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: 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: 348 The new coronavirus is losing its potency and has become much less lethal, a senior Italian doctor said on Sunday. “In reality, the virus clinically no longer exists in Italy,” said Alberto Zangrillo, the head of the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan in the northern region of Lombardy, which has borne … Read more

Number of words: 244 Most people think that the more you spend on healthcare, the better your healthcare is, but it’s not true. Now, it’s not that every heart surgeon is going, “Oh yes, a couple more of these heart operations and I’ll be able to pay for a yacht.” Rather, if you’ve spent 40 … Read more

Number of words: 1,660 When 61 people met for a choir practice in a church in Mount Vernon, Washington, on 10 March, everything seemed normal. For 2.5 hours the chorists sang, snacked on cookies and oranges, and sang some more. But one of them had been suffering for 3 days from what felt like a … Read more

Number of words: 2,531 I grew up with my identical twin, who was an incredibly loving brother. Now, one thing about being a twin is, it makes you an expert at spotting favoritism. If his cookie was even slightly bigger than my cookie, I had questions. And clearly, I wasn’t starving.  When I became a psychologist, I began to notice favoritism of … Read more

Number of words: 467 Theubiquity and power of swearing suggest that taboo words may tap into deep and ancient parts of the emotional brain. Words have not just a denotation but a connotation: an emotional coloring distinct from what the word literally refers to, as in principled versus stubborn and slender versus scrawny. The difference … Read more

Number of words: 1,997 I have a confession to make. But first, I want you to make a little confession to me. In the past year, I want you to just raise your hand if you’ve experienced relatively little stress. Anyone?  How about a moderate amount of stress?  Who has experienced a lot of stress? Yeah. Me too.  But that … Read more