acquaintance from our student days and close friend of my sister’s. She…
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Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543)
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom Nicolaus Copernicus was born on 19 Feb 1473 in the Prussian town of Torun, now part of Poland. He studied at the Jagiellonian University of Cracow, and although his main subjects were mathematics and astronomy, he also immersed himself in philosophy and read the works of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Euclid.…
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“It would be like I never existed”: Two minutes with manic psychosis, 1978
Paul RousseauCharleston, South Carolina, United States Foreword Mental illness is often marginalized by non-psychiatric clinicians, yet it causes as much suffering, if not more, than physical illness. I was a medical student completing a rotation in psychiatry when I observed the encounter described here. The patient had visited several community clinics and received little treatment…
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Rabbit starvation (protein poisoning)
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Jack Sprat could eat no fat,his wife could eat no lean…”—Sixteenth-century nursery rhyme Rabbit starvation (fat starvation, mal de caribou, protein poisoning) is an acute type of malnutrition that develops from a diet deficient in fat and where nearly all calories come from lean meat. Rabbit meat is very lean, as can…
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Dr. Dominique Larrey
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden Dominique Jean Larrey (1766-1842), the orphaned son of a shoemaker, was raised by an uncle who was a surgeon and became a physician himself by the age of twenty-one. He gave medical assistance to those who stormed the Bastille and supported the French Revolution. In the first war waged against republican France,…
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Wilhelm Baum (1799–1883)
Postgraduate medical education in the nineteenth century required personal contact with the masters of the profession – working and rounding with them, or at least listening to their lectures. Thus the German surgeon Wilhelm Baum spent one year after obtaining his doctorate (1822) as a surgical assistant to von Graefe in Berlin. He then studied…
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The Queen’s quickening: The phantom pregnancies of Mary I
Eve ElliotDublin, Ireland In November 1554, the people of England believed a miracle had taken place. Resplendent on her new throne, Queen Mary I, daughter of Henry VIII, proudly revealed that she was with child. She was thirty-seven (past the usual childbearing age in the Tudor era) and had only been married to her much…