A Disease Called Alzheimer
Daniel Pinheiro HERNANDEZ, José Guilherme Pinheiro PIRES, Mayara BUENO, Pedro Henrique Martins de OLIVEIRA, Rafael Vinícius Lôndero Quintino dos SANTOS
Original title: Uma Doença Chamada Alzheimer
Published in
Keywords: Alois Alzheimer, Alzheimer’s Disease, History of Medicine.
Alzheimer's disease is the most common type of dementia. Its onset is insidious, and the brain damage is continuous, resulting, over time, in the functional disability of the patients. The objective of this paper is to know the history of the discovery of Alzheimer's Disease and to understand the origin of this eponym. The study was carried out through bibliographic research in the following databases: Pubmed, Scielo and Lilacs. The following descriptors were used: Alois Alzheimer, History of Medicine, Alzheimer's Disease. Alois Alzheimer was born in the small town of Marktbreit in Bavaria (Germany), and graduated in 1887 receiving his medical degree from the University of Würzburg. He took up his first position as an assistant at the Asylum for Mental and Epileptic Patients in Frankfurt, where he served for 14 years. He met Franz Nissl (1860-1919), the German neuropathologist, and together they studied the cortex of patients with pre-senile dementia. He presented his postdoctoral thesis showing the existence of neurofibrillary entanglements, which came to characterize a specific form of dementia. In 1910, the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926) named this condition as Alzheimer's Disease. Alzheimer is recognized as a memorable psychiatrist and neuropathologist who discovered a disease that today affects millions of people worldwide.
Ancient Medicine and the body’s perception in Hippocrates (c. 460-370 BC)
Hélio Angotti Neto
Original title: A Medicina Antiga e a percepção do corpo em Hipócrates (c. 460-370 a. C.)
Published in Rhythms, expressions and representations of the body
Keywords: Galen, Hippocrates, History of Medicine, Human Body, Nature of Man.
Hippocratic medicine addresses the human body and its phenomena based on principles like the complexity and the balance of its components among themselves and its relations towards the nature. By means of logical formulations based on the composition of the human body by humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and dark bile) and, consequently, principles (heat, cold, dry and humid), the Hippocratic author seeks an explanation of phenomena such as epidemic diseases and nutritional disorders. Although the text is anachronistic, according to the current scientific perspective, there are epistemological principles obtained through contemplative science and empiricism that still have some value in relation to medical epistemology concerning human body comprehension.
Art and Medicine - An Optional Mutual Relationship
Georgia Dunes da Costa MACHADO
Original title: Arte y Medicina - Una Relación de Mutualismo Facultativo
Published in
Keywords: Art, History of Medicine, Interdisciplinarity, Medical Humanities, Transdisciplinarity.
As we evolve scientifically, we move away from the art involved in the intrinsic care of medicine. Many of our doctors are more blind, deaf, less tactile, devoid of empathy, as well as massacred by the high number of care they need to perform and the shameful conditions of work and service to which they are subjected and who are obliged to submit their patients. How can we not distance ourselves from models of behavior like that of William Osler (1849-1919)? This work presents different possibilities of using the arts as an example of a tool for reversing the proven loss of empathy of the medicine students. This through interventions in this process, as well as a reflection about the preconception of the hierarchy of knowledge and the feeling of unpreparedness of the faculty for the basic ability of mediation between art and medical-humanistic contents. It is possible, with the involvement of the emotion, as it happens with the musicians of an orchestra, to govern such mediation of an eye in the good final product: a new or old doctor that disturbs and surprises his patient, being a watershed in life of the individual who puts his full trust in him. In these terms, the use of the arts emerges as an important pedagogical resource, oriented to the rescue of the origins of Medicine, being the technologies and medical science incorporated for the benefit of the patient protagonist in a process of voluntary mutualism between medical art and medical science. This desire sums up in the phrases: “The curricular contents should teach not only the auscultation but the Listening; not only the palpation, but the Comfort to those who suffer; and not only to treat but to broaden the meaning of the act of caring”; “the worst man in science is he who is never an artist, and the worst artist is one who is never a man of science.”
Cultural Legacy and Professional Values in Method of Medicine Book I, by Galen (129-217)
Hélio Angotti-Neto
Original title: Legado cultural e valores profissionais no Livro I de Método da Medicina, de Galeno (129-217)
Published in Mirabilia Journal 31 (2020/2)
Keywords: Galen, Hippocrates, History of Medicine, Medical Education, Medical Ethics.
This work translates excerpts from Book I of the work Method of Medicine, by the ancient doctor Galen. In its content, aspects related to the transmission of knowledge to the next generation of professionals and the necessary attention to the moral elements of the profession, which must permeate the practice and its transmission, are discussed.
Introduction to Medicine didactics of the Middle-Ages: analysis of medical treatises of the Iberian Peninsula
Josué VILLA PRIETO
Original title: Introducción a la didáctica de la Medicina en la Edad Media: análisis de los tratados médicos de la Península Ibérica
Published in
Keywords: Alonso Chirino, Arnau de Vilanova, Didactic treatises, History of Education, History of Medicine, Medieval medicine, Ramón Llull.
The Medical treatises produced in the Iberian Peninsula express Galen and Hippocrates traditional knowledge almost without introducing something new until the Late Middle Ages. This study proposes an interpretative synthesis about those new elements in a significant period of the genesis of Medicine as a modern science: how intellectuals define their attributions, how is inserted its teaching at Iberian studia generalia, who compose textbooks and materials for its study, how are organized these same treatises and, of course, which contents do they have.
Life Stories in Medicine
Hélio ANGOTTI NETO
Original title: Histórias de Vida na Medicina
Published in
Keywords: History of Medicine, Medical Education, Medical Humanities.
This volume of Mirabilia / Medicinæ Journal brings three articles on Medical Humanities, History of Medicine and Medical Education. The first article is the academic report of the 5th UNESC Seminar on Medical Humanities - Life Stories in Medicine -, held on June 9 and 10, 2017 at Campus I of the University Center of Espírito Santo, in Colatina, Espírito Santo. The second article covers the history of Alois Alzheimer (1864-1915 AD). And the last article describes a health education initiative in the context of patient safety, an area of great importance and prominence in healthcare.
Medieval leprosy and the metaphorical medicine of Ramon Llull (1232-1316)
Ricardo da COSTA; Hélio ANGOTTI-NETO
Original title: Medieval leprosy and the metaphorical medicine of Ramon Llull (1232-1316)
Published in
Keywords: History of Medicine, Leprosy, Middle Ages.
A brief study of leprosy in the Middle Ages, its history, medical perception and social attitude toward manifestations of the disease. As a case study about the prevailing medical principles, we present some excerpts from Començaments de Medicina (c.1274-1283), Doctrina pueril (c. 1274-1276), Fèlix o Libre de Maravelles (1288-1289), and Liber prouerbiorum (c. 1296) by the medieval philosopher Ramon Llull (1232-1316). It presents the theoretical foundations of his Medicine: a metaphorical art that links the Hippocratic four elements (air, fire, earth and water) and Christian Theology using numeric symbolism.
The Symbolic and Moral Interpretation of the Hippocratic Oath
Hélio Angotti-Neto
Original title: A Interpretação Simbólica e Moral do Juramento Hipocrático
Published in Mirabilia Journal
Keywords: Aristotle, Hippocrates, Hippocratic Oath, History of Medicine, Medical Humanities.
The Hippocratic Oath remains as one of the most famous ethical texts in Medical Ethics and Bioethics. The objective of this essay is to clarify its poetic and symbolic interpretations, searching for the adequate comprehension of the Oath using a critical narrative approach with the Aristotelian Theory of the Four Discourses and the interpretation of its direct, indirect, specific and general moral prescriptions. The Oath is a poetic text, which can be used to cause a powerful impression upon the new physician, helping in his moral education and in his commitment with the moral community of Medicine. This analysis makes evident that the Hippocratic Oath still can be used for medical education and professional inspiration, rather than just be discarded as a historical curiosity. The conclusion is that the Oath can be approached more properly with specific literary and philosophical tools that can decode its meanings to better comprehension for the contemporary physician.
The body in the pedagogical philosophy of Ramon Llull (1232-1316)
GIUBERTI, Fabricia dos Santos
Original title: O corpo na filosofia pedagógica de Ramon Llull (1232-1316)
Published in
Keywords: Body, Doctrine for Children, History of Medicine, Ramon Llull.
Ramon Llull (1232-1316) in his work Doctrine for Children (c. 1274-1276) teaches his son Dominic that the human body is composed of four elements, an idea inherited from Greek medicine, and that such elements corrupt the man’s body. There are five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Through them, the man participates in external things. For the Mallorcan, bodily life is the actuality by which the body lives, and the spiritual life is to love God. From these principles, Llull teaches the child that he must love the bodily life and health because, through health, the soul and the body are convenient to each other, and the man lives by convenience.The purpose of this paper is to present the conception of Ramon Llull about the body as exposed on Doctrine for Children, methodologically combined with the historical perspective of Jacques Le Goff and Nicholas Truong in the work "A History of the Body in the Middle Ages".
