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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1526 | Basel

End of the Road

Discussing death with Erasmus.More

c. 1760 | Michigan

White-Man Giver

Native Americans encounter a terrible sickness.More

1804 | London

Helping Himself

Thomas De Quincey enters the church of opium.More

Charts & Graphs

The Pfizer Circle of Hell

Symptoms and solutions and symptoms…

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Greek physician, writer, and philosopher Galen.

Portrait of English essayist and critic Thomas De Quincey.

Painting of humanist and scholar Erasmus.

Classical bust of Thucydides.

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

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

Black and white photograph of British writer Doris Lessing.

Because the newer methods of treatment are good, it does not follow that the old ones were bad: for if our honorable and worshipful ancestors had not recovered from their ailments, you and I would not be here today.

—Confucius, c. 515 BC

Missing contributor image silhouette

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

Mimnermus & Montaigne

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