Humanities resources to support healthcare professionals and patients
Ian Rankin. I don’t really blame people for shunning the dying. I try to do it myself, not physically but mentally by painting other pictures in my head. My mother has perhaps less than a week to live. If what she’s doing now is living. Not living, just there. At least I can go to Read More …
My next shock was a surgical one. On a certain Sunday morning a carriage-and-pair drew up in front of the dining-room window, to my great alarm. In walked a stout old fellow in tile hat and surtout, accompanied by his wife. He said never a word; but his mouth remained wide open. The wife also Read More …
On the other side of the ward, there’s that ‘amazing murmur’ – the mitral stenosis, who lies coughing up pink frothy phlegm into a stained handkerchief. He’s in his mid forties, and his face and body are swollen with oedema. A framed picture of his two little children stands on the bedside table, smiling at Read More …
First, I had mastered the practical basis of my profession, the art and craft of Medicine, which begins and develops only after a man leaves University and Hospital. Secondly, I had endured an extremely severe training and initiation: the very best I could have had. It not only made one exact, punctual, and methodical; but Read More …
Dealing with death, Miguel Torga Coimbra, 10 December 1958 Twenty-five years now that I’ve been battling death professionally, and I feel more incapable than ever of understanding and accepting it. Halfway between the peasant in the pure state and pure intellect, when death comes calling I find neither the peace of the credulous person who Read More …
Use of Penicillin in 1945, Miguel Torga Coimbra, 1 February 1945 Penicillin. I too want to try out the last panacea invented by science. On a young boy burning up with fever, pus running out of his ears and terrible pain. In the old days, the tympanic membrane would be doused with milk from a Read More …
Maternal Health in Afghanistan, Khalid Hosseini. Inside the old, dingy operating room, Laila lay on a gurney bed as the doctor scrubbed her hands in a basin. Laila was shivering. She drew in air through her teeth every time the nurse wiped her belly with a cloth soaked in a yellow-brown liquid. Another nurse stood Read More …
I was as fearful of failing as I had been with my A-levels, but there was also a terrible sense of unease about what was happening to me, to which I couldn’t put a name. As I prepared for my finals, with my mind map, and my chart of each available hour, there came a Read More …
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 …
The Diphtheria disaster at Medellin, Colombia. Diphtheria of a virulent type had been present in the district. In 1928, 45 of 105 patients died; in 1929, 68 of 109; and in 1930, 30 of 271. In consequence it was decided to test children by the Schick method and to immunize them with formalinized diphtheria toxin Read More …