The Assassination of Medgar Evers.

In 1995, Dr Martin Dalton published a recounting of his involvement with the first human lung transplant in the Annals of Thoracic Surgery. As recalled in that account, the first lung transplant took place in the summer of 1963 in the context of another historical event, the assassination of Medgar Evers. This article is written in follow-up to Dalton's report in hopes of providing more insight into the events surrounding the assassination. This review will discuss the details of the assassination, attempted resuscitation, and the medical evidence presented in the trial of his assassin.

The attempted murder of a surgeon (1882): Frank Algernon Hall of Lewes, Sussex.

Frank Algernon Hall (1846-1899) was an English surgeon who practised in Lewes, Sussex. He is remembered for an attempt on his life in 1882 by "feloniously shooting". This premeditated act took place at the Lewes surgery where he practised and lived. No reason for the attack is documented and his assailant, Edwin Battersby, was removed to Broadmoor asylum. The author reflects on the value of historical accounts in promoting awareness of assaults on clinicians.

The art of surgery.

, Published online in Wiley Online Library (www.bjs.co.uk). DOI: 10.1002/bjs.10863 In times when art usually depicted perfection, Caravaggio (1571-1610) painted everyday reality. He used people walking the streets of Rome to represent holy figures. Caravaggio loved many women. He killed a man in a duel and had to flee from Rome to avoid being 'beheaded by anybody who saw him'. In this biblical scene he painted, Judith Beheading Holofernes, Judith is a portrait of Fillide Melandroni, the reason for the duel. Holofernes is a self-portrait. Judith looks cruel, in mourning clothes, seeking revenge for the assassination of her lover. The maidservant, almost an evil spirit, has a voluminous thyroid goitre, and she seems to encourage the revenge of Fillide. Read more about Caravaggio and this painting in an essay online.

A medical history of Governor John B. Connally and his gunshot wounds.

: On November 22, 1963, the Governor of Texas, John Connally, was injured during the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Multiple authors have documented President Kennedy's injuries, the attempted resuscitation, and the controversies surrounding these events. However, the injuries sustained by Governor Connally have been overlooked by historians predominantly because of the extraordinary importance of the presidential assassination and its impact on the national consciousness. This review discusses the governor's political life, the mechanism of injury, his medical care, and the role the injuries had on his subsequent public life.

Do we really need new medical information about the Turin Shroud?

Image processing of the Turin Shroud (TS) shows that the Man represented in it has undergone an under glenoidal dislocation of the humerus on the right side and lowering of the shoulder, and has a flattened hand and enophthalmos; conditions that have not been described before, despite several studies on the subject. These injuries indicate that the Man suffered a violent blunt trauma to the neck, chest and shoulder from behind, causing neuromuscular damage and lesions of the entire brachial plexus. The posture of the left claw-hand is indicative of an injury of the lower brachial plexus, as is the crossing of the hands on the pubis, not above the pubis as it would normally be, and are related to traction of the limbs as a result of the nailing to the patibulum. The disappearance of the thumbprints is because of entrainment of the flexor pollicis longus tendons while the nails were driven through the wrists. The blunt chest trauma, which resulted in the body falling forwards, was the direct cause of a lung contusion and haemothorax, confirmed by the post-mortem leakage of clots and serum from the chest caused by the stabbing with the spear, and was a likely cause of cardiac contusion. All the evidence is in favour of the hypothesis that the TS Man is Jesus of Nazareth.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy: revisiting the medical data.

Doubt continues to surround the assassination of President Kennedy to this day. Unfortunately, the controversy was not diminished by the multiple commissions and panels that were convened to investigate it. This was in large part because these various panels continued to propagate much of the confusion and lack of precision that plagued the initial medical reports, and introduced some new confusion of their own. Much of this controversy was driven by incomplete information, poor documentation and analysis, and the puzzling decision to withhold key medical evidence both from investigators and the public. However, the preponderance of evidence does show that the single-shooter, three-bullet theory is plausible both medically and scientifically.

[Samuel Pozzi (1846-1918), flamboyant surgeon of la Belle Epoque]. / Samuel Pozzi (1846-1918), chirurgien flamboyant de la Belle Epoque.

Samuel Pozzi was an outstanding in the Paris of nineteenth century, highly gifted and successful, but his real personality remains, after one hundred years, filled with mystery. He was born in the heart of Dordogne, Bergerac, in a family of Huguenots who had come from Geneva. After his first studies in Pau and Bordeaux, he came to Paris, while barely eighteen years old to reach the heights of the medical world of his time. Beginning as "Interne" then "Chirurgien des hôpitaux", "professeur agrégé", head Physician at Hôpital Broca and, finally he was appointed Professor to the newly created Chair of Clinical Gynecology. He gained fame as a master of gynecological surgery but kept, during his career, a keen interest for all fields of surgery, including organ transplantation.

[Young man with gunshot wound (GSW)--what killed Ernst vom Rath?].

On the morning of November 7, 1938 vom Rath, a diplomat at the German embassy in Paris, was shot by Herschel Grynzspan, a Jewish teenager. Of the 5 shots fired, 2 hit vom Rath, one in the right shoulder and one in the abdomen. He was rushed to Alma Women's Hospital near the embassy, where emergency surgery was undertaken. Two days later his condition deteriorated rapidly and succumbed 55 hours after the shooting. It is believed that the assassination triggered the "Kristallnacht"--the organized Nazi pogrom against Jews across Germany. Based on the Alma hospital registry, autopsy findings and articles from recent years, the course of his condition and possible cause of his death are discussed. The possibility of malpractice, and even medical fraud, which led to his death are also mentioned.

Murder by radiation poisoning: implications for public health.

On November 23, 2006, former Russian military intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko died in a London hospital. Authorities determined he was deliberately poisoned with the radionuclide Polonium-210 (210Po). Police subsequently discovered that those involved in this crime had--apparently inadvertently--spread 210Po over many locations in London. The United Kingdom Health Protection Agency (HPA) contacted many persons who might have been exposed to 210Po and provided voluntary urine testing. Some of those identified as potentially exposed were U.S. citizens, whom the HPA requested that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) assist in contacting. CDC also provided health care professionals and state and local public health officials with guidance as to how they might respond should a Litvinenko-like incident occur in the U.S. This guidance has resulted in the identification of a number of lessons that can be useful to public health and medical authorities in planning for radiological incidents. Eight such lessons are discussed in this article.

[The tragic demise of head physician Ortensio Pepi in Pula in 1938]. / Tragicna smrt primarijusa Ortensija Pepija u Puli in 1938.

The description represents a frame - an anecdotal one from today's perspective - from the history of surgery in Pula, to which the author's attention was directed by the late Vilijam Bilic, M.D., head of the Section for surgical diseases of the General Hospital in Pula. Head physician Ortensio Pepi, head of surgery of the then Regional Hospital, died in Pula on January 17, 1938 from gunshot wounds inflicted ten days before. He was shot in the street by a husband of a patient that died three months before following a difficult surgery. It appears that the gunman passed judgement on himself immediately after the insane act by shooting himself in the head, and died the same evening. The event garnered a lot of attention from the only newspaper of the time in Pula - Corriere Istriano, through which we keep track of the difficult, yet successful abdomen surgery and the gradual recovery of head physician Pepi. However, several days after the reporter published that the patient"s condition is no longer life threatening, Ortensio Pepi died "due to complications".

[Biographical update of Licentiate Martín de Castellanos de Maudes (1545?-1614). New documented information]. / Actualización biográfica del Licenciado Martín de Castellanos de Maudes (¿1545-1614). Nuevos datos documentales.

INTRODUCTION: The semblance and facts of licentiate Martín de Castellanos from Maudes (1545-1614?), a novelist surgeon specialized in treating urological diseases and who due to his merits and prestige was appointed professor of 'Urology' by Philip II, were almost definitively profiled in 1994 through the publication of his biography in a exhaustive piece of work. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Thorough review of new documentary findings at the Santa Cruz Church in Madrid and at the Simancas General Archive regarding new biographical information on Martín de Castellanos. RESULTS: It demonstrates the existence of other children from his marriage and that his eldest son, a collegiate at the University of Salamanca died as a result of the injuries he sustained following a sword fight among students on 13 November 1595. The work provides abundant information on the process that occurred at the University of Salamanca as a result of the death of Castellanos' son, of the lawsuit he filed against the culprits, and of the intervention of Philip II himself at the request of the surgeon, by means of a written order to the city magistrate. CONCLUSION: Although the transcription of the documents does not modify the fundamental facts of his life, they do give information on this occurrence, which updates his biography and directly associates the urologist with the king.

Chloroform anesthesia and the Saville Kent murder in 1860.

The discovery of the anesthetic properties of chloroform by Sir James Simpson is one of the therapeutic triumphs of the 19th century. Queen Victoria requested chloroform anesthesia for the birth of her second son, Prince Leopold, and from then until the end of century chloroform was the most popular general anesthetic for obstetrics and surgery. Chloroform was so pleasant to inhale that it became a drug of abuse and was involved in all sorts of criminal activity. Despite its wide usage, chloroform was not thought to be part of the brutal murder of 3-year-old Saville Kent on the night of June 30, 1860, outside his manor house in southwest England. The events surrounding and after the murder have recently been documented by Kate Summerscale in a book entitled, "The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher," the Detective Inspector assigned to the case by Scotland Yard. According to Ms Summerscale's records, Mr Whicher ignored the possibility that chloroform was involved in Saville's death. However, evidence supports the view that chloroform played a critical role in the crime and indicates that the guilty plea by Samuel Kent's daughter, Constance, for which she spent 20 years to the day in prison, was as inaccurate as it was incomplete.