Capsule
A tortured soul finds redemption in words
An 1863 graduate of the School of Medicine made his mark as a contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary while incarcerated with schizophrenia.
Some alumni of the School of Medicine make groundbreaking medical discoveries. Some become leaders of medical institutions. William C. Minor, M.D. 1863, also left his mark: he developed schizophrenia, killed a man and became a brilliant linguistic scholar while in an asylum for the insane.Minor graduated from Yale’s medical school, which at that time entailed two years’ study, as a qualified surgeon. After caring for wounded soldiers in the Civil War, Minor began to suffer from what would much later be defined as paranoid schizophrenia. In 1868 Minor was admitted to a government hospital for the insane in Washington, D.C., and released from the Army in 1870. During a stay in London that was intended to rest...
From Other Issues
Winter 2013
The Civil War Wounded in Photographs
Seated in profile, the young men pose as they would for family portraits. On closer inspection of the oval gold-lined...
Autumn 2012
Medicine in the time of Shakespeare
“A plague o’ both your houses,” the dying Mercutio cries in Romeo and Juliet. “Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing...
Spring 2012
World War I sacrifices for a greater good
The image is haunting: against a background of imploring children with outstretched arms, a gaunt woman cradles an...
Winter 2012
The Search for the Cushing Brains
By now the story of Harvey Cushing’s brains is well-known. When the neurosurgeon died in 1939, he left his brain tumor...
Autumn 2011
How the 1960s affected the School of Medicine
The Yale School of Medicine was not immune to the student protests that gripped the country in the 1960s and early...
Spring 2011
The medical school’s first full-time dean
Until the middle of the 20th century, the School of Medicine’s department chairs were expected to serve as deans,...
Autumn 2010
The New Haven Dispensary
In the America of the mid-1800s, dispensaries—originally established in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston—existed to...
Spring 2010
The physician's apprentice
In March 1811, at the age of 22, Elijah Woodward Carpenter of Brattleboro, Vt., signed his name to an indenture, a...
Winter 2010
The colonies’ first medical degree
In 1723 Yale granted the first medical degree issued in the American colonies to Daniel Turner (1667–1741), a London...
Autumn 2009
The origins of Darwin’s The Origin of Species
A medical student, appalled at what he was witnessing, ran from the operating room. He was little more than a boy,...
Spring 2009
Cautionary tales for WWII GIs
She’s no idealized oil painting. The lines around the mouth tell you she’s been around the block. She might have...
Autumn 2008
A theory abandoned but still compelling
In 1977 readers were enthralled by The Dragons of Eden, a book by the astronomer Carl Sagan that explored the evolution...
Spring 2008
An artist and a medical missionary collaborate
In 1834, within a month of his graduation from the Medical Institution of Yale College and his ordination as a...
Winter 2008
Preserving a rich trove of texts and artifacts
The Catoptrum Microcosmicum resembles a child’s flap book, in which you lift a flap showing a beach ball to discover a...
Autumn 2007
From the library’s historical treasures
In 1543, when Andreas Vesalius published his text of the human anatomy, De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem (Seven...
Spring 2007
An arrest in New Haven, contraception and the right to privacy
When police raided a Trumbull Street clinic on November 10, 1961, it came as no surprise. The Planned Parenthood League...
Winter 2007
Yale’s Army Medical Laboratory and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic
The two facilities established at Yale during World War I for training lab technicians for fieldwork and for studying...
Autumn 2006
Rare volumes and a refuge from the blacklist
John P. Flynn, Ph.D., a professor emeritus of psychology (psychiatry) who died in 1980 after 26 years on the Yale...
Spring 2006
Harvey Cushing: the man, the surgeon and the father
J. Michael Bliss, Ph.D., author of a new biography of Harvey W. Cushing, M.D., assumed the lectern at the Hope...
Autumn 2005
From the Middle East, in the Middle Ages
When we check into a hospital, take our children to the pediatrician or undergo a surgical procedure, it’s likely we’re...
Summer 2005
From the field of battle, an early strike at cancer
Early in 1942 two young assistant professors in Yale’s new Department of Pharmacology, Louis S. Goodman, M.D., and...
Spring 2005
From scarcity to plenty since Colonial days
Living as we do in the “low-carb nation”—where, despite the gospel according to Atkins, obesity rates are...
Fall/Winter 2004
A life among the viruses
When virologist Jordi Casals-Ariet, M.D., died last February at age 92, his obituaries highlighted two salient facets...
Summer 2004
Homage to the crown prints
A woman diagnosed with hysteria is the centerpiece of a popular lithograph, a copy of which once adorned Sigmund...
Spring 2004
Marie Curie at Yale
When Marie Curie came to Yale in 1921 to receive an honorary degree, opinions among the faculty were decidedly mixed....
Winter 2004
A nurturing vision
Inside Sterling Hall of Medicine, brain specimens from Harvey Cushing’s collection share shelf space with 19th century...
Autumn 2003
In the footsteps of Watson and Crick
When hundreds of scientists gathered in England in April to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the structure of DNA,...
Spring 2003
“A surgical machine”
World War I brought mechanized warfare to the battlefield, and with it carnage on a scale never seen before. To deal...
Winter 2003
A monstrous notion
With his flattened pate, horrid scars and a set of neck bolts to keep his head on straight, the monster popularly known...
Autumn 2002
A leather-bound diary, a young Harvey Cushing
During his weeklong trip to the World’s 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Harvey W. Cushing, M.D., took in a...
Spring 2002
Anatomy of an insurrection
Early on the morning of January 12, 1824, Jonathan Knight, Yale’s first professor of anatomy and physiology, received a...
Winter 2002
A half-century of growth
In 1951, the School of Medicine operated on a budget of just over $3 million. In 2001, annual revenue had grown...
Autumn 2001
After Flexner, a new start
The release of the Flexner Report in 1910 was bad news for most of the nation’s medical schools. Commissioned by the...
Spring 2001
The first 200 years
Today, medical students attending Yale have access to close to 1,000 full-time faculty members, modern labs and...
Fall 2000 | Winter 2001
Civil War Medicine
When New Haven’s first hospital opened in 1833, it was the product of years of political wrangling and a fund-raising...
Spring 2000
A tragedy's medical aftermath
July 6, 1944, a month after D-Day: More than 6,000 people sat under the Ringling Brothers Circus big top in Hartford,...
Fall 1999 | Winter 2000
Fulton, penicillin and chance
On May 27 of this year, in a nursing home in Connecticut’s Northwest Corner, Anne Sheafe Miller died at the age of 90....
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