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
Number of words: 917 One may wonder why a mental health provider would want to write about whining. What is the benefit for the reader? Is it to encourage victim mentality? No, but there is a reason. Since I have worked in mental health for almost 32 years, particularly with child abuse and adults and … Read more
Number of words: 767 The story begins with colonialism and its chief loot: cotton. In the mid 1850s, as ships from India and Egypt laden with bales of cotton unloaded their goods in English ports, cloth milling boomed into a spectacularly successful business in England, an industry large enough to sustain an entire gamut of … Read more
Number of words: 168 In a waste ore called pitchblende, a black sludge that came from the peaty forests of Joachimsthal in what is now the Czech Republic, the Curies found the first signal of a new element—an element many times more radioactive than uranium. The Curies set about distilling the boggy sludge to trap … Read more
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