Word: painful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Pain. Long a doctors' doctor, Dr. Libman now accepts only rare cases which other doctors refer to him. Some of his old patients, however, still climb the high stoop of his brownstone house in Manhattan's East 64th Street. Up that stoop, as patient or friend, have gone Adolph Lewisohn, Samuel Untermyer, Albert Einstein, Alexis Carrel, Sarah Bernhardt...
...Libman's present preoccupation, and probably his most important contribution to the science and practice of Medicine, concerns Pain. Chiefly by evidence of pain can a doctor tell what ails his patient. Diagnostician Libman has discovered that people are either sensitive (i. e. normal) or hyposensitive (i. e. subnormal) to pain and that the sensitives and the hyposensitives show systematically different symptoms when suffering from the same disease...
Instead of pain normally caused by a disease, a hyposensitive person may feel only pressure, burning sensations, numbness, prickling, tingling. "Such symptoms as pruritus and ticklishness need special study in this connection," says Dr. Libman. "That ticklishness may represent pain is suggested by the observation that pressure over a diseased organ may elicit laughter in a hyposensitive patient instead of pain...
...sorrow, fatigue, diversion of attention, joy, focal infections, and endocrine influences (especially the menopause), trauma, meteorological changes." As an example Dr. Libman cites the case of a Viennese doctor who, when a soprano took a B note a quarter of a tone too high, suffered a severe attack of pain in a tooth that had never before been painful. On the following day that doctor's dentist found the tooth decayed...
...matter with you?" The patient tries to explain. Dr. Libman apparently pays little heed. He pats the patient's head, glides his right palm down the patient's neck, slyly presses his thumb, first against the tip of the mastoid bone ("Do you feel any pain? Does it hurt you when I press?"), then against the styloid process just below the ear, "Do you feel any pain? Does it hurt you when I press?" With a sensitive person, sick or well, pressure on the styloid process will hurt keenly, whereas the hyposensitive will suffer not at all. Having...