Clio in the Clinic : : History in Medical Practice / / Jacalyn Duffin.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter UTP eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2015
• HerausgeberIn: Duffin, Jacalyn,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2016]; ©2004
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (350 p.)

Sometimes, history can solve a medical mystery; at other times, it can point to the right treatment or console a despairing doctor by demonstrating a timeless connection to unchanging aspects of human existence. In Clio in the Clinic, twenty-three doctors, each of whom is also an accomplished historian, write autobiographically about how they use history in their practice of medicine. Their stories of clinical experiences show that historical thinking can serve in the diagnosis and care of patients.These essays constitute new evidence for an old argument about the utility of history in medicine. They open an intimate window on how history informs and serves clinical practice and describe what life is like for doctors when they leave the history meetings and go back to the wards.The contributors to this volume hail from five countries and represent sixty years of training; the most senior completed medical school in 1943, the youngest in 2003. They include several internists, four pediatricians, two psychiatrists, two infectious disease specialists, one neurologist, one emergentologist, and one surgeon. Topics include: history in the service of patients, the doctor-patient relationship, disease causation, administrative dilemmas, and the use of history to reflect on current trends in the practice of medicine.Many books make claims for the value of teaching history to future physicians, but none have explored the clinical experience of those doctors who are experts in history. Clio in the Clinic shows how knowledge of history can shape a physician's view of the profession and how it can be a surprising asset at the bedside for diagnosis and treatment. Not all the endings are happy, but these tales of medical life are written with insight, honesty, humour, and great affection for medicine, its history, and its people.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Contributors -- Clio in the Clinic: An Introduction -- The Night I Fell in Love with Clio -- Speculum medicinae: Reflections of a Medievalist-Clinician -- A Wartime 'Plague' in Crotone -- Plagues and Patients -- Coping with the HIV/AIDS Epidemic -- 'La Crise' -- Floating Kidneys -- Historical Adventures in the Newborn Nursery: Forgotten Stories and Syndromes -- Susan and the Simmonds-Sheehan Syndrome: Medicine, History, and Literatures -- The Histories of a History: The Boy, the Baron, and the Syndromes -- Who Says You Have to Crawl before You Walk? Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, Crawling, and Medical History -- An 'Appallingly Sudden Death' Explained Seventy-Six Years Later -- One Blue Nun -- William Withering's Wonderful Weed -- Dr Heisenberg, Are You Certain about the Diagnosis? -- Trust and the Tuskegee Experiments -- Beware the Poor Historian -- We Are All Historians: Thoughts about Doing Psychiatry -- Timeless Desperation and Timely Measures -- A Brief History of Timelessness in Medicine -- How Medical History Helped Me (Almost) Love a V.A. Hospital -- What Do You Know? Cancer, History, and Medical Practice -- Seeing through Medical History -- Index