Words as a surgeon’s tool

When a patient comes in with a fatal head bleed, that first conversation with a neurosurgeon may forever color how the family remembers the death, from a peaceful letting go (“Maybe it was his time”) to an open sore of regret (“Those doctors didn’t listen! They didn’t even try to save him!”) When there’s no place for Read More …

The Steel Windpipe

A dying child in rural Russia in 1916, by Mikhail Bulghakov. At eleven o’clock that night a little girl was brought. The mother’s face was contorted with noiseless weeping. When she had thrown off her sheepskin coat and shawl and unwrapped the bundle, I saw a little girl of about three years old. For a Read More …

Suppose they bring me a hernia

Forty-eight days ago I qualified ‘with distinction’; but distinction is one thing and hernia is another. Once I watched a professor operating on a strangulated hernia. He did it, while I sat in the amphitheatre. Suppose they bring me a hernia? Worse, they brought a dreadfully injured young girl, only daughter of a devastated widower. Read More …

Bladder stones, a 17th century musical

Lithotomy – and hence, the lithotomy position. Commentary French composer Martin Marais (1656-28) wrote this dramatic, narrated piece about the experience of this terrifying, high-risk, no-anaesthetic operation in the 17th century. The approach was trans-perineal. Samuel Pepys had a bladder stone removed this way when he was 25 in 1658, repeatedly mentioned in his diaries, including Read More …