The Surgeon Evgueni Vasilievich Pavlov in the Operating Theater, by Ilya Repin, 1888. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Medicine

Volume II, Number 4 | fall 2009

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The Travelling Quack, by Tom Merry, 1889.

Preamble

The God in the Machine

By Lewis H. Lapham

Americans ask of medicine more than medicine can deliver—not only the cure for death, but also the gift of riches.

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The Doctor, by Friedrich Friedländer, 1870.

Great Expectations

By Noga Arikha

Medicine was once a humanistic endeavor, an art as well as a science. Today both doctors and patients fail to see that we are more than just our bodies.

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Map

Contagion

A brief history of malaria, leprosy, and smallpox.

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1610 | Toulouse

Preventative Care

Finding a cure for love.More

1908 | London

The Senior Practitioner

Rudyard Kipling gives a pep talk to med school students.More

1889 | London

Collecting Symptoms

Jerome K. Jerome gives a self-diagnosis.More

Charts & Graphs

What Seems to Be the Problem?

Medical human oddities.

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Color photograph of Oliver Sacks with a white beard and glasses.

Meehan Crist

Painting of humanist and scholar Erasmus.

Photograph of Soviet playwright and writer Mikhail Bulgakov.

Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates.

English writer Jerome K. Jerome.

Portrait of English essayist and critic Thomas De Quincey.

The physician should look upon the patient as a besieged city and try to rescue him with every means that art and science place at his command.

—Alexander of Tralles, c. 600

Depiction of Greek philosopher Plato.

Black and white photograph of Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud with cigar.

Plato & Sigmund Freud

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