The Elkdog Men

I have the flu, I think.  The cough has started to take on that seal-bark tone of bronchitis, but we’ll see.  I ventured out today to buy food, leaving invisible scum-trails of biological weaponry on every surface I touched, and when I came back inside the cold air had made it hard to breathe, for just a second.  I had to cough and all my various passages were blocked up with human slime, and for a moment I thought about all the nobodies of history who died from stuff like this.  Then I coughed up this righteous huge chunk of yellow mucus into the sink and crawled back to bed.  

But look at the WPA poster!  Osler also called pneumonia “the captain of the men of death.”  Whereas we just name the dangerous new mutated organisms “superbugs.”  The people demand more poetic names for death!

“Cholera on the bowsprit, by Graetz. Puck magazine, 18 July 1883.  ’The kind of “assisted emigrant” we can not afford to admit.’  Disease is personified by the death’s-head immigrant in Turkish garb.” (caption from Jacalyn Duffin’s History of Medicine)

“Psychiater Europas! Wahret Eure heiligsten Diagnosen!” (“Psychiatrists of Europe! Protect your sanctified diagnoses!”) Cartoon by Emil Kraepelin, “Bierzeitung”, Heidelberg 1896.  Kraepelin was influential in the popularisation of the dementia praecox disease-concept, which later developed into what we think of as schizophrenia.

disturbthebookmites:

The Edwin Smith papyrus, the world’s oldest surviving surgical document. Written in hieratic script in ancient Egypt around 1600 B.C., the text describes anatomical observations and the examination, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of 48 types of medical problems in exquisite detail. Among the treatments described are closing wounds with sutures, preventing and curing infection with honey and moldy bread, stopping bleeding with raw meat, and immobilization of head and spinal cord injuries. Translated in 1930, the document reveals the sophistication and practicality of ancient Egyptian medicine. Plate 6 and 7 of the papyrus, pictured here, discuss facial trauma.

The Pfizer Circle of Hell, Lapham’s Quarterly vol. II no. 4.

(I don’t know what Tumblr’s drama is about putting in the link to the high-res version automatically but the more legible size is here.)

Public Health Posters - Infectious Disease - Immunization

Anti-vaccination anxiety in 1975.  I may just be hormonal here but the crying mother picture ruined my morning.  “Is it too late to vaccinate?  …Yes it is!”

“1,440 items found in the stomach of a patient suffering from pica. Taken at the Glore Psychiatric Museum, Saint Joseph, Missouri.”

A Doctor’s lady is a small figurine depicting a nude or nearly nude female, usually said to have been used by traditional Chinese male physicians to allow a female patient to indicate the location of her discomfort in a modest fashion, without showing or pointing to her own body. “Doctor’s ladies” may be made from various materials such as ivory, resin, semiprecious stone, or soapstone, and are typically from 10 to 25 cm long, often with a base in the form of a couch. [wiki]