Visiting an Exhibit on Early AIDS at the New York Historical Society

Most doctors didn’t know what was going on. The young men weren’t sure either. There were rumors but also credible denials about a disease affecting the community…

Posted in Exhibits, Infectious Disease, Life in NYC, Medical Education, Medical History, ReviewsTagged , , , , , , , Leave a Comment on Visiting an Exhibit on Early AIDS at the New York Historical Society

Notes on the Social History of American Medicine, Self Reliance and Health Care, Today

…a bit on the history of health care in the United States. The Social Transformation of American Medicine, by Paul Starr, was first published in 1982. The author, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton, gives a fascinating, still-relevant account…

Posted in Books, Economics, Medical Education, Medical History, ReviewsTagged , , , , , , 1 Comment on Notes on the Social History of American Medicine, Self Reliance and Health Care, Today

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Narrative of Cancer History and Ideas

This week I finished reading the Emperor of All Maladies, the 2010 “biography” of cancer by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee. The author, a medical oncologist and researcher now at Columbia University, provides a detailed account of malignancies – and how physicians and scientists have understood and approached a myriad of tumors – through history. The encyclopedic, […]

Posted in Books, Medical History, Oncology (cancer), ScienceTagged , , , , , Leave a Comment on The Emperor of All Maladies: A Narrative of Cancer History and Ideas

Magic Johnson is Alive 20 Years after Announcing He Had HIV

Yesterday’s Washington Post Sports has a clip from CNN, 20 years ago, when basketball star Magic Johnson announced on TV that he had HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The date was Nov 7, 1991. “Where were you when Magic made his announcement? What were your thoughts on Johnson and HIV/AIDS that day and how […]

Posted in Communication, Infectious Disease, Medical History, Medical NewsTagged , , , , , , , Leave a Comment on Magic Johnson is Alive 20 Years after Announcing He Had HIV

First Look at the Burns Collection of Early Medical Photographs

CBS News has posted a gripping set of images, mostly of cancer patients, dating to the 1880s. The photos from the Burns Archive are graphic, as much as they’re telling, instructive and rare.   This photograph, taken in New York City in 1886, is one of the earliest ever taken of breast surgery. Surgeons had […]

Posted in Communication, Medical History, Oncology (cancer), PhotographyTagged , , , , , 2 Comments on First Look at the Burns Collection of Early Medical Photographs

Who Was Nurse Mary Jane Seacole?

(and, on bias in education) On the bus last week I was reading the latest New Yorker and came upon a short, front-end piece by Ian Frazier on Mary Jane Seacole, a Jamaican nurse who tended wounded soldiers in the Crimean War. As best as I can recall, I’d never heard before of Florence Nightingale’s […]

Posted in Medical Education, Medical HistoryTagged , , , , , , , 4 Comments on Who Was Nurse Mary Jane Seacole?

A Glimpse into the Cochrane Library

I’m taking notes on the Cochrane Library. The site – a collection of databases and reviews – drew my attention yesterday when an embargo was breached for an article to be published there having to do with zinc’s putative power to squelch the common cold. From the website, published John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.: the […]

Posted in Epidemiology, Medical History, Wednesday Web SightingTagged , , , , , , Leave a Comment on A Glimpse into the Cochrane Library

The King’s Speech is Not Just About Stuttering

Over the weekend I went to see the King’s Speech. So far the film, featuring Colin Firth as a soon-to-be-King-of-England with a speech impediment, and Geoffrey Rush as his ill-credentialed but trusted speech therapist, has earned top critics’ awards and 12 Oscar nominations. This is a movie that’s hard not to like for one reason […]

Posted in Communication, Medical History, Movies, Patient-Doctor Relationship, ReviewsTagged , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments on The King’s Speech is Not Just About Stuttering

Twitter, The Notificator, and Old Social Media News

A series of clicks this morning brought me to an interesting web finding in a Wiki-like Dead Media Archive that links to NYU’s Steinhart School of Media, Culture, and Communication. And there rests the Notificator, said (by me) to be Twitter’s great-great-great grandfather, with details: On September 9, 1932, the London Times printed an article […]

Posted in Communication, Health IT, Life in NYC, Medical History, Social Media, Wednesday Web SightingTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a Comment on Twitter, The Notificator, and Old Social Media News

A Play About the Life and Work of Dr. Rosalind Franklin

Franklin’s story starts like this: She was born in 1920 to a Jewish family in London. She excelled in math and science. She studied physical chemistry at Cambridge, where she received her undergraduate degree in 1941. After performing research in photochemistry in the following year on scholarship, she joined the British Coal Utilisation Research Association (BCURA) and carried out basic investigations on the micro-structure of coal and carbon compounds, and so earned a Ph.D. from Cambridge University. She was a polyglot, and next found herself in Paris at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimique de l’Etat, where she picked up some fine skills in x-ray crystallography.

You get the picture: she was smart, well-educated and totally immersed in physical chemistry before, during and after WWII. Single-minded and focused, you might say –

Posted in Essential Lessons, Medical History, Occupational health, Reviews, Science, Theater, Women's HealthTagged , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment on A Play About the Life and Work of Dr. Rosalind Franklin
newsletter software