PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Francesco Maria Galassi MD qualified as a doctor at the University of Bologna in his native Italy in 2014 and is currently on a postdoctoral internship at the University of Uttrecht in the Netherlands. He has also attended courses at Imperial College London, Oxford, Cambridge and New York universities. Alongside his medical qualifications, he has a deep interest in ancient history and particularly the history of medicine. He is proficient in both Latin and Ancient Greek as well as English, French, German, Dutch and Spanish. Hutan Ashrafian, BSc Hons, MBBS, MBA, PhD, MRCS is a surgeon, historian, systems biologist, biostatistician, paleopathologist and philosopher. He is currently lecturer in surgery at Imperial College London and surgeon registrar at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London. His historical and paleopathological work spans the era of Alexander the Great and the classical world, epistemology and the earliest world literature from the Ancient Near East, art and science in the renaissance focusing on the work of Leonardo da Vinci. As an Egyptologist, he has offered the first pathological analysis of the Great Sphinx and his analysis of the death of Tutankhamun was featured in documentaries on the BBC and the Smithsonian Channel. He is the founding president of the Institute of Polymaths.
Dr Galassi is a paleopathologist at Zurich University; Hutan Ashrafian is a surgeon and paleopathologist at Imperial College London. Both men are perfectly well qualified to re-examine Caesar's symptoms and to offer an alternative diagnosis to the well accepted one of epilepsy... I am of course not qualified to comment on their findings or proposed diagnosis, but I found the book to be both readable and informative, and a worthy addition to the various biographies of the great man, most of which concentrate on his military prowess and politics. A most fascinating read. -- Books Monthly Irrespective of whether one agrees with the authors' conclusions, this books is thoroughly researched and referenced, well-presented, and will be of interest to anyone with a keen eye into the past, especially to historians of medicine. -- British Society for the History of Medicine Using their medical knowledge and expertise, they examine the several possible reasons for Caesar's poor health, hoping to explain his many symptoms which included faints, dizziness, psychomotor changes, headache, nightmares, choleric outbursts, etc. -- United Nations of Roma Victrix (UNRV) We will never know for sure whether Caesar actually suffered from TIA, which the authors themselves acknowledge, but thanks to them a thorough biomedical profile has finally been made available for paleopathologists, historians, philologists and neurologists alike, who will then be able to expand their researches on the matter. For the ordinary history lovers, however, this book allows them to feel closer to Caesar, the real man who lived before his myth, and like him perhaps dreaming of eternity.-- Academic Journal of Neurological Sciences
