Reflections

The second half of the twentieth century was the heyday of cardiac surgery. Inspired by many pioneers working mainly in Europe and North America, new techniques of surgery and even more importantly, new techniques of bypassing the circulation of the heart and lungs, led to a flowering of cardiac surgery which is one of the most important triumphs of medicine. Cardiac surgeons are famously said to be extremely egoistic. I had a teacher who insisted that they had every right to be so, as they were the only humans who could stop and restart the human heart at will. The only other entity who had this ability, he said, was God. Two such egoistic surgeons who were legends in their lifetime and will remain so for centuries to come were Dr Michael De Bakey and Dr Denton Cooley. Dr DeBakey was a decade senior to Dr Cooley. He graduated from Medical School in 1932 and spent time in the Army during the Second World War rising to the post of Colonel. He developed many techniques and was the fi...

On July 12, one hundred and seven years ago, a boy was born in the small Chilean town of Parral some 350 km south of the capital, Santiago. His father was a small time railway employee and his mother, who was a teacher who died very soon after his birth. This boy, Ricardo Eliezer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, was to become one of the twentieth century’s most famous and well loved poets, Pablo Neruda. Neruda was lifelong communist. He became one during his stint in Spain during the Civil War and clung to his ideology despite the infamous revelations of later years. This led to many estrangements, most famously from his longtime friend, Octavio Paz, another legendary poet, who could not stomach his admiration for Stalin. While today it is easily possible to see Stalin for the monster he undoubtedly was, it was not so plain to people in the days of the Second World War when Stalin and communist Russia stood basically alone against the all conquering Germans. The British had drawn back to their...

Caption: "My little Boy, Sir, died when he was only Two Months old, just after he had been Vaccinated." "How very sad! Had he been Baptised?" "Yes, Sir; but it was the Vaccination as carried him off, Sir!" From Punch, September 19, 1891 For some reason, vaccination has always been the target of the ire of rabble rousers. This was true in the 19th century when smallpox vaccination was targeted by many ill informed activists and is true today when a band of people with motives which are not really obscure anymore try to perpetuate fears regarding vaccination and in the process subject children and their families to unnecessary risks with often fatal outcomes. Edward Jenner introduced cowpox vaccination a safe alternative to the then prevalent smallpox vaccination in the last decades of the eightieth century. Its benefits were quickly recognized and this resulted in the Compulsory Vaccination Act in 1853 in the UK. This legislation required parents to vacc...

The Brahminy kite is a fairly common raptor in India as well as in South East Asia. In fact the island of Langkawi, one of the favourite destinations for holiday makers in Malaysia is named after this bird which is also claimed to be the original for the Garuda, the mythical bird which is the state emblem for Indonesia. A coastal bird, its range extends from the Indian subcontinent up to New South Wales in Australia. However it is mainly in Coastal Southern India, Sri Lanka and South East Asia that it really has its home. The reason why I brought this up is because there is a pair of these kites roosting in a tree just below the verandah of my flat in Bukit Jalil. Just across the wall is one of the greens of the Bukit Jalil Golf Course and this hole is ringed by some really majestic trees. We had noticed a pair of kites coming to this area occasionally, but it was late last year that we really noticed that they were roosting in a tree about 150 yards away from my verandah. Now, over t...

The pictures are of an embryonic stem cell, Claudia Castillino and Professor Macciarini There is a report this morning of the first artificial organ transfer in humans. Prof Macciarini who was earlier with the Hospital Clinic at Barcelona but now works in the Karolinska Institute in Sweden did this pioneering surgery. The world is familiar with what he had done earlier for Claudia Castillo. Claudia was a Columbian immigrant to Spain who developed a tracheal stricture following a tubercular infection. She was breathless and was unable to work and look after her children. Dr Macciarini used a donor cadaver trachea and denatured it of its proteins and then used stem cells to grow the tissue back on the graft. This made it compatible with the patient and he then operated on Claudia replacing the diseased trachea and giving her a new life. This was in 2008 and it created a sensation when this report was published in the Lancet that year. The good professor has continued his work to a ...