Tag: World War II
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Doris Unland: Surgical nurse extraordinaire
Frederic Grannis Duarte, California, United States Doris Unland RN “scrubbed in” OR 10. Doris Unland was an extraordinary American surgical nurse who worked for forty-seven years at St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota. She may have participated in more major surgical operations than any other person—physician or nurse—in history. Born on December 19, 1910, she…
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Macdonald Critchley
JMS Pearce East Yorks, England Fig 1. Macdonald Critchley by Norman Hepple. Credit: National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, UCLH Arts. Source Macdonald Critchley was a neurologist of elegance and sophistication.1 He was pre-eminently a clinical investigator of disorders of higher mental functions, especially those relating to language. He was the author of many…
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Dr. Sabina Spielrein: Consequences of feminism and love
Irving Rosen Toronto, Ontario, Canada Sabina Spielrein (1885-1942) as a young woman. She had a hectic existence and can be considered an early contributor to the psychoanalytic literature. Image via Wikimedia While all our lives are eventful, some people tend to experience situations that set them apart. Born in 1885 in Rostov, Czarist Russia, Sabina…
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A historical analysis of the military’s method of anti-malaria health education through print
Pavane L. Gorrepati Iowa City, Iowa, United States The fight against malaria has largely been successful because of modern scientific advances, but during World War II the fight was supplemented by propaganda posters warning soldiers about malaria just as they were warmed against venereal diseases. Everyone was expected to aid the war effort—women to…
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Book review: A Time for All Things: The Life of Michael E. DeBakey by Craig Miller
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, UK In the latter half of the twentieth century, Michael DeBakey was a worldwide household name, a remarkable feat for a surgeon in the days before the cult of celebrity had become part of the cultural zeitgeist. Craig Miller, himself a distinguished vascular surgeon and medical historian, has written a superb scholarly and…
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Deserving but unrecognized: the forty-first seat
Marshall A. LichtmanRochester, New York, United States The Nobel Prizes Each year on December 10th, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death, the Nobel Foundation and the Swedish royal family recognize the individuals deemed to have made the greatest achievements in chemistry, physics, physiology or medicine, and literature; and the Norwegian Nobel Committee recognizes “the person…
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Being our best selves: hidden in full view
James Stoller Peter Rea Alan Kolp Cleveland, Ohio, United States Figure 1. Pillars and pediment We live in a paradox framed by a tension between age-old wisdom about excellence and our current state. The paradox is this: our behaviors and our priorities are often at odds with age-old truths about how we can be…
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How a small town kept smallpox small
Annabelle Slingerland Leiden, the Netherlands Fig. 1 Presentation of smallpox. To make a mountain out of a molehill is a vice, but to keep the mole underground is a virtue. The little town of Tilburg in the south of the Netherlands was not accustomed to seeing mountains, but when a molehill first came into…
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Hiroshima seventy-five years after the bombing
Cristóbal Berry-CabánFort Bragg, North Carolina, United States “At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in…