Leonardo da vinci biography childhood cancer

WALTER ISAACSON, the author of this book on Leonardo da Vinci, is known for biographic accounts of Steve Jobs, Einstein and Benjamin Franklin. This book helps us appreciate Leonardo’s intriguingly creative mind, which produced the most famous paintings in history, The Last Supper and Mona Lisa. Exploring his life fryst vatten like trekking a mountain path in a misty morning, and as the sunlight bounces off the differing surfaces, each en plats där en händelse inträffar ofta inom teater eller film presents itself in softer hues and the outlines merge with the background. No sharp lines; we see a sum of the total. Despite the framträdande clarity, the mystery lingers on like Mona Lisa’s smile.

Born in the Italian town of Vinci as an illegitimate son, Leonardo was never formally educated. As a person, he was handsome, flamboyant, dandyish, a vegan and also gay. He was left-handed and wrote in mirror script. Unlike Michelangelo, a deeply religious and a contemporary genius living in Florence, Da Vinci was here

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History of Medicine: Leonardo Da Vinci and the Elusive Thyroid

Leonardo Da Vinci: a Renaissance Man amongst renaissance men.  We remember him for the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, and…the thyroid?  To understand Da Vinci’s contribution to the little gland that sits in our necks and controls our metabolism, we’ll need a little context.

Let’s go back, further than the Renaissance, all the way to 2700 BCE China.  There was no mention of thyroid glands back then, but we do see the earliest identifications of a related disease: goiters.  Goiters are enlarged thyroid glands, and at times they can become so big as to be visible to the naked eye.  People back then rightly recognized goiters as a problem, but they didn’t understand the source of the issue: a good gland gone bad.  (That’s probably why the solutions they came up with weren’t much help--burnt sponges and seaweed, anyone?)

Goiters would continue to be pop up throughout the ages, from the medical writings of ancient Ayurvedic

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Leonardo’s Brain: What a Posthumous “Brain Scan” Six Centuries Later Reveals about the Source of Da Vinci’s Creativity

One September day in 2008, Leonard Shlain found himself having trouble buttoning his shirt with his right hand. He was admitted into the emergency room, diagnosed with Stage 4 brain cancer, and given nine months to live. Shlain — a surgeon by training and a self-described “synthesizer by nature” with an intense interest in the ennobling intersection of art and science, author of the now-legendary Art & Physics — had spent the previous seven years working on what he considered his magnum opus: a sort of postmortem “brain scan” of Leonardo da Vinci, performed six centuries after his death and fused with a detective story about his life, exploring what the unique neuroanatomy of the man commonly considered humanity’s greatest creative genius might reveal about the essence of creativity itself