Department of Medicine Grand Rounds Case Vignette :
Department of Medicine Grand Rounds Case Vignette Kartikya Ahuja, M.D.
March 14th, 2007
Slide3:
CC: A 25 year old male presents with pulmonary tuberculosis
HPI:
Born in Birmingham Alabama, the patient was age 13 when his father committed suicide by shooting himself with a shotgun in the family house attic.
At age 15 his mother died as she drove her car off a country bridge. At that time he was sent to live with extended family.
At age 18 he enrolled at the University of North Carolina where he studied chemistry.
He moved to New York City to study but experienced recurrent bouts of depression.
At age 25 he graduated with honors from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.
After graduation he interned in pathology at Bellevue Hospital.
Slide4:
At age 26 he contracted pulmonary tuberculosis, and was hospitalized for three months on the Bellevue wards, along with three of his other co-interns.
For the following three years he was confined to Trudeau sanatorium in Saranac, New York.
Therapeutic course:
Therapeutic course He returned to Columbia University where he began a writing career, delving into literary and philosophical readings during his slow recovery. He took a particular interest in existentialism, with its concern for the alienation of the modern individual.
Confined by his illness, he “began to read no longer McLeod’s Physiology or Gay’s Bacteriology, but the great Russian novelists, especially Dostoevsky; the modern French novelists, especially Camus.”
He wrote for thirty years, producing several published novels.
In 1990 he died of complications of lung cancer.
Final Diagnosis:
Final Diagnosis depression
pulmonary tuberculosis
lung cancer
“TB liberated me”
-Walker Percy
Slide8:
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