Capsule
“A surgical machine”
With World War I raging, a Yale professor looked to France and Henry Ford to systematize treatment on the battlefield.
World War I brought mechanized warfare to the battlefield, and with it carnage on a scale never seen before. To deal with the mass casualties in the trenches of Europe, a Yale professor turned to those keystones of American industrial might, the assembly line and mobility, to deliver lifesaving medical care to American troops at the front lines in a new way.The mobile medical units born during the Great War were the innovation of Joseph Marshall Flint, M.D., Yale’s first full-time professor of surgery. Flint volunteered as a surgeon on the Western Front in France in 1915, two years before the United States joined the war, both to provide care and to learn. Based on what he witnessed there, Flint proposed a...
From Other Issues
Winter 2018
Real Life Comics, Advocates for Medicine and Public Health
About two years ago the Medical Historical Library began adding a new category to its collection of scholarly tomes and...
Autumn 2017
Old specimens yield new clues to disease
Four years ago, when Maya Lodish, M.D. ’03, and her young daughter visited the Cushing Center for a scavenger hunt at...
Spring 2017
Like dissection, but without the mess
One of the newest acquisitions in the Medical Historical Library is in an elegant wooden case, about 3 feet on each...
Winter 2017
In the midst of an epidemic
“People who didn’t live through this can’t appreciate how hopeless it was,” said Susan Wheeler, curator of prints and...
Autumn 2016
The Yale system—91 years and counting …
On his first day as an intern at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Antony Chu, M.D. ’02, had to borrow...
Spring 2016
Longest-running show on Cedar Street ends after more than 60 years
Student spoof of life at Yale Med will re-emerge as a Fourth-Year Show
Winter 2016
Greek drama’s lessons for veterans
It’s the fifth century BCE, and Athens is in turmoil. Civil war, plague, and revolts against the Persian Empire have...
Autumn 2015
The history of human monstrosity
In 1834, a Mexican woman named Julia Pastrana was born with protruding lips and thick black hair covering her face. Her...
Spring 2015
Man as industrial palace
The nearly life-sized poster titled Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as an Industrial Palace) depicts the human body...
Autumn 2014
The fight to control smoking
A photograph of Harvey W. Cushing, M.D., lies flat in one of the glass cases that ring the rotunda in the...
Spring 2014
Winning fame and fortune at play
Alfred Carlton Gilbert, M.D. 1909, won an Olympic gold medal for pole vaulting in 1908; graduated from the School of...
Winter 2014
Brain imaging in the era of bell bottoms
“We are proposing that the Yale-New Haven Hospital acquire the EMI scanner, [which] represents the most revolutionary...
Spring 2013
The world’s medical heritage goes digital
It’s 1909 and your child has diarrhea. The cure, according to that year’s edition of the Guide to the Clinical...
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...
Winter 2009
A tortured soul finds redemption in words
Some alumni of the School of Medicine make groundbreaking medical discoveries. Some become leaders of medical...
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,...
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....
Yale Medicine is the magazine of the Yale School of Medicine. Read More...
