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…
Paul writes in Romans 12 of how we are all part of one body, no one part more important than the other, and in 1 Corinthians 12 of how we are one body made up of different parts all reliant on each other. Eyes and ears, arms and legs. I was challenged recently to write…
The last tree in this series is the Stone Pine – not a common garden tree, in this country. They commonly grow in Mediterranean countries. If you have visited Rome you will have seen them in gardens and along roadsides; tall trees with a pine leaf canopy at the top. The young plants – like…
The Judas tree (Cercis Siliquastrum) is actually a beautiful tree when in bloom. There are two varieties, one with white flowers and the other with dark purple-pink flowers. It has gained its colloquial name from the myth that this is the species of tree that Judas hung himself from after betraying Jesus in the garden…
The second tree in this series is the Giant Redwood or Sequioa – the largest tree in the world! (Not this one!) Apparently, they are an endangered species according to the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of nature) with fewer 80000 remaining in its native California. So with 2 in our back garden, perhaps we…