Come for the conference, stay for the vacation: A photo essay

I have been so busy that I was (am) desperate for a break. So when one of the five conferences I am attending in May-June ended at lunchtime on a Saturday, and it wasn't substantially cheaper to fly home the same day, I decided to spend an extra night at the hotel. Originally Dear Husband had to work that weekend but he needed downtime as much as I did, so he took the weekend off to attend our nephew's high school graduation in Ohio. In Florida I had good time connecting with friends old and new; co-presented two workshops; and absorbed what felt like a firehose of information. At last year's conference I had split my time between medical content, publication advice, and career development. This time I live-Facebooked areas in which I am weak, like the musculoskeletal exam, cardiac devices, and hormone therapy. The organization's staff try to keep things light, so that's me with the conference mascot, a stuffed yeti doll wearing snorkel gear. The plenaries were appropriately inspiring. I was a member of the winning trivia team for the second year in a row (and runner-up the year before that), so I've decided to sit out next time and contribute a category of medical history questions. Then I spent ~25 hours recharging my batteries. 

I was tickled to fly out on Maryland One.

Approach to Ft. Lauderdale.

View from my balcony on the 32nd floor. I think that's the highest floor I've ever stayed on.

It was a looong way down.

Society of

General

Internal
Medicine

They ran out of blue Meds Peds ribbons, so I wrote it on the bottom of my badge.

My institution hosts a dinner for current and former members.

I staged photos of the program as part of my posts. The gold rectangle is my business card holder with pearl inlay that was a graduation gift from My Awesome Parents.

George (NYU) and I defended our trivia title!

UPMC Med Peds had a great showing, especially of residents.

I was sad nobody noticed the scarf that I designed using Renaissance anatomical illustrations.

This medical conference prefers pricey hotels, but I was still shocked that the bill for a working lunch at the restaurant was $54 (one salad, one dessert, no alcohol or tip). I heard they were charging north of $20-35 per cocktail. After the conference ended, I walked to the nearby grocery store to stock up for the rest of my stay. Two lunches, one breakfast (sans yogurt pilfered from the conference), one dinner, and snacks cost $48. I figured out how to make hot tea with the espresso machine in the room.

Hotel pool on my way to sunrise yoga. The clouds protected us from the worst of the sun's rays, but we still sweated through our workout while the yogi--a young man from Los Angeles--explained anatomy, philosophized about mind over matter, and reminded us how "dope" our bodies are for the things that they can do or have done.

During my mini-vacation, I played games on my phone and ate dinner in bed while watching a movie. I got to spend time in the ocean waves and in the hotel pool. After showering and checking out I read on the back deck until the sun was high and the temps were uncomfortable, so I moved inside to recharge my devices and write this blog post, a sort of farewell postcard for both you and me.

Boston's arts and sciences in two museums: Part 2

Because I was too busy completing the book manuscript to propose a new paper, and the poster I made with colleagues studying the organization's early career prizes wasn't accepted, I didn't present anything the big history of medicine meeting this year. This meant I could relax and listen to the panels, which I annotated for Facebook. I did moderate a panel on the history of epidemic disease on Sunday morning.

When the conference wrapped up, I met a friend at the Museum of Fine Arts for lunch and a look-see. To our surprise, the ticket line was out the door, down the steps, and to the sidewalk, as it was Mother's Day, Northeastern's graduation, a family entrance weekend, a Vincent Van Gogh exhibit, AND "Art in Bloom," when floral artists pair bouquets with artworks. After waiting to be seated for a modest lunch, we explored the jewelry and musical instrument exhibits, as well as some rooms upstairs with fin-de-siecle European and American art. 

"Jewelry is everywhere as the MFA. This space and the jewel box gallery on your right feature a small yet broad sampling of an extraordinary collection. This isn't the only space in the museum where you will encounter these miniature treasures. Throughout your visit, look for jewelry alongside other works of art in many of the MFA's galleries." The case has an ancient necklace next to one from the 21st century. My favorite pieces were the "classic" Art Nouveau pieces with filigree work and colored gems.

This small room had fewer instruments than the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, but there was still a nice variety. We particularly admired the guitars with intricate inlays and finely cut sound holes.

I could have stared at this painting for a long, long time.

It is "Orchis and Hummingbird" (c. 1870-83) by Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904).

Fancy table with more inlay work.

Hung in a simple wooden frame, "Lady with a Red Shawl" (c. 1840) was attributed to "Artist once known, American, mid-19th century."

I believe this is a Tiffany stained glass window.

Editor's Note : Click here for the medical history museum at MGH.

Boston's arts and sciences in two museums: Part 1

Approaching Logan Airport

Cardinal Cushing Memorial Park

Named for Richard Cushing (1895-1970), Archbishop of Boston (1944-1970) and Cardinal (1958-1970)

Old West Church

The first weekend in May I flew to Boston for the American Association of the History of Medicine conference. I arrived early enough on Thursday morning that I had time to work in a cafe over breakfast before treating myself to the Paul S. Russell, MD Museum of Medical History and Innovation. I spent an hour among the exhibits that, true to their name, displayed both the history that had been made at Massachusetts General Hospital (like the first successful surgery under ether anesthesia) and the history that is still being made there (such as imaging technologies I might want to study in a future project).

The museum is named in honor of a pioneer in the field of transplant surgery and chair of the Mass General History Committee. Below: busts of Drs. James Jackson and John Collin Warren, who co-founded MGH in 1811 with Reverend John Bartlett under the motto "when in distress, every man becomes our neighbor." The first building opened its door ten years later in 1821 and quickly affiliated with Harvard Medical School.

Surgeon's kit (1854)

I don't think I knew that "limb replantation" was a thing until Thursday morning, and then Saturday morning I heard a talk by a plastic and cosmetic surgeon who had made that one of her specialties! This example was a 12-year-old boy whose pitching arm was sheared almost completely off by a bridge on 31 May 1962 while he was hanging onto the outside of a freight train.

Portable apothecary kit c. 1870

Dr. James Jackson once wrote, "A physician need not always declare his prognosis [to the patient], but he should always try to make one for himself--it decides the treatment--the greater the danger, the bolder may be the treatment, if any reliance is to be placed on treatment."

This quotation nicely sums up 19th-century medical practice, in which the (male) physician possesses knowledge that he may or may not choose to share with the patient. The diagnosis presumably results from the combination of the patient's subjective symptoms and the objective signs collected by the physician. Unlike humoral medicine, in which therapeutics were tailored to the individual patient, in scientific medicine, there are specific disease entities that appear similarly in all patients, so no matter the patient, once the physician knows (or guesses) the diagnosis, he [sic] can choose the treatment. "Bold" treatments recall the "heroic" medicine of lancing, bleeding, purging, etc., while the reluctance to rely on treatment hints at the therapeutic nihilism that many physicians adopted once there was more accurate diagnosis but not yet effective therapeutics (especially drugs like the ones in the apothecary kit, as surgery was advancing thanks to anesthesia and anti-sepsis).

Lobotomy tools in front of MRI slices through a brain

I practiced my laparoscopy skills, moving rubber rings from one set of dowels to another with hand-held graspers while looking only at the screen. I dropped the first one into the patient's "abdomen," and I imagined the surgical attending yelling at me while I fished around for it.

They had nursing history (above and below).

Ida Cannon and Richard Cabot founded the first medical social service in 1905.

And both old and new technology. Above: iron lung from polio epidemic, below: a computer on wheels aka COW with the computer program Epic on it.

They had a section on COVID, too, including masks that were sterilized and re-used and individual baggies of ashes for Ash Wednesday that had been donated by Palliative Care practitioners.

Then it was time to take the T to the conference hotel, where I washed up before the Executive Council meeting. Thursday evening after the first plenary and the opening reception, I went out for dinner/dessert with an old friend from graduate school who has since moved and is now shifting from environmental into medical history.

Editor's Note: Click here for Part 2, the MFA art museum.