T he events narrated by Shakespeare in his tragedy Hamlet 1 are the following: King Hamlet of Denmark dies suddenly and his brother Claudius a few weeks later marries the widow, his sister-in-law, Queen Gertrude; according to the official explanation, a snakebite was the cause of his death. The ghost of the king appears before his son, Prince Hamlet, and tells him that his own brother, now his ...

An ancient Buddhist story I tells of a young mother who took her baby son to the pond of the sage Mahosadha to bathe him. A ghoul, watching from a distance, assumed the form of a woman and approached the mother and son, asking if she might play with the child. The ghoul took the child in her arms, singing softly to it. All of a sudden the ghoul ran off with the child, while the mother pursued, ...

Urinary lithiasis and gout were uncommonly prevalent in the eighteenth century. This essay considers the history of both afflictions and especially tells of the last illnesses of Sir Robert Walpole, who died from complications of stone, and his son, Horace, who throughout his life was a sufferer of gout.

The son of a village farrier near Tours, Velpeau rose from humble beginnings to become by dint of intelligence, hard work, and determination the leading surgeon of his day in Paris. As professor of clinical surgery in the university he was an admired and respected teacher. His writings covered most aspects of medicine, surgery, and obstetrics.

You are asked to see a 37-year-old male carpenter who was noted to be anemic and mildly thrombocytopenic during a routine physical examination. The patient has been married for 11 years and has a 5-year-old son and an 8-year-old daughter. He reports that he has been in good health but has noted increasing fatigue over the past 2 months. Two weeks ago, he and his son had viral gastroenteritis th...

Motivation has been traditionally defined as energy (e.g., running speed) and direction (e.g., toward food), and the determinants of motivation as need (e.g., for food), expectation (e.g., cognitive map of the maze), and incentive value (e.g., quality of the food). When motivation toward attaining a desired future meets resistance or conflict, self-regulation becomes relevant. The use of effect...

Wildberger became a renowned local figure and received an honorary medical doctorate from Jena and many foreign honours. In later life he moved his institute to Forchheim, where he had the assistance of his medically-qualified son before the latter emigrated to America. His writings on the proper training of orthopaedic surgeons, with their insistence on early specialist education in methods an...

Three years ago, John Schwartz, a national correspondent at The New York Times, got the call that every parent hopes never to receive: his 13-year-old son, Joe, was in the hospital following a failed suicide attempt. After mustering the courage to come out to his classmates, Joe’s disclosure --delivered in a tirade about homophobic attitudes --was greeted with dismay and confusion by his fellow...