How one man poured himself into poetry to prevent “the stealing of [his] personhood” by Parkinson’s. From Harvard Medicine’s 2003 bulletin, The Neurobiology of the Arts.
I sat dumbfounded as he went on to recite about a hundred lines of his verse, the tears coming to his eyes as he described, in one particularly moving section, his granddaughter at the piano, the same talented little girl whom he hadn’t been able to recall earlier during our visit. His words rose and fell with all the musicality of a Beethoven or Bach concerto, as if her inerasable presence in his mind had found a last remaining outlet. I wondered whether he had indeed once published his work, in the homeland he could no longer name, in a world that he was fast losing.
Beautiful. Read the whole piece above, excerpted from The Healing Art: A Doctor’s Black Bag of Poetry.
Medical uncertainty has once again appeared as the subject of a half hour comedy (does this count as dramedy now?). In a recent episode of New Girl, roommate Nick Miller deals with the anxiety of waiting for an ultrasound after his friend’s doctor discovers a lump on his thyroid. (As an aside, since we’re studying for the boards, was it a thyroglossal duct cyst? It moved with swallowing. Okay, enough medicine).
In an awesome bit of history of medicine news, Andreas Vesalius’ personal 1555 copy of De corporis humani fabrica (On the Workings of the Human Body) has been found. The margins feature his handwritten notes for a new edition. If you’re a new reader here on THF after yesterday’s conference, check out why Vesalius inspired our name.
In 1543, Andreas Vesalius, the founder of modern human anatomy, published De Humani Corporis Fabrica (The Fabric of the Human Body), what is now considered the most famous and beautifully illustrated of all early printed medical books. Later today, Professor Vivian Nutton of the University of Warwick in Coventry, England, will present the discovery of an annotated copy of the later 1555 edition that includes hundreds of Vesalius’ manuscript notes and corrections to the printer plates. It seems the Flemish anatomist was working on a third edition of his magnum opus!
Wow. Thanks to everyone who made the Inaugural Humanism Day Conference an absolute blast. Check back later on for pictures and updates. And to all our new readers – welcome!
It’s the last call to register for the Inaugural NJMS Humanism Day Conference, on Wednesday, March 14 in Newark, NJ. Please join us for a day of free workshops and presentations, featuring keynote speaker Mark Nepo.
We hope to see you there! Full schedule after the jump.
In the classic tradition of diagnosing literary and historical figures, neurologists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine have examined the literary icon of the century – Harry Potter.
From the paper, “Harry Potter and the Nummular Headache,” appearing in February’s issue of Headache:
Harry’s circumscribed headache location in the distribution of his lightning bolt scar would appear to fit the proposed criteria in the appendix of the International Classification of Headache Disorders, 2nd edition6 for NH. The criteria specify pain exclusively felt in a well-circumscribed region of 2 cm to 6 cm, round or elliptical in shape, either continuous or interrupted by spontaneous remissions lasting weeks to months. We understand through Rowling’s series on Harry’s teenage years that his headaches began in his 11th year, following a traumatic head injury in childhood surrounding the murder of his parents. His headaches were characterized by several months of spontaneous remissions, and as per the epilogue in the 7th book,5 were completely remitted by the age of 18. Rowling describes searing and burning pain along the finite region around Harry’s scar as the major feature of his headache, which is not inconsistent with the NH pain character. Depictions of the scar in the artwork on the book covers, as well as in the film series, show that the area of the scar (and thus, the area of the pain) is certainly confined to an area with a maximal diameter less than 6 cm. Although a frontal location of pain in NH is less common than other regions of the head, a sizeable minority of NH patients do experience pain in that location.7
According to MSNBC‘s interview with author Matthew Robbins, MD, “It’s a good way to educate the public about a condition that can occur in children and often goes unrecognized.”
No word if the healers at St. Mungo’s had a similar diagnosis.
Picture a deeply sun-bronzed woman in a wide-brimmed, straw hat. She is wearing a traditional, quilted vest decorated with red, green, and black woven designs which cover many more layers of wool and alpaca garments beneath. This woman speaks some Spanish, but she will tell you much more fluently in her own language that she is from the native Quechua people who live in the Andes throughout South America.
At the Casa Hogar del Campesino, or Peasant’s Home hospital where we are working, almost all of the patients are Quechua who hail from Cusco and its surrounding rural areas. These patients sometimes travel for many hours on crowded mini-buses to receive the free care provided by the Catholic nun-physicians, nurses, and staff at the hospital. Many of them are impoverished, and the generous medical care, food, and love provided by the nuns are much needed and appreciated.
There’s a column over at McSweeney’s called “Playing Doctor” which breaks down the complex choreography of standardized patient encounters. In medical school, students learn history-taking and physical exam by practicing on actors who play patients. Robert Isenberg, an actor and SP, describes nervous students who stick to scripts, what it’s like to “act” cancer, and how playing pretend can seem like the real deal (from The Bad News):
My fingers are latticed, and they clench themselves white. I stare off with darting eyes, run my tongue inside my cheek. Whatever it is I’m not saying, it’s really bothering me.
“May I ask what kind of test?” the woman says. Her voice is funeral-hushed.
“Well,” I say. “I found a lump. Just over my collar bone.” I let out a gruff sigh. I nod a little, as if confirming what I’ve just said. “The thing is, I’ve been through all this before.”
This past summer as I backpacked through Europe, I stumbled into the Museu Picasso, nestled in the tortuous La Ribera section of Barcelona, Spain. The museum, which feels more like a medieval Spanish villa, was supported by the late artist, and contains many of his early academic pieces.
Picasso first arrived in Barcelona in 1894, and his monumental painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” is based on a brothel on Carrer d’Avinyó, a street in Barcelona. I was quite taken back by Picasso’s early mastery of the academic style of painting. However, one painting stood out, “Science and Charity.”
If you’re a medical student not watching TED videos yet, you might want to start. TEDMED (a spin-off of TED) has phenomenal short talks “imagining the future of health and medicine.” Below, Brian Goldman discusses, “Doctors make mistakes. Can we talk about that?”
