scholarly journals Notions of “coronavirus” from the perspective of a clinical immunologist and medical historian

2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 349-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Folker Wenzel
Keyword(s):  
Medical Historian

Medicine in America, Historical Essays

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 38 (6) ◽  
pp. 1033-1033
Author(s):  
THOMAS E. CONE
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
History Of Medicine ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
The United States ◽  
Amount Of Information ◽  
Enormous Amount ◽  
History Of ◽  
Excellent Work ◽  
Medical Historian

This book offers the reader an enormous amount of information about the history of medicine in America and at the same time is a delight to read. One would expect nothing else from Professor Shryock who is, in my opinion, our foremost medical historian. No one has been more successful than he in showing that the history of the medical profession represents a significant phase of our social and cultural evolution. Excellent work has been done in this area previously by Doctor Packard in his well received History of Medicine in the United States and by Doctor Sigerist in his superb study Amerika und die Medizin.

On being a patient

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-5
Author(s):  
Christopher Booth
Keyword(s):  
National Health Service ◽  
Health Service ◽  
National Health ◽  
Repeated Surgery ◽  
Medical Historian ◽  
British National Health

Those who practise medicine should remember that we are all patients at some time, most likely at the beginning and end of our lives. Therefore, this textbook begins with an account of encounters with the medical and nursing professions, written by an outstanding doctor, medical historian, and leading clinical scientist. After a highly distinguished and eventful career which spanned the introduction of the British National Health Service in 1948, Christopher Booth died in 2012, aged 87 years. Latterly, he experienced the protracted misery of illness punctuated by repeated surgery; but to the end he retained his intellect and penetrating wit. His piquant observations are a challenge to us all as we try to provide care for our patients, as is his parting shot: ‘If you are a physician, no matter how important you may think that you are, you should, so far as your own illnesses are concerned, consider yourself a layman.’

Lucia and the Auscultation of Disease in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Mark A. Pottinger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Emotional Symptoms ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Look ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Medical Historian ◽  
Eventual Death ◽  
French Physician

As many scholars have shown, regardless of its popularity today, the ‘mad scene’ of Lucia di Lammermoor was not popular in the several years that followed the premiere in 1835. In fact, audiences, critics and publishers of opera selections for the salon preferred the love duet of act 1 or the final scene of the opera when Edgardo kills himself upon hearing the news that Lucia is dead. In this article, I explore early nineteenth-century notions of hysteria, a disease that manifested with both physical and emotional symptoms. If undiagnosed, the individual suffering from the disease would experience muscle contractions, pupil dilations, delusions, cardiac arrest and eventual death. One of the seminal studies of hysteria in the first half of the nineteenth century was written by the French physician and medical historian Frédéric Dubois d'Amiens (1799–1873), who published in 1833 Histoire philosophique de l'hypochondrie et de l'hystérie, a 500-plus page investigation into the cause and cure of hysterics and hypochondriacs. Through an investigation of the diagnosis of hysteria in d'Amiens's work and the sound and look of hysteria in Donizetti's opera, now made more acute through familiarity with the newly invented stethoscope (1816, René Laennec) and its ability to deliver the internal sounds of the body, we can see how close the opera comes to mirroring the look and sound of the disease, which may explain the lack of enthusiasm and in some cases outright hostility to Lucia's fall into madness in the early reception of the work in France.

Kurt Aterman, MUDR, MB, BCh BAO HONS, DCH, MRCP, PhD, DSc, FRCPath: “A Small Man With a Very Large Cerebrum and a Soul to Match”

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 337-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
James R Wright
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
World War I ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Medical Training ◽  
World War ◽  
Pediatric Pathology ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Historical Times ◽  
Medical Historian ◽  
Pathology Training

Kurt Aterman was raised in the Czech-Polish portions of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire during World War I and the interwar period. After completing medical school and beginning postgraduate pediatrics training in Prague, this Jewish Czech physician fled to England as a refugee when the Nazis occupied his homeland in 1939. He repeated/completed medical training in Northern Ireland and London, working briefly as a pediatrician. Next, he served in the Royal Army Medical Corp in India, working as a pathologist. After the war and additional pathology training, he spent the next decade as an experimental pathologist in Birmingham, England. After completing a fellowship with Edith Potter in Chicago, Aterman spent the next 2 decades as a pediatric-perinatal pathologist, primarily working in Halifax, Canada. Fluent in many European languages, he finished his career as a medical historian. Aterman published extensively in all 3 arenas; many of his pediatric pathology papers were massive encyclopedic review articles, accurately recounting ideas from historical times. Aterman was a classical European scholar and his papers reflected this. Aterman was one of the founding members of the Pediatric Pathology Club, the predecessor of the Society for Pediatric Pathology. This highly successful refugee’s writings are important and memorable.

Edward Jenner, F. R. S. and the cuckoo

1974 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-240 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Small Town ◽  
Present Note ◽  
The Other ◽  
150Th Anniversary ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Medical Historian ◽  
National Biography

In January 1973 the 150th anniversary of the death of Edward Jenner, the originator of vaccination, was modestly commemorated in the small town of Berkeley, Gloucestershire, where he was born and lived for most of his life (1). Jenner was himself the subject of controversy during and after his lifetime, on the one hand lauded as a selfless saviour of mankind, and on the other denounced as a self-seeking charlatan; his discovery likewise has virtually never ceased to be a subject of debate (2). There is no dearth of books and articles about Jenner and vaccination (3) and the subject of the present note is an unconnected and very minor discovery of Jenner’s—nevertheless one which is not only intrinsically interesting to naturalists, but also pertinent to any study of the character and integrity of its author, for the discovery was still being disputed more than a century after is was made. Edward Jenner was the first to publish, in 1788, an accurate account of what happens to the unfortunate young of the parent bird in whose nest a cuckoo deposits one of her eggs. Yet to consult the Dictionary of National Biography for details of Jenner’s life is to read, in an article published in 1892, that the ‘absurdity’ of this account had been demonstrated by the naturalist Charles Waterton. A few years earlier Charles Creighton (1847-1927), the epidemiologist and medical historian, whose intense opposition to vaccination led him to denigrate Jenner in every conceivable way, had described his paper on the cuckoo as mainly ‘a tissue of inconsistencies and absurdities’ (4).

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