Occupational health « Medical Lessons

Until Tuesday, A New Book About a Very Strong Person

By Elaine Schattner, MD, on May 6th, 2011

A short note on a book party, fundraiser and warm celebration I attended yesterday evening. My first Facebook friend, Luis Carlos Montalván, an acquaintance from my experience at Columbia’s Journalism School, has published a wonderful book, Until Tuesday (Disney-Hyperion).

I received a copy of the book at the gallery, and couldn’t put it down. Luis, a seasoned veteran and former Captain in the U.S. Army, earned the Combat Action Badge, two Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart medal. He was severely injured during his deployment in Iraq, and came back with deep emotional and physical wounds.

His wonderful book is a tale of healing, aided by a special dog, but really it’s about human healing, and Luis’s determination to get well.

I am inspired by Luis, first that he got his book out (he beat me to it!), and also for being so brave in telling his story. It’s not an easy one, but it’s intense and will

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A Play About the Life and Work of Dr. Rosalind Franklin

By Elaine Schattner, MD, on November 11th, 2010

Franklin’s story starts like this: She was born in 1920 to a Jewish family in London. She excelled in math and science. She studied physical chemistry at Cambridge, where she received her undergraduate degree in 1941. After performing research in photochemistry in the following year on scholarship, she joined the British Coal Utilisation Research Association (BCURA) and carried out basic investigations on the micro-structure of coal and carbon compounds, and so earned a Ph.D. from Cambridge University. She was a polyglot, and next found herself in Paris at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimique de l’Etat, where she picked up some fine skills in x-ray crystallography.

You get the picture: she was smart, well-educated and totally immersed in physical chemistry before, during and after WWII. Single-minded and focused, you might say –

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health care delivery | Medical Ethics | Medical News | Occupational health

Copiapó Dreaming – The Copper Miners' Tale

By Elaine Schattner, MD, on October 17th, 2010

This week it seemed at least half the world was captivated by the uplifting story of the Chilean miners. The 33 men — mainly middle-aged and of modest means — zoomed up in high-tech capsules from the deep, would-be tomb where they’d been waiting for 69 days underground in the southern Atacama, not far from the industrial, northern Chilean city of Copiapó. The amazing and nearly-too-good-to-be true news is that a top-notch team of engineers, doctors including the NASA/Johnson Space Center Deputy

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Until Tuesday, A New Book About a Very Strong Person

A Play About the Life and Work of Dr. Rosalind Franklin

Copiapó Dreaming – The Copper Miners' Tale

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