Journal of medical biography
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Biography Historical Article
'Neither a borrower nor a lender be': Letters from the anaesthetist Joseph Thomas Clover to the Birmingham surgeon Joseph Sampson Gamgee.
The London surgeon and anaesthetist, Joseph Thomas Clover (1825-1882), and the Birmingham surgeon, Joseph Sampson Gamgee (1828-1886), are well known figures in the history of medicine. Draft letters among the surviving papers of Joseph Clover have been transcribed and reveal new information about their friendship, their financial affairs and Clover's motivation to become a full-time anaesthetist. They have also led to the discovery that Gamgee was briefly imprisoned in Warwick County Goal for debt in 1859.
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Philip Harker Newman an orthopaedic surgeon and a major in the Royal Army Medical Corps was left behind to man a casualty clearing station during the evacuation of Dunkrik in 1940. Newman was made a Prisoner of War and studied the adverse psychological effects of incarceration on his fellow officers. He escaped from Germany eventually returning to Europe for its liberation in 1944. ⋯ In 1962, he operated with Sir Herbert Seddon (1903-1977) on Sir Winston Churchill who had sustained a fractured neck of femur following a fall in the South of France. Newman became President of The British Orthopaedic Association in 1976 and chairman of the Editorial Board of The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery. In 1976, he was also awarded a CBE and wrote his wartime memoirs, Safer than a Known Way published in 1983.
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Historical Article
Vivien Theodore Thomas (1910-1985): An African-American laboratory technician who went on to become an innovator in cardiac surgery.
Vivien Theodore Thomas (1910-1985) was an African-American laboratory technician and instructor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He was born as the grandson of a slave in Lousiana, working as a carpenter and subsequently as a laboratory technician after the great depression and the loss of his savings derailed his plans to become a doctor. In his role as a laboratory technician, he overcame challenging personal circumstances to become an innovator in paediatric cardiac surgery, despite having no formal college education. ⋯ He also contributed to major breakthroughs in research covering a spectrum of disorders such as traumatic shock, coarctation of the aorta and transposition of the great arteries. He acted as a teacher and mentor to a generation of surgical residents and technicians who went on to become leaders in their field across the USA. A television film based on his life was premiered by HBO in 2004 titled 'Something the Lord made'.
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Operative nerve-stretching was first described in 1872 to relieve incurable pain from sciatica and tabes dorsalis. It became popular for 20 years and numerous articles were published on the subject. It had many complications but relief was only transient and, consequently, it fell into disuse. This paper analyses the literature, contemporary views on the benefits of nerve stretching and its influence on more recent neurological practice.
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Biography Historical Article
Johannitius (809-873 AD), a medieval physician, translator and author.
The medieval physician, translator and author Abū Zayd Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq al-'Ibādī, best known in the West as Johannitius, is considered the best translator of Greek texts, particularly medical writings, into Arabic. He made great inroads in the art of translation in the Islamic world. ⋯ Among his own works, the illustrious Kitab al-Ashr Maqalat fil-Ayn (Ten Treatises on the Eye) contains the oldest known illustration of the structure of the eye. It served as the primary source for Galen's theory of vision and subsequent use by Western scholars.