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"Medicine History Humor."
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The mystery of the exploding teeth : and other curiosities from the history of medicine
\"This wryly humorous collection of stories about bizarre medical treatments and cases offers a unique portrait of Victorian medicine in all its grisly weirdness ... Historian Thomas Morris has assembled the stories thematically so readers will witness mysterious illnesses (such as the Rhode Island woman who peed through her nose), horrifying operations (1635: A hungover Dutchman swallows a knife, which is then surgically removed from his stomach), dubious treatments ('take twelve young swallows out of the nest'), unfortunate predicaments (such as that of the boy who honked like a goose after inhaling a bird's larynx), and many other marvels\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Humoring the body
Though modern readers no longer believe in the four humors of Galenic naturalism—blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm—early modern thought found in these bodily fluids key to explaining human emotions and behavior. In Humoring the Body, Gail Kern Paster proposes a new way to read the emotions of the early modern stage so that contemporary readers may recover some of the historical particularity in early modern expressions of emotional self-experience. Using notions drawn from humoral medical theory to untangle passages from important moral treatises, medical texts, natural histories, and major plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Paster identifies a historical phenomenology in the language of affect by reconciling the significance of the four humors as the language of embodied emotion. She urges modern readers to resist the influence of post-Cartesian abstraction and the disembodiment of human psychology lest they miss the body-mind connection that still existed for Shakespeare and his contemporaries and constrained them to think differently about how their emotions were embodied in a premodern world.
eBook
The body in balance
Focusing on practice more than theory, this collection offers new perspectives for studying the so-called \"humoral medical traditions,\" as they have flourished around the globe during the last 2,000 years. Exploring notions of \"balance\" in medical cultures across Eurasia, Africa and the Americas, from antiquity to the present, the volume revisits \"harmony\" and \"holism\" as main characteristics of those traditions. It foregrounds a dynamic notion of balance and asks how balance is defined or conceptualized, by whom, for whom and in what circumstances. Balance need not connoteegalitarianism or equilibrium. Rather, it alludes to morals of self care exercised in place of excessiveness and indulgences after long periods of a life in dearth. As the moral becomes visceral, the question arises: what constitutes the visceral in a body that is in constant flux and flow? How far, and in what ways, are there fundamental properties or constituents in those bodies?
eBook
Galen's Theory of Black Bile
In Galen's Theory of Black Bile: Hippocratic Tradition, Manipulation, Innovation Keith Stewart analyses Galen's characterisation of black bile to understand the different ways it is used in his arguments that cannot always be reconciled with the content of his sources.
eBook
For All of Humanity
Smallpox, measles, and typhus. The scourges of lethal disease-as threatening in colonial Mesoamerica as in other parts of the world-called for widespread efforts and enlightened attitudes to battle the centuries-old killers of children and adults. Even before edicts from Spain crossed the Atlantic, colonial elites oftentimes embraced medical experimentation and reform in the name of the public good, believing it was their moral responsibility to apply medical innovations to cure and prevent disease. Their efforts included the first inoculations and vaccinations against smallpox, new strategies to protect families and communities from typhus and measles, and medical interventions into pregnancy and childbirth.For All of Humanityexamines the first public health campaigns in Guatemala, southern Mexico, and Central America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Martha Few pays close attention to Indigenous Mesoamerican medical cultures, which not only influenced the shape and scope of those regional campaigns but also affected the broader New World medical cultures. The author reconstructs a rich and complex picture of the ways colonial doctors, surgeons, Indigenous healers, midwives, priests, government officials, and ordinary people engaged in efforts to prevent and control epidemic disease.Few's analysis weaves medical history and ethnohistory with social, cultural, and intellectual history. She uses prescriptive texts, medical correspondence, and legal documents to provide rich ethnographic descriptions of Mesoamerican medical cultures, their practitioners, and regional pharmacopeia that came into contact with colonial medicine, at times violently, during public health campaigns.
eBook
Balto: comedic representation of medical professionals in TV drama
Medical professionals have been portrayed as hard-working and serious individuals in most Egyptian dramas. Recent Egyptian TV series have portrayed medical service providers, highlighting different aspects of their personalities. The present paper adopts an approach that combines the studies of humor and language to investigate the comedic representation of medical professionals in contemporary Egyptian television TV drama, with special reference to a recent TV series called
Balto
(2023). Within the framework of humor theories of incongruity and superiority, this paper aims to analyze elements of the comedic portrayal of health professionals in the selected TV series,
Balto
, to investigate how humor is employed to both humanize the long-idealized depiction of doctors as well as critique societal perceptions of representatives of the medical sector in Egypt. The paper particularly focuses on analyzing how the protagonist and other medical professionals practice their work, exercise managerial power, and operate/function with their peers and patients within a small remote health unit.
Journal Article
‘The House of God’: reflections 40 years on, in conversation with author Samuel Shem
The House of God is a seminal work of medical satire based on the gruelling internship experiences of Samuel Shem at the Beth Israel Hospital. Thirteen ‘Laws’ were offered to rationalise the seemingly chaotic patient management and flow. There have been large shifts in the healthcare landscape and practice since, so we consider whether these medical truisms are still applicable to contemporary National Health Service practice and propose updates where necessary:People are sometimes allowed to die.GOMERs (Get Out of My Emergency Room) still go to ground.Master yourself, join the multidisciplinary team.The patient is the one with the disease, but not the only one suffering.Placement (discharge planning) comes first.There is no body cavity that cannot be reached with a gentle arm and good interventional radiologists.Fit the rule to the patient rather than the patient to the rule.They can always pay you less.The only bad admission is a futile one.If you don’t take a temperature you can’t find a fever and if you are not going to act on it, don’t do the test.Show me a BMS (best medical student) who ONLY triples my work, and I’ll show you a future Foundation Year 1 doctor (FY1) who is an asset to the firm.Interpret radiology freely, but share your clinical findings with the radiologist and in a timely fashion.Doing nothing can be a viable option. These were developed in conversation with Samuel Shem, who also offers further insight on the creation of the original laws.
Journal Article
Bilateral Toxoplasmosis Retinitis Associated with Ruxolitinib
Bilateral toxoplasmosis retinitis was diagnosed in a patient with polycythemia vera and myelofibrosis who was being treated with the Janus kinase inhibitor ruxolitinib, presumably as a result of immunosuppression.
To the Editor:
Toxoplasmosis is an endemic, though typically benign, disease, since most infected persons are asymptomatic. However,
Toxoplasma gondii,
the causative protozoan, can be opportunistic, especially in patients with immunosuppression. It is the most common cause of posterior uveitis, which classically appears as retinochoroiditis adjacent to a chorioretinal scar. Here, we report a case of bilateral, primary toxoplasmosis retinitis in a patient who was taking a novel immunosuppressant drug.
A 65-year-old man was referred because of decreased vision in both eyes during the previous month. His medical history included polycythemia vera with myelofibrosis and splenomegaly, for which he was . . .
Journal Article
Doctors at War
Doctors at Waris a candid account of a trauma surgical team based, for a tour of duty, at a field hospital in Helmand, Afghanistan. Mark de Rond tells of the highs and lows of surgical life in hard-hitting detail, bringing to life a morally ambiguous world in which good people face impossible choices and in which routines designed to normalize experience have the unintended effect of highlighting war's absurdity. With stories that are at once comical and tragic, de Rond captures the surreal experience of being a doctor at war. He lifts the cover on a world rarely ever seen, let alone written about, and provides a poignant counterpoint to the archetypical, adrenaline-packed, macho tale of what it is like to go to war.
Here the crude and visceral coexist with the tender and affectionate. The author tells of well-meaning soldiers at hospital reception, there to deliver a pair of legs in the belief that these can be reattached to their comrade, now in mid-surgery; of midsummer Christmas parties and pancake breakfasts and late-night sauna sessions; of interpersonal rivalries and banter; of caring too little or too much; of tenderness and compassion fatigue; of hell and redemption; of heroism and of playing God. While many good firsthand accounts of war by frontline soldiers exist, this is one of the first books ever to bring to life the experience of the surgical teams tasked with mending what war destroys.
eBook