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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Valentine Godé-Darel in a Hospital Bed, by Ferdinand Hodler, 1914.

Course of Illness

By Iain Bamforth

Reconsidering an epic of illness—Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

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Map

Contagion

A brief history of malaria, leprosy, and smallpox.

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1624 | London

Riddling Distemper

John Donne meditates on man’s miserable condition.More

c. 1320 | Montpellier

Diagnostic Manual

Identifying the symptoms of lepers.More

1908 | London

The Senior Practitioner

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

Charts & Graphs

Royal Treatment

How heads of state get their medicine.

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Black and white photograph of John Crowley sitting on a porch.

Black and white photograph of English writer Virginia Woolf.

Classical bust of Thucydides.

American poet William Carlos Williams.

Depiction of German abbess and mystic St. Hildegard.

Black and white photograph of scholar, novelist, and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis.

Italian poet and librettist Felice Romani.

The doctor occupies a seat in the front row of the stalls of the human drama, and is constantly watching and even intervening in the tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies which form the raw material of the literary art.

—W. Russell Brain, 1952

Missing contributor image silhouette

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

Mimnermus & Montaigne

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