Healing Arts: Medicine in History, Culture and the Arts

Today on A Medical Humanities Moment, we take a brief look at the Oracle at Delphi.

What gave the legendary Oracle her clairvoyant powers? Was it the whispers of Apollo...? Or was there a more scientific cause for her divine madness?

Take a break with A Medical Humanities Moment and find out.

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P.S. As mentioned in the podcast, if you'd like to visit the ruins of Delphi yourself, it's now a Unesco World Heritage Site.

Franz Liszt was one of the world's first superstars, driving his mostly female audiences to the point of mass hysteria....

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Ever since Lord Carnarvon died shortly after entering King Tutankhamun's tomb in 1923, rumours of a deadly curse have abounded. But what's the real story?

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*Opening scene taken from the movie The Mummy (1932), now in the public domain.

How did Agatha Christie know so much about poisons?

Today on The Medical Humanities Podcast, you'll find out!

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What is this oath, exactly? Is it just a myth? Is it something doctors used to do but no longer swear to? Was it really something Hippocrates came up with? And is it legally binding?

Today on A Medical Humanities Moment, we’ll find out a bit more about the Hippocratic Oath. 

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Join me as I countdown my top five tv medical scenarios that are either mistakes, myths, or just plain made up.

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As any student of life sciences will tell you, medical terminology can feel like a foreign language. Fossae and foramina, erythropoietin and encephalomalacia, atelectasis and acromegaly—students have to assimilate an enormous number of Latin and Greek root words, suffixes, and prefixes to know that brachioradialis is called the "drinking muscle" for a reason, that eating ice cream can result in sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia (brain freeze), and that unilateral periorbital ecchymosis is just a fancy way of describing a black eye.

Why do we use these fifty cent words? And where do they come from?

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The caduceus: the winged staff with two serpents wound around it, almost instantly recognizable around the world as the symbol for the medical professions. 

The thing is - it doesn’t have anything to do with medicine...

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Did King George III of England really go insane, or was a hereditary disease the cause of his erratic behaviour?

Today on the Medical Humanities Podcast, the Madness of King George.

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When Queen Mary I of England, daughter of Henry VIII, announced that she was with child, her subjects were overjoyed…and bewildered. Many were skeptical, due to her age and the recency of her marriage, and some were outright convinced she was either mistaken or delusional…because as they suspected, no royal baby ever appeared.

Today on The Medical Humanities Podcast - The Queen’s Quickening: The Phantom Pregnancies of Mary I. First published in the Journal of Medical Humanities, by the Hektoen Institute of Medicine in Chicago, 2022 

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