Bhavya Chowdhury Number of words: 487 In England, meanwhile, tobacco was rapidly escalating into a national addiction. In pubs, smoking parlors, and coffeehouses—in “close, clouded, hot, narcotic rooms”—men in periwigs, stockings, and lace ruffs gathered through the day and night to pull smoke from pipes and cigars or sniff snuff from decorated boxes. The commercial potential of … Read more
Number of words: 994 Bailar and Smith published their article in May 1986—and it shook the world of oncology by its roots. Even the moderately pessimistic Cairns had expected at least a small decrease in cancerrelated mortality over time. Bailar and Smith found that even Cairns had been overgenerous: between 1962 and 1985, cancer-related deaths … Read more
Number of words: 750 To understand the Bailar-Smith analysis, we need to begin by understanding what it was not. Right from the outset, Bailar rejected the metric most familiar to patients: changes in survival rates over time. A five-year survival rate is a measure of the fraction of patients diagnosed with a particular kind of … Read more
Number of words: 147 In the history of medicine, no significant disease had ever been eradicated by a treatment-related program alone. If one plotted the decline in deaths from tuberculosis, for instance, the decline predated the arrival of new antibiotics by several decades. Far more potently than any miracle medicine, relatively uncelebrated shifts in civic … Read more
Number of words: 540 Yet a third voice of dissent arose in oncology in the 1980s, although this voice had skirted the peripheries of cancer for several centuries. As trial after trial of chemotherapy and surgery failed to chisel down the mortality rate for advanced cancers, a generation of surgeons and chemotherapists, unable to cure … Read more
Number of words: 758 To choose a medical specialty is also to choose its cardinal bodily liquid. Hematologists have blood. Hepatologists have bile. Huggins had prostatic fluid: a runny, straw-colored mixture of salt and sugar meant to lubricate and nourish sperm. Its source, the prostate, is a small gland buried deep in the perineum, wrapped … Read more
Number of words: 185 In 1965, at Michigan State University, a biophysicist, Barnett Rosenberg, began to investigate whether electrical currents might stimulate bacterial cell division. Rosenberg devised a bacterial flask through which an electrical current could be run using two platinum electrodes. When Rosenberg turned the electricity on, he found, astonishingly, that the bacterial cells … Read more
Number of words: 786 It took a Philadelphia surgeon named Bernard Fisher to cut through that knot of surgical tradition. Fisher was brackish, ambitious, dogged, and feisty—a man built after Halsted’s image. He had trained at the University of Pittsburgh, a place just as steeped in the glorious Halstedian tradition of radical surgery as the … Read more
Number of words: 141 Nixon, meanwhile, had reached the edge of his patience. Elections were fast approaching in 1972. Earlier that year, commentators such as Bob Wiedrich from the Chicago Tribune had laid down the stakes: “If Richard Milhous Nixon . . . can achieve these two giant goals—an end to the war in Vietnam … Read more
Number of words: 164 In 1828, a Berlin scientist named Friedrich Wöhler had sparked a metaphysical storm in science by boiling ammonium cyanate, a plain, inorganic salt, and creating urea, a chemical typically produced by the kidneys. The Wöhler experiment—seemingly trivial—had enormous implications. Urea was a “natural” chemical, while its precursor was an inorganic salt. … Read more
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