While researching the works of Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield I found a rather moving tribute by him to William Osler, aptly titled “Hero Worship”. By moving tribute, I mean fangirling over an extraordinary physician, writer, etc. which leads me to wonder if Dr. Penfield were alive, would he want my Sir William Osler: A ‘Stach Through History desktop wallpaper? Sadly this delightful article is not under public domain but can be found in the Archives of Internal Medicine for those who have institutional access.

Sir William Osler devoted his mind to medical education, to the study of clinical problems and to the lore of medical history. In all those fields he was a distinguished leader, and yet it is not altogether because of these qualities of the intellect that Osler Societies have sprung up in so many parts of the English-speaking world, chiefly composed of students or of young physicians. The unique quality of this man had to do with the “heart.”

I would have you see him, through the eyes of the previously quoted undergraduate, as “the least sentimental, the most helpful, most lovable,” teacher of medicine. He belongs to medical students of all time, as Lincoln belongs to common men everywhere, a man who grew to be what he was by dint of hard work, and in whose footsteps any under-graduate may dare to “hope and dream” that he may follow.

Penfield, W. (1949). “Hero Worship.” Archives of Internal Medicine 84(1): 104-109.

Today I had the chance to visit Musée des Hospitalières de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal located on Avenue des Pins Ouest between Avenue du Parc and Rue Saint-Urbain. I’d passed by the complex many times in the past couple of years since I lived right around the corner, but I’d never actually visited the museum.

Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal (Source)

“Hôtel-dieu” means “hostel of God” and is an old term in French for hospitals. The term refers to the origin and history of French hospitals as religious institutions and Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal is no different. It is the oldest hospital in Montreal, founded in 1642 by Jeanne Mance. There is actually a street called Rue Jeanne-Mance and I’d always assumed it bore the name of one of Catholic saints, as many streets in Montreal do. So it was news for me to find out (1) Jeanne Mance was a lady (2) and wasn’t a religious figure.

Jeanne Mance, founder of
Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal
*Click image for full view
(source)

Jeanne Mance was a laywoman born to a bourgeois family in France. When she came to New France, with an endowment from a French benefactress Angélique Bullion, she founded Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal. The hospital was staffed by nuns from the order of Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph (RHSJ) which had been founded six years prior.

Today part of the old hospital has been converted to a museum that sits in two parts. The first floor is the entrance, the second contains artifacts and documents describing the founding of the hospital and the nuns’ convent, and the third displays artifacts from the hospital.

I found the second floor particularly interesting because I had a chance to speak with a guide, a kind old lady who described for me in detail the nuns’ lives from the 1600s onward. It was obvious that the nuns in the convent led solitary and cloistered lives and one might wonder, as I did, what the appeal would be. As my guide recounted, young women were compelled to join the order for many different reasons, but there existed some common narratives in their experiences. Up to mid-19th century, families in New France were encouraged to have large families in order to keep the settlements going strong. Many women who joined the religious orders came from large families where they were the first children, and were expected to be responsible for many younger children. Understandably, after the experience, some young women found life as laywoman unappealing.

Large families also meant that many families were very poor and could not afford an education for the children. For young women, joining the order meant receiving support from a spiritual family and an education. In spirit of sisterhood, nuns would teach each other to write, work with numbers, and skills that would be more difficult for laywomen to acquire. One of the documents in the museum described a 13-year old who had joined the order and had later gone on to become a very successful mother superior. While it might seem unreasonable that a 13-year old could understand or be capable of making such a decision, the chances of a young woman being able to accomplish much outside this context were very small. Also at that time, women were considered to be subjugated to their husbands and devoid of their own identity and person-hood after they married. The nuns, however, were able to retain authority within society and commanded respect for their accomplishments. So while the nuns may have been cloistered from society, in some ways they were much more present and able to contribute to society than laywomen.

Not all nuns were in convents, however, and some orders were actually completely immersed in society. There were orders to help the blind, to help orphans, to help those with leprosy and in general help the needy when no one else was. In Montreal, the convent and the hospital were separate. However, as my guide described the nuns at Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal lived a kind of a double life reflective of their motto “silence and charity”. In the convent they dealt with religious duties, while in the hospital they worked as nurses, tending to the needs of the sick and helping their families cope.

Hôtel-Dieu infirmary (Source)

The medical artifacts on the third floor are quite interesting and make up a large part of the 20,000 artifacts that the museum has preserved. These included instruments such as early microscopes (with intact slides!), glass syringes, wooden wheelchairs, and pictures of the hospital. Aside from the historical medical equiptment, I enjoyed looking at pictures of the nurses, noticing their transformation through the years. Up to 1935 the nurses in Hôtel-Dieu wore head-covering similar to coifs. Apparently, the coif with an extended veil in the back sometimes got in the way so they changed their nuns’ coifs to nursing caps. For most of Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal’s history only nuns were allowed to be nurses in the infirmary; however, after 1901 they began to train laynurses. These young women would train and work at the hospital alongside the nuns and stay with the nuns for a small fee.

In 1970s, following Quebec’s Révolution tranquille (Quiet Revolution), all the hospitals in Quebec were transferred to the government to be run by the secular apparatus. Therefore, while the Hôtel-Dieu hospital exists as a teaching hospital for Université de Montréal, the nurses are no longer associated with any religious orders. What remains of Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal’s 300-year history is the museum and the nuns who live in another part of the complex. Today they run an affordable hostel for families of patients in CHUM/MUHC hospitals who need to stay in the city to accompany their sick family member. The nuns no longer live in a convent, separate from society, and they no longer wear habits but normal clothes. They can only be identified by the pins they wear as part of the order Sisters of St. Joseph (RSJ).

I read a pretty great quote a couple of days ago from the short fiction writer Katherine Mansfield “Far better to write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.” I am guessing twitter isn’t even twaddle?

These days my writing has been pretty sporadic. This is despite the fact that I told myself (not resolved, those never happen) that I would write more frequently. There are certain periods when I feel confident and inspired and can’t wait to get everything down on paper. But more frequently, I doubt my ability to express myself, to be creative– and become very reluctant to write anything, anything at all.

I’m not a follower of the Eat, Pray, Love cult (I only read a portion of the book), however, the book’s author Elizabeth Gilbert has given a fantastic TED talk on how we can dissociate creativity from productivity, and make both possible. She discusses the origin of the word ‘genius’ which I really liked. The concept behind genius is very similar to mythology of the muses, but even more personal. According to the OED the word refers to classical Greco-Roman beliefs where genius was an individual tutelary god or spirit present in each person, providing him or her with a divine nature and governing his or her fortunes. Gilbert’s main point in the talk is that while creativity can’t be forced, when we sit down and work on a given project, sometimes a stroke of genius will flash by and since we’re already working we can take advantage of it. And even if it doesn’t come by– we’ve still accomplished something.

This semester is probably my most challenging in terms of materials and courseload, but I am also talking incredibly interesting courses. Most of my classes now are with less than thirty people, a big difference from the three-hundred and six-hundred seat classes I was taking even up to last semester (not a fan). So while I have hundreds of pages to read and write, the chance to discuss readings in seminars and work on projects gives me a lot more to talk about, to write about- and an opportunity to rid this fear of expressing myself/writing inadequately. In short, henceforth I shall twaddle while my genius will do the writing.

* Image Source – A really interesting NYT article on Randall Munroe, the genius behind xkcd.

I have incredibly spotty wireless coverage in my room which means that I have to do amazing feats of gymnastics to be able to see more than two bars on my laptop. However, I wanted to take a few minutes to celebrate Alfred Russel Wallace’s 188th birthday. He, along with Charles Darwin (whose birthday is coming soon– cake pending– it’s going to be better than these– wait, where did they get Darwin action figures?– is that Père Noël dressed in black?), put forward the theory of evolution. As I wrote in an article a while back:

Alfred Russel Wallace is a truly fascinating character in his own right and one of the unsung heroes of science. He produced a massive body of scientific work in evolutionary biology, biogeography and ecology. He wrote extensively in areas outside science as well. Coming from a very modest background, Wallace considered himself a socialist and engaged extensively in social activism. He criticized free-trade and privatization, supported woman’s suffrage, and wrote against eugenics and social Darwinism which were ideas sported by some of his contemporaries. He also adhered to other beliefs, such as spiritualism, that caused some tension between him and scientific contemporaries.

In contrast to Darwin who took a conservative approach to science, having forestalled publication of his theory of natural selection for 20 years—the self-educated Wallace operated on strokes of genius. It has been said that developed the main points of evolutionary theory in a two-hour fit of malaria (how productive are your sick days? I thought so.) He clearly wasn’t afraid to be controversial, and almost to a flaw was willing to hedge all bets on an idea he believed to be right. And he was mostly right. At the same time, Wallace was incredibly humble scientist who sparked a modern revolution in science by providing Darwin with impetus and unconditional support.

Happy birthday!

I added a new sidenotes feature to the site inspired by the blog of the WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg (and countless other blogs). This feature allows me to post mini-entries that are somewhere between a real entry and a twitter post. I tried using several plugins including AsideShop and Miniposts, but none of them really worked with my blog or interfered with other features of the site. Finally I stumbled on Adding Asides in WordPress’ own codex and found it tremendously helpful. After implementing the code, one little feature I wanted to have was the ability to exclude these sidenotes from the main posts’ Archives. I use a plugin called clean Archives reloaded, so I added the following code:

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$rawposts = get_posts( 'numberposts=-1&category=-CATEGORYTOBEEXCLUDED' );

below this line

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$rawposts = $wpdb->get_results( "SELECT ID, post_date, post_date_gmt, comment_status, comment_count FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status = 'publish' AND post_type = 'post' AND post_password = ''" );

Replacing of course ‘CATEGORYTOBEEXCLUDED‘ with the ID number for the specific category that I wanted excluded. Adding the second line in there is kind of redundant, but the plugin uses a direct query instead of get_posts() for memory reasons and I didn’t want to mess with it.

Tonight is MSURJ’s submission deadline. Every year we, the editors of the journal, sit in front of our computer screens– refreshing the journal’s inbox fervently– and watch the submissions roll in. In the past three years I’ve noticed that the submissions tend to come in at around the same times– a day before, four hours before, exactly at the deadline, and occassionaly minutes after the deadline with a dog-ate-my-homework apology attached (it’s okay!). Of course there is always the occassional deflated email a couple of days later asking “when is the next deadline?“.

It’s so exciting to see all these interesting manuscript titles in your inbox, waiting to be read and potentially published. Given our anticipation I can only imagine what the editors in Nature, Science and other journals that receive breakthrough research every day must feel like. While I refresh the inbox, I know that we all fear that this year there won’t be a lot of submissions, or that we won’t have a good quality crop. I think that’s a fear that anyone publishing a magazine or journal faces, and is minimized substantially when you’ve publicized the publication well prior to the deadline. This year is specially exciting for MSURJ since we’ve opened up the journal and will be publishing Guest Articles from outside McGill. So many people put so much effort in the publication of this journal each year– may as well take it international.

Having been on MSURJ’s editorial board for the past four years, I’m savouring my last year. I’ll definitely be writing about our publication process for the 6th volume of the journal. In fact, right now I’m working on a 4-post series on starting and publishing an undergraduate science journal which I’ll be putting up in the next couple of weeks.

Here’s to hoping we have a good, productive semester ahead!

*addendum: yay… 100th post on this blog!

he printing press was developed and first used in 1439 by Johannes Gutenberg. It was quickly adopted across the world and laid the foundation for technological, socio-political and scientific revolutions in the following centuries. It has been estimated that since the time of Gutenberg some 130 million books have been published worldwide ^[1], and in the United States some 270-290 thousand books continue to be published annually ^[2]. However, with the advent of the internet and the introduction of digitization technologies, how books are published, marketed, distributed, and the way people interact with them have begun to transform.

*Image source

The digitization of books has been heralded by proponents as having the potential to democratize knowledge and push the kind of revolutionary impact that Gutenberg’s printing press did. These groups argue that digitization helps preserve knowledge by storing newer books and recovering rare and lost books and making them easily accessible to the public ^[3]. Others, however, take a more skeptical perspective noting that the digitization of books may lead to some undesirable technical externalities including taking publication rights out of the hands of authors and publishers, and threatening user privacy ^[4]. In this paper I examine what the digitization of books entails, the technologies currently being used to digitize books, the issues and complicating factors involved in digitization, and how some of these issues might be resolved.

Contents

1. Digitization of Books
2. From Paper to Screen
3. Complicating Factors
4. Future Directions
5. References

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