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.

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Anatomy of the heart; And she had a heart!; Autopsy, by Enrique Simonet, 1890.

Dissection

By Meehan Crist

Medical students are forced to change their perceptions of the dead. There is a human instinct that must be overcome to stick knives and fingers into human flesh.

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Map

Contagion

A brief history of malaria, leprosy, and smallpox.

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1908 | London

The Senior Practitioner

Rudyard Kipling gives a pep talk to med school students.More

1914 | Lambaréné

Swarmed by Mosquitoes

Albert Schweitzer confronts sleeping sickness.More

1804 | London

Helping Himself

Thomas De Quincey enters the church of opium.More

Charts & Graphs

Field Research

Advances in modern medicine during wartime.

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Portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky

Depiction of German abbess and mystic St. Hildegard.

black and white pencil drawing of Moliere in an ornate frame

Color portrait of English poet John Donne.

Black and white photograph of American writer and critic Anatole Broyard.

Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls, and sloth, or the Gout will seize you.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1734

Depiction of Greek philosopher Plato.

Black and white photograph of Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud with cigar.

Plato & Sigmund Freud

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Lapham’sDaily

Roundtable

Lapham’s Quarterly Is on Hiatus

By Lapham’s Quarterly

But the American Agora Foundation is already planning for the future. More

The Colosseum, attributed to Robert Eaton, c. 1855.

DÉjÀ Vu

Monumental Mistakes

2023:

Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.

c. 1850:

Thompson of Sunderland makes his mark on Pompey’s pillar.

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Terracotta funerary plaque, Greek, Attic, c. 520 BC.

The World in Time

Robert D. Kaplan

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power. More

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