Syphilis

Abstract

For early modern physicians syphilis was “the great imitator”, a disease that mystified with the sheer range of its symptoms and the length of time it might take to show itself. Syphilis was first recorded in Europe in the mid-1490s, and the coincidence with Christopher Columbus' first voyage to the New World led contemporary physicians (along with more recent archaeologists and historians) to conclude that his sailors had brought the disease back with them. The historian will see you now: introducing Case Histories“I hope that Lord Grey and you are well”, wrote the Regency wit and clergyman Sydney Smith to his confidante Lady Mary Grey in February, 1836, “no easy thing, seeing that there are about fifteen hundred diseases to which man is subject”. Last year the editors of the Lancet journals announced the launch of The Lancet Clinic, a major online initiative which draws together an overview Seminar with the best current research from across the Lancet journals on 135 of the most globally important diseases. Full-Text PDF SchizophreniaDementia praecox, dementia paranoides, catatonia, hebephrenia, stupefaction—just the terms historically associated with schizophrenia could fill up a short essay on the subject. The contentious and surprisingly short history of this diagnosis draws out some of the most difficult questions in psychiatry. Is schizophrenia a natural entity, awaiting objective description, or does it emerge from a shifting intersection of contexts? Is good practice a matter of grouping disorders into broad categories based on underlying resemblances, or does accurate diagnosis depend on breaking these generalisations down into lists of specific symptoms? Full-Text PDF Parkinson's diseaseHad James Parkinson never written An Essay on the Shaking Palsy, he might now be remembered as an adventurous activist in an age of turmoil. Born in London, in 1755, he belonged to a generation whose political consciousness was shaped by the French and American Revolutions and the writings of firebrand democrats like Thomas Paine. When some of his colleagues in the London Corresponding Society were charged with treason, Parkinson stood up for them in the witness box, and, in 1796, he was suspected of involvement in the Popgun Plot—an alleged conspiracy to assassinate George III with a poisoned dart from an airgun. Full-Text PDF OsteoarthritisStiffness and pain in the joints was for centuries seen as a mark of mortality, one of the natural shocks of old age: just look at Leonardo da Vinci or Thomas Rowlandson's caricatures of old people, with their crooked digits and knobbly joints. Since the 16th century, anatomists have been familiar with the basic structure of joints—bones capped with cartilage, connected by ligaments, and lubricated by synovial fluid—and the name they gave to the principal disorder of these joints is a classic example of plain English put into learned Greek: arthritis, literally joint inflammation. Full-Text PDF