Search Results for: the doctor is in

Brain eating, prion science, and latest chapter in the story of kuru

Guest post by Warwick Anderson We invited Warwick Anderson, author of  The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen, to comment on a study published last week in the journal Nature, covered in the Washington Post and elsewhere, about genetic resistance to the molecule that causes kuru and several other fatal brain diseases. The story…

Brain eating, prion science, and latest chapter in the story of kuru

Guest post by Warwick Anderson We invited Warwick Anderson, author of  The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen, to comment on a study published last week in the journal Nature, covered in the Washington Post and elsewhere, about genetic resistance to the molecule that causes kuru and several other fatal brain diseases. The story…

Gaining New ‘Perspectives’

Guest post by Martha Montello In 1957, D. J. Ingle, the first editor of Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, explained why he thought a new journal was needed for scientists and physicians already inundated by publications. With professional journals increasingly focused on smaller and smaller systems and preoccupied with publishing data, he decided that readers…

A World without Women’s Colleges and Universities

Guest post by Kristen A. Renn The recent and—to many—unexpected announcement of the fast-track closing of Sweet Briar College has sent shockwaves through the private liberal arts college sector. Nearly all of the remaining women’s colleges in the U.S. are also in this sector and thus face a dual threat to continued existence: the decreasing…

Diagnosis and shades of grey

Guest post by Annemarie Jutel Diagnoses are by their very nature well-defined categories. That’s what a diagnosis is: a label for grouping things that are more like X than like Y. It’s influenza, not pneumonia, or it’s rheumatoid arthritis, not multiple sclerosis, and so on. If we didn’t group symptoms and give them diagnostic labels, we…

Diagnosis and shades of grey

Guest post by Annemarie Jutel Diagnoses are by their very nature well-defined categories. That’s what a diagnosis is: a label for grouping things that are more like X than like Y. It’s influenza, not pneumonia, or it’s rheumatoid arthritis, not multiple sclerosis, and so on. If we didn’t group symptoms and give them diagnostic labels, we…

First, do no harm

Guest post by John M. Henshaw John Haygarth is scarcely remembered today. But the British physician (1740–1827) was highly regarded in his day, when he made important contributions to the prevention of smallpox and to the treatment of patients with fevers. He was also one of the very first physicians to publish a study of what…