Month: May 2022
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When Papa Doc treated yaws
Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden A patient with yaws prior to and two weeks after a single injection of benzathine penicillin. 1950s. From Kingsley Asiedu, Christopher Fitzpatrick, and Jean Jannin, “Eradication of Yaws: Historical Efforts and Achieving WHO’s 2020 Target.” PLoS Negl Trop Dis 8(9), 2014: e3016, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0003016. Via Wikimedia. CC BY 4.0. “Our Doc…
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“Panama disease”: A pandemic…for bananas
Elizabeth RudaChicago, Illinois, United States The average person does not go to the grocery store, look around the produce section, and think, “Wow, these foods could be extinct within the next few years.” Yet extinction is possible in the case of the most common cultivar of banana sold today, the Cavendish.1 At the same time…
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Sarah Gamp: Precursor of the nursing profession
Before the reforms introduced by Florence Nightingale, the nursing profession was exemplified by women such as the famous Sarah (Sairey) Gamp of Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit. Described as a fat woman with a husky voice and a moist eye, she wore dilapidated articles of dress picked up from several second-hand clothes shops. “The face of…