Saint Roch and Social Distancing During Pandemics: Lessons to be Remembered.

Surprisingly, Catholic hagiography can teach us a lot about medicine. As an example, we present here the history of Saint Roch who is considered, along with Saint Sebastian, one of the two main Saints who act as protectors against plagues and have often been invoked by Catholic people during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Whereas Saint Sebastian is associated with plagues only symbolically, Catholic tradition considers Saint Roch to have had real contact with the bubonic plague.

Beethoven: His Hearing Loss and His Hearing Aids.

: To celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of the great classical composer, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), we point out how his hearing loss affected him and how the primitive hearing aids at that time helped mitigate his hearing loss. From the age of 26, Beethoven began to suffer from a fluctuating, progressive hearing loss ("my hearing grew worse and worse"), This started in his left ear ("in my left ear, with which this illness of my ears had started"), where he had difficulty hearing higher pitched tones ("I don't hear the high notes of the instruments and voices") and words ("Sometimes, I cannot hear people who speak quietly, I can hear the sounds, but not the words") and associated with tinnitus ("my ears, they still keep buzzing and humming day and night") and loudness recruitment ("if someone yells, it is unbearable to me").However, in spite of his hearing loss, Beethoven never lost his love for music and continued composing music, at times using some of the acoustic hearing aids that were just being developed.

Amedeo Modigliani and his "great secret": a brief history of medical and social aspects of tuberculosis in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

The pathography of the famous painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) shows that he had tuberculosis and died of tubercular meningitis aged 35. The nineteenth century was characterized by numerous milestones in the history of tuberculosis. In 1853, Hermann Brehmer, first used the term tuberculosis referred to at the time as "phthisis".