WEMJ Volume 114 No. 2 - June 2015
Welcome to the June issue of the WEMJ.
Welcome to the June issue of the WEMJ.
This issue concentrates on medical history. In addition we have articles from medical students who have presented at the monthly meetings. First article is a fascinating report from Walford Gillison on his own experiences as a prisoner of war under the Japanese. This is followed by equally interesting reports from several more of the members of the Bristol Medico Historical Society. Kind regards and good reading Paul Goddard, Hon. Editor
1) WEMJ Volume 114 No. 2, Article 1: Childhood experiences during World War II in China,
Walford Gillison
I was born in 1935 in Hankou which comprises a third of the large industrial city known as Wuhan, near the centre of China. My father and grandfather were medical missionaries. By 1939 Japanese soldiers controlled nearly half of China confronted by Mao Zedong (Mao Tse Tung) in the northeast and Chiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai Shek) in the southwest (figure1).
At the end of 1941 Japan declared war against the United States after Pearl Harbor on December 7th and against Britain on December 19th. We had become enemies of Japan.
2) WEMJ Volume 114 No. 2, Article 2: MAUD FRANCES FORRESTER – BROWN (1885- 1970) Britain’s First Woman Orthopaedic Surgeon
John Kirkup MBE, MD, FRCS Bristol Med-Hist. Society, 15.Dec.2008
In an era when few women achieved consultant surgical status, Miss Forrester-Brown MD, MS proved not only a pioneer orthopaedic surgeon but demonstrated that her sex was no bar to this physically demanding speciality
3)WEMJ Volume 114 No. 2, Article 3:ROKITANSKY - A MAN OF MICROSCOPIC AND MACROSCOPIC VISION
Bruno Bubna-Kasteliz
Freiherr Karl von Rokitanskywas the one of the leading figures in pathology for over 40 years at a time when Viennese medicine was very influential in Europe and he was probably one of the most important men who made it so. But his contribution to the reforms which led to the formation of what came to be known as the ‘Second Viennese Medical School’ is perhaps less well known today than his contributions to pathological anatomy.
4)WEMJ Volume 114 No. 2, Article 4: A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUTISM
Peter Carpenter
Autism was first described as a specific syndrome by Leo Kanner in 1943. He was a Austrian-Hungarian, who moved to the States where he helped create the specialty of Child Psychiatry, writing the first English textbook on Child Psychiatry in 1935. Both Kanner and his father have themselves been said to have had many features of an Autism condition
5) WEMJ Volume 114 No. 2, Article 5: BERYL CORNER
OBE, JP, MD, FRCP (Lond),FRCPCh (Hon), MD Hon (Bristol), DSc Hon (UWE) (1910 – 2007)
Peter M. Dunn, MA, MD, FRCP, FRCOG, FRCPCH
Beryl Corner was a founder member of the Bristol Medico- Historical Society in 1985 and its third President, 1995-1999.
6) WEMJ Volume 114 No. 2, Article 6: FETAL COMPRESSION AND THE RECOGNITION OF CONGENITAL DEFORMATION,
Peter M. Dunn, MA, MD, FRCP, FRCOG, FRCPCH
The sight of a case of Potter’s Syndrome in 1958 helped to stimulate my interest in prenatal fetal deformation. During the decade 1959-1968 I worked on a magnum opus entitled: ‘The influence of the intrauterine environment on the causation of congenital postural deformities with special reference to congenital dislocation of the hip’(4). When after three years of clinical research I began to study the literature on this subject, I found to my surprise that the notion that intrauterine constraint might lead to fetal deformation, though discounted in recent times, actually reached back to the days of Hippocrates(