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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Albucasis blistering a patient in the hospital at Cordova, 1100, by Ernest Board, c. 1912.

Early Islamic Medicine

By Jonathan Lyons

The history of Western medicine owes much to its encounters with the medieval Muslim world, yet this debt seems destined to go unrecognized and unrepaid.

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Map

Contagion

A brief history of malaria, leprosy, and smallpox.

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c. 1916 | Vienna

Making a Diagnosis

Sigmund Freud provides an introduction to psychoanalysis. More

1847 | Tennessee

Civilization and Its Discontents

Dorothea Dix pleads for the creation of a new institution.More

c. 1155 | Bingen

Gift from the Sea

There’s nothing a little whale won’t cure.More

Charts & Graphs

Royal Treatment

How heads of state get their medicine.

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Oil painting portrair Michel de Montaigne in red robes and white collar

Photograph of American clinical psychologist and writer Kay Redfield Jamison.

American writer William Styron.

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

Portrait of English essayist and critic Thomas De Quincey.

We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering.

—Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, 1969

Missing contributor image silhouette

Oil painting portrair Michel de Montaigne in red robes and white collar

Mimnermus & Montaigne

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