Brain

0

After less than a week in second year medical school, I had survived the elimination contest exam, coming in 38th of the 650 examinees. Thus I earned my place in the amphitheater that held only 110 people, including the spare chairs wedged into the stairwell.

The cornerstone on the building — the original cornerstone — said clearly, “1568.” It was not a museum, but a living medical school building. I suppose some monks had practiced here in the building at the outset when medicines were mostly tinctures, maybe marijuana if they were lucky. 
In the ancient dissection room, were four slate tables for cadavers. They were not easy to obtain, for it was said very few wanted their bodies dissected after death. The slate tables had rivulets carefully carved into them. The floor around the tables had buckets to catch various bodily fluids.

During my dissection, the master who supervised pointed a finger at me and the three other students at our table. Tradition said that “Sylvius, of the “Sylvian Fissure” had dissected at that very table. Sylvius,” meaning “from the woods” in Latin is “DuBois.” a common name in French. This fissure, that separates the frontal and temporal lobes, is so named in all the language in which medical terminology is known to me. He is sometimes claimed by Germany and sometimes by Holland.

I have looked into it enough to know he had a couple of “teaching voyages” around Europe, and his dates of activity would have made his presence in my dissection room very possible, indeed. The first day I was in this amphitheater, my physiology professor, from an ancient French family which alleged lineage dating back to 18th century pre-revolutionary French nobility, sidled up to my table and rapped on it, as if to focus his attention on me — before starting his lecture. “Mademoiselle,” he said, “you should be ashamed of yourself. You have taken a seat in this class away from a deserving Frenchman, who could earn a salary and raise a family.” The amphitheater could not have been more silent since 1568. I heard my own voice tremble. “With all due respect, Monsieur, I am here according to the Napoleonic Code of 1802, which opened the Universities of France to people coming from all nations who are capable of speaking the French language, so that they return with French culture to their nations of origin. I am pleased to be so honored. Vive la France!”

Pretty much any time you say “Vive la France!” in am amphitheater of students it is fairly certain that the whole amphitheater will end up cheering and shouting “Vive la France,” which they did. My poor professor was silenced, and shook his head. Nobody else said anything derogatory about my origins to me for the remainder of my education.

Later that week was my first lecture in neuroanatomy. I had loved the brain and its mystery and majesty long before starting the study of medicine. In first year medicine we were focused primarily on learning the limbs, with the brain and the head, neck thorax, and abdomen saved for the second year. Strangely I cannot remember the professor’s name. He was ancient and had to be helped up to the master’s lectern, One of the students told me he had been teaching before World War II. He had an essential tremor — head and neck, and sometimes the whole of his body. His voice seemed feeble, even with the microphone of the lectern. He wore a vest and trousers beneath his white coat.

“Mesdames, Mesdemoiselles, Messieurs … To me, falls the responsibility of teaching you the brain. When I address you, I speak to your brain. Assiduously studied, for hundreds of years, we knew little about it before World War I. The brave “poilus,” the French soldiers who protected this great nation in WWI , gave their lives — and all too often, gave us their brains. From knowing what part of their brain was missing and what they were unable to do in their twilight of their young lives, we learned what part of the brain did what. From this, we have evolved into a people whose knowledge of the brain we share with the world.”

He stared at me, and I felt as if his eyes burned holes in my flesh. “This organ is so complex, I do not teach with the pathologists’ photographs or drawings, but with simple circles of colored chalk to show you their bunches and bundles in cross-section. Learn them well, for they were learned from people’s lives and memories.” The other students told me later, when I talked to them that they were suppressing giggles. Me, I was suppressing tears. I have heard many complaints about nearly everything about medical education. But I have never heard anybody tell me about a deeper contact with being part of the research and education tradition than I did at that moment.

Filed under Brain, Diagnosis, Disease, Doctors, News by on . Comment#

0

She was an older woman, gray-haired and distinguished, one of those Canadian imports who had never forgotten her British roots. They were as close by as her slight English accent. I had known many people in Canada just like her, who would say “I’m just an old Brit” because that is what they felt like, in the “melting pot” America was alleged at one time to be, or in rich ethnic salad of Canada.

We knew her from her singing. We sang in a “showcase” of sorts in the San Diego region. My husband’s rich and jazzy baritone, my humorous songs or French songs long before my post-menopausal “croak” set in. Read more on Back To The Blitz…

0

Those lovable psychologists do all kinds of research (without bodily fluids) and sometimes it is clever stuff. Practical stuff. Stuff you can apply, often nearly immediately, to make your life better.

James Clear often comes up with these.

I remember being told very early in life (age 9, in gifted children’s school) that a high IQ is NOT a guarantee of success. Read more on Intention Means More Than Motivation…

Filed under News, Psychology by on . Comment#

0

I often think of Emma Bovary.

In 1856, Gustave Flaubert’s first novel was helped along in sales by a trial for obscenity. And yet the school of thought Flaubert embodied was called “literary realism.” Read more on Literature and Psychology…

0

My favorite way to put people to sleep is Aromatherapy.  To help a person sleep, the requisite molecules have to get to the brain.  They certainly to not have to drag around the circulation of the entire body. The sense of smell is perhaps the most sensitive of all senses.  You need to smell only a few molecules of something, compared to how much it takes to see and hear, they say. I have heard it said many times, although it does sound a bit like comparing apples and oranges. Read more on A Sweet Way To Go To Sleep…

0
Knowing when to eat is important, but there are no bad times. One of the most obese people I have known personally was our family Kosher (traditional Jewish) butcher back on the east coast.  He said his weight was immeasurable on a normal scale; I didn’t know then that I would become that way later.  He was the kind of guy who was so heavy he was in such pain whenever he got up from a chair to serve a customer, he invoked God in rapidly recited Hebrew.

He said he ate very reasonable “balanced” (which is not what obese people need) meals during the day, but every night he got “crazy hungry” and “snacked” on everything imaginable, mostly sweets, from the minute he finished after-work dinner until his late bedtime, while in front of the television. He said his doctor was irate and told him to stop eating at night because eating in the evening and before bed made people fat and sick. Read more on Meats or Sweets For Weight Loss…

0

Sometimes, in practical everyday life, I get lost or disoriented.  Like in one of the busy discount department stores we frequent.

My husband is always there in the store. Read more on Mapping Out Life…

Filed under life, News by on . Comment#

0
Natural treatment of obsessionality. “Estelle, you’re such a little worrier.  Yes you are.” When I was little, I never understood why my Auntie Charlotte always addressed me this way.  I did know that my family had “adopted” her which seemed to give her the right to “adopt” me.  Her orthodox Jewish family had rejected her because she wanted to marry a guy who had been married before, even though he was very Jewish. I was not supposed to know or care about such things.  But I did know she was the first person in my life to tell me I worried too much about things that didn’t need worrying about.

Read more on Obsessions…

0

One of the themes that keeps coming up in those little “newslets” for 15 minutes of Continuing Medical Education each is that systematic screening for several serious diseases, like cancers, is simply not as efficient as one wishes it were. At the very least, in terms of cost, it rarely pays. Sometimes people try to identify a subset of people who should be screened; but all too often, even that is a daunting task.

Some stalwart and doubtless realistic physicians sometimes suggest–screen patients who ask for it. This seems strikingly similar to the young doctor in Amiens who told me, that if he wanted to build a practice and feed his family, he had to give everyone antibiotics. It is that ancient trend of anti-intellectualism, patients who second-guess the doctor, people who are worried about their health– And yet, these people could argue that (they have paid their health insurance and earned what they think is good care), and they are individuals and not statistics. Read more on When To Screen For Things Medical That Could Kill…

Filed under Doctors, Education, medicine, News by on . Comment#

0

Maybe if it’s “all in your head,” it’s in your brain chemistry

We women have spent so long and worked so hard for equality in rights, in education, and at work, that it may actually be hard to talk about how we are different.

The World Health Organization has been working on this, and knows a lot about what is going on.  Illnesses of the mind, problems with thinking and feeling and living, are only identified by doctors less than half the time. Three out of five people who have this kind of problem wait less than a year before seeing a doctor. This is true of both sexes. Read more on Mental Health In Women…

Filed under Brain, Mental Illness, News by on . Comment#