Tag: World War II
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Chance in the origins of antibiotics
William KingstonDublin, Ireland The discovery of antibiotics has been described as the “domestication of microorganisms” and ranks in importance with the domestication of animals as part of settled agriculture about 10,000 years ago. It depends upon antagonism between bacteria, which had been noticed as early as 1874, and Pasteur commented then that if we could…
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Hubris syndrome – A moment in history?
Lord David Owen has written extensively about politicians and heads of state who became insufferable from being intoxicated by the power of their office. He called this aberration from gentlemanly behavior the hubris syndrome, an acquired personality disorder that most often went away after they left office. Hubris has come down to us from the…
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Andreas Roland Gruentzig
Mahesh RajuChicago, Illinois, United States Andreas Roland Gruentzig was born at the start of World War II on June 25, 1939 in Dresden, Germany.1 His mother, Charlotta, raised both him and his older brother after their father had failed to return from the war. His mother, a teacher, had difficulty supporting her family while living…
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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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Body heat: September 1944
Winona WendthLancaster, Massachusetts, United States I traveled up to Terezin against my will. My writing instructor had made the assignment. “Just write down what you see,” he said at nine in the morning while we squeezed into the aisle of a public bus headed out from Prague. The vehicle was packed with dozens of laborers…
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Mentally ill and Jewish in World War II
Mary SeemanToronto, Canada Introduction In 1928, my grandfather was admitted to the Clinic for Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases in Vienna for a recurrence of the manic-depressive illness he had suffered from since youth. The clinic director was Julius Wagner-Jauregg who one year earlier had been awarded the Nobel Prize for fever treatment of third stage…
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Neuroscientist refugees from Nazi Germany find haven in Illinois
Lawrence ZeidmanChicago, Illinois, United States Introduction The purge of thousands of “non-Aryan” physicians, including many neuroscientists, began within the first few months of the Nazi takeover of Germany in January 1933. At that time, roughly 9,000 “non- Aryan” (full Jews, baptized Jews, part-Jews, and other minorities), and politically dissident doctors lived in Germany,1 comprising 15-17%…
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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…
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Peleliu as a paradigm for PTSD: The two thousand yard stare
Gregory RuteckiCleveland, Ohio, United States “I noticed a tattered marine…staring stiffly at nothing. His mind had crumbled in battle…his eyes were like two black empty holes in his head…Last evening he came down out of the hills. Told to get some sleep, he found a shell crater and slumped into it…First light has given his…