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Posted by Alex Lickerman  Print  Email to a friend  Photo: Randy Son Of Robert People all over the world know the story of Helen Keller, the deaf-blind girl Annie Sullivan taught to communicate by spelling letters on her hands, whose story was depicted in the play and movie The Miracle Worker. What most people don’t know is the story of how Helen’s parents found Annie Sullivan in the first place: Helen’s mother, Kate (who happened to be a cousin of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general), had been inspired by a story of the successful education of another deaf blind girl, Laura Bridgman, which she read in Charles Dickens’ American Notes. So in 1886 she and Helen’s father, Arthur, traveled from their home in Alabama to Baltimore to find Dr. J. Julian Chisolm, an otolaryngologist, for advice.
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Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: pedrosimones7 In 2001, just as I was about to take over as Medical Director of Primary Care at the University of Chicago, I expressed reservations to a previous Director about my ability to run a clinic that included several clinicians who were not only older than I but who had actually been my teachers ten years earlier. What she said in response did more to shape my tenure as Director over the next seven years than any other advice I ever received: “What people really want,” she told me, “is leadership.” Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: Snake3yes Several weeks ago, my now 15-month-old son developed a fever to 103.5 F. Usually a champion sleeper, that night he woke several times with a frenetic look in his eyes and a jerkiness to his movements that frankly unnerved me. The heat coming off his little febrile body almost made me start sweating myself. He had no other symptoms to suggest the cause of his fevers, and even though our pediatrician had been reassuring when I’d called early in the day (“fevers in kids are a dime a dozen”), my doctor brain was kicking in full-blast with worry over it’s cause. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: quapan I once came up with a metaphor I thought perfectly captured the sheer mass of material my classmates and I were expected to memorize in our first two years of medical school: it was like being asked to enter a grocery store and memorize the names of every product in the store, their number and location, every ingredient in every product in the order in which they appear on the food label, and then to do the same thing in every grocery store in the city. Continue reading…
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