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

Medicine

Volume II, Number 4 | fall 2009

Purchase

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.

More

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.

More

Map

Contagion

A brief history of malaria, leprosy, and smallpox.

View

c. 1916 | Vienna

Making a Diagnosis

Sigmund Freud provides an introduction to psychoanalysis. More

c. 1100 | Salerno

Feminine Issues

Trotula explains a woman’s “flowers.”More

c. 1320 | Montpellier

Diagnostic Manual

Identifying the symptoms of lepers.More

Charts & Graphs

Royal Treatment

How heads of state get their medicine.

View

Portrait of English essayist and critic Thomas De Quincey.

Black and white photograph of English writer Virginia Woolf.

photograph of David Foster Wallace speaking at a podium

Black and white photograph of Alsatian-German winner of the Nobel Peace Prize Albert Schweitzer.

American writer William Styron.

Jewish philosopher, jurist, and physician Moses Maimonides.

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

Depiction of Greek philosopher Plato.

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

Plato & Sigmund Freud

Purchase