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.

Albucasis blistering a patient in the hospital at Cordova, 1100, by Ernest Board, c. 1912.

Essay

Early Islamic Medicine

By Jonathan Lyons

The history of Western medicine owes much to its encounters with the medieval Muslim world, yet this debt seems destined to go unrecognized and unrepaid.

Map

Contagion

A brief history of malaria, leprosy, and smallpox.

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Voices In Time

c. 1760 | Michigan

White-Man Giver

Native Americans encounter a terrible sickness.More

Voices In Time

1847 | Tennessee

Civilization and Its Discontents

Dorothea Dix pleads for the creation of a new institution.More

Voices In Time

1889 | London

Collecting Symptoms

Jerome K. Jerome gives a self-diagnosis.More

Charts & Graphs

What Seems to Be the Problem?

Medical human oddities.

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Photograph of American clinical psychologist and writer Kay Redfield Jamison.

Jewish philosopher, jurist, and physician Moses Maimonides.

Contributors

English novelist, essayist, and critic George Orwell.

Painting of humanist and scholar Erasmus.

I have yet, I believe, some years in store, for I have a good state of health and a happy mind, and I take care of both by nourishing the first with temperance and the latter with abundance. This, I believe, you will allow to be the true philosophy of life.

—Thomas Paine, 1803

Black and white photograph of Emily Dickinson sitting next to a desk.

Conversations

Emily Dickinson & William Styron

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Medicine

c. 1760 | Michigan

1847 | Tennessee

1889 | London