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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2005 | Afghanistan

Do No Harm

Medical ethics on the front lines of the Iraq War.More

1610 | Toulouse

Preventative Care

Finding a cure for love.More

1889 | London

Collecting Symptoms

Jerome K. Jerome gives a self-diagnosis.More

Charts & Graphs

Vital Signs

Inside the modern American hospital.

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Classical bust of Thucydides.

Photograph of Soviet playwright and writer Mikhail Bulgakov.

Founder of the Macrobiotic diet and philosophy George Ohsawa.

Jewish philosopher, jurist, and physician Moses Maimonides.

Lewis Lapham at his desk

Physician, heal yourself: thus you help your patient too. Let his best help be to see with his own eyes the man who makes himself well.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, c. 1884

Plato & Sigmund Freud

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