In what could be considered a very bad idea, Robert Louis Stevenson trekked through Cevennes, France, among mountains and lower highlands, despite his youthful bad health, aboard a donkey named Modestine. It was the autumn of 1878 and he was many years, half a decade in fact, from the fame of his greatest literary success: …
A Caesarian, or C section, is the medical term for the intervention of childbirth where the baby is cut and removed from the womb of the mother by doctors. It is believed that there is only one known case of a woman giving herself a caesarian section without a doctor, where both the mother and child …
Asylums. Electro-Shock Therapy. Skull Drills. Pills. Exorcisms. Isolation. Lobotomies. Many of the drastic procedures that have been put in place to relieve a person with mental illness such as schizophrenia are only successful in creating ‘vegetables’ out of patients, not curing their illness but making them ghosts of their previous selves. Throughout history, there have …
The label schizophrenia is a recent term, first used in 1908 by Eugen Bleuler, a Swiss psychiatrist, and was meant to describe the disunity of functioning between personality, perception, thinking and memory. Whilst the label is new, accounts of schizophrenia-like symptoms can be found in ancient texts dating back to 2000 BC, and across a …
Crohn’s disease is a type of inflammatory bowel disease but it may affect any part of the whole digestion tract from the mouth, through the stomach to the colon and anus. Crohn’s disease may affect it’s patients in many different ways; with symptoms including pain, cysts, fever, diarrhoea, bleeding from sores in the gut track, infection and …
Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura (ITP) is a misnomer. The rare condition causes antibodies to destroy platelets important for blood clotting, and can produce symptoms of low platelet count, unusual haemorrhaging, including intracranial haemorrhage (rare but potentially life threatening), mucosal and gingival haemorrhaging, abnormal menstruation, petichiae, purpura and a general propensity to bruise easily. However, some patients …