Medicine — the Rough Guide

On location

Travel into the Hundred Acre Wood with guide Sarah Shea and colleagues, who observe the inhabitants from a neurodevelopmental perspective and conclude that Christopher Robin's friends are Seriously Troubled Individuals (page 1557). Explore the natural history of the hospital with Jeffrey Silverman and Magda Kohn as they observe the referral behaviours between the emergency department and internal medicine (page 1566). Up on the wards William Hanley and Anthony Hanley follow the migration of the stethoscope from the traditional to the “cool” circumcervical position (page 1562), and Steven Shumak and Donald Redelmeier advise the traveller on local customs and etiquette (page 1570). Escape with Joel Parlow into the OR suite, where he illustrates the adaptability of the human organism with a tale of a prisoner, a key and a suppository (page 1576).

Canadian explorers

From across Canada various guides offer their services. David Keegan contemplates call and matrimony in Placentia, Nfld. (page 1582). Mary Johnston observes fiery autumnal foliage and equally fiery provincial politics in British Columbia (page 1583), while Robert Patterson attends a traditional First Nations thanksgiving in Squamish (page 1584) and William Arkinstall picks up (cigarette) butts along the highway outside Kelowna (page 1588). Brian Deady learns about a different kind of squamish in Atlantic Canada (page 1585). Brendan Hanley bicycles and skis to his clinic in the Yukon, to the certain envy of most urbanites (page 1584). A historical display features the 1949 contract of employment between the Board of the Myrnam Municipal Hospital District #23 and Dr. Steven Cholod (page 1586). And past and present are set side by side in the University of Western Ontario's class lists from 1954 and 2004, showing the increasingly international face of Canadian medicine (page 1581).

World travellers

Practitioners of international and humanitarian medicine invite us to parts of the world where war, disease and other disasters have challenged but not diminished the human spirit. Colleen O'Connell recalls her time in Mozambique working with people who suffered amputations from land mines, bullets or machetes (page 1590). Douglas Kittle coordinates activities of Médecins sans Frontières in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, attempting to stem a TB epidemic despite the legacies of war, political instability and environmental destruction (page 1594). In Tajikistan Marie Skinnider is establishing a multifaceted program to combat maternal mortality among a people too poor to pay for hospital births (page 1605). In Afghanistan Maureen Mayhew manages a clinic and trains village health care workers about infectious diseases, public health and land mines (page 1601). In Saudi Arabia Vincent Hanlon questions the reduction of the Muslim annual pilgrimage, or Hajj, to a single newspaper photograph (page 1598). Captain Paul Charlebois describes a Christmas spent as medical officer to a peacekeeping unit in Bosnia–Herzegovina (page 1602).

Inner journeys

When Allan Wilson's teenaged son Josh was diagnosed with osteogenic sarcoma the family found themselves immigrants in a place no one wishes to visit, “the continent of cancer” (page 1620). Lara Hazelton and David Sheehy discover two other bleak and lonely places, one the “old bridge” in Halifax, where people go to end their lives, and the other a busy emergency department (pages 1608 and 1612). Gretchen Roedde explores the terrain of faith and mission in portraits of two priests working in South Africa (page 1616), while Ronald Bayne depicts his sister's devotion to swallows (page 1623). Medical student Mony Singh describes the first year of her career journey (page 1625), and Caralee Caplan takes us on a whirlwind trip through a day in her life as an internal medicine resident (page 1606). Shelagh McRae imagines a near future which might, or might not, be a better place than the present (page 1613).