I recently switched the central lights on in our front room. (We usually use the side lights). To my husband’s horror, and my amusement, the light showed up a network of cobwebs! Jesus came as light to the world. He came to be a light leading the way. He came to banish the darkness of…
Marseille is a port on the south coast of France. It has had a rather dark reputation for gang violence and drug criminality. However, it is a vibrant and fascinating Mediterranean city steeped in history, from Greek times to present day. It was particularly affected in WW2 when the gestapo, with the help of the…
I was recently fortunate enough to go to the Chelsea Flower Show with some friends. We got to the gates for opening time, 8am, but even then there were many crowds all eager to get a look at the show gardens. What surprised me was how small, even the “large”, gardens were. The site was…
As a follow on from the body parts series of TFTD, I am sharing my recent experience at the optician. I have been myopic (short-sighted) since I was about 12 years old and have worn glasses continuously since then. (Apart from a brief foray into contact lenses as a student – that’s another tale!) Because my father had glaucoma, I get called…
Oliver Sacks, an eminent neurologist wrote a book entitled, “The man who mistook his wife for a hat.” This describes the phenomenon of visual agnosia – where despite normal vision the brain cannot recognise the object. Vision is dependent on our eyes, including the lens, the muscles of the iris, as well as the muscles…
Phineas Gage was a railway worker in the 1800s who was made famous by an horrific industrial accident where a metal rod was impaled through the left side of his head. This destroyed almost the entire left frontal lobe of his brain. Amazingly he survived the accident and went on to live a further 12…
Following on from my last few TFTDs, I am concentrating on one body part that we all know well, is essential to life, and has never been successfully transplanted, (unless you believe the novels of Mary Shelley). This is of course the brain, and the next few TFTDs will look at different areas of the…
Anyone who has renal failure will know that our kidneys are essential to life. When I was at school learning basic biology, I learnt that there are 7 features that distinguish living from non-living objects – respiration, nutrition, growth, reproduction, movement, sensitivity and lastly, excretion. The kidney is essentially an organ of excretion. It filters the…
Frederick Banting and Charles Best are credited with discovering insulin following experiments of removing the pancreas from dogs and then reinjecting the extracts. Leonard Thompson was 14 in 1922 when he was given the first ever injection of insulin. He had type 1 diabetes, weighed only 65lbs, slipping in and out of a diabetic coma…
There is a tiny gland sitting deep in the centre of your head just underneath the brain, weighing no more than 1g in weight and no more than 1cm in size, (about the size of a kidney bean), that has functions affecting nearly every part of the body. It’s absence of failure to function correctly…