The need for the historian or social scientist to think carefully about how he or she arranges material was authoritatively described by the historian and philosopher R.G.Collingwood. In his Autobiography (p.81) he wrote:” I had learnt by first-hand experience that history is not an affair of scissors and paste, but is much more like Bacon's notion of science. This historian has to decide exact...

Thomas Giordani Wright (1808-98), a prosperous doctor in Wakefield for most of his working life, started his long medical career as apprentice to Mr James McIntyre, Surgeon, in Newcastle upon Tyne. During the last three years of his apprenticeship (1826-29), before leaving to become a student at London University, he wrote his Diary of a doctor.' The Diary, written not as a confidential and pri...

I first saw William at the Saturday morning clinic when he came by appointment for a second examination. He is a commonplacelooking American boy with a pale freckled face, light tawny colored hair, dull blue eyes, and thick expressionless lips. His frontal regions are slightly depressed. Though he is thirteen years eight months of age, he looks about eleven, undersized and under weight. There w...

Pharmacy which is an art and science of preparing and dispensing drugs and Materia Medica gives the names, sources physical characters and chemical properties of herbs or substances used in medicine and their doses have been interwoven connected with medicine from the time immorial. This can be traced back to the findings of ancient Egyptian and Unani Physician like Hippocrates (460-377 B.C) Di...

Freud wrote over three and a half million words. He was a master of style and presentation and had something worthwhile to say on every page. Frequently he was magnificent, as for example in his First Introductory Lectures, but it would be expecting too much of anyone to suppose that in such a large volume of writing he would always be clear. Moreover, he was introducing new and difficult conce...

islamic golden age, 9-12 century ad, was the period through which persian scientists and physicians were most influential in improving medical sciences including cardiovascular knowledge. although post-islamic golden age witnessed a number of great persian scholars moving cardiovascular concepts forward, they failed to become as well known as their predecessors. one of these scholars was hakim ...

Dear Editor, It was with great sadness that we learnt of the death of Prof Barrie Jones on 19 August 2009 in Tauranga, New Zealand, aged 88. He was admired worldwide for his work in developing the concept of prevention of blindness and for establishing the International Centre for Eye Health (publishers of the Community Eye Health Journal) in 1981. He was in fact responsible for encouraging the...