Month: May 2024
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Pigs as food and victims
The domestic pig descends from the wild boar. Domesticated around 7000 BC in the Near East and East Asia, it currently accounts for over 36% of the world’s meat intake. Each year in the United States alone, the average person consumes about fifty pounds of pork as bacon, ham, sausages, pork chops, ribs, and other…
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Caviar: The black gold of the Black Sea
Caviar, goose liver, and truffle are the three top delicacies consumed in the world. Caviar is probably the most delicious. It is made from the unfertilized eggs of the sturgeon, of which there are twenty-eight fish species belonging to the family Acipenseridae, and is often valued at $1,000 or more per ounce. The sturgeons’ reproduction…
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Sunao Tawara
Sunao Tawara was a prominent Japanese pathologist and anatomist best known for discovering in 1906 the atrioventricular node, also known as the AV node or bundle of Tawara. This small mass of specialized cardiac muscle fibers located between the atria and ventricles of the heart is a key component of the heart’s conduction system, responsible…
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Lonely physician
Dean GianakosLynchburg, Virginia, United States Jack wakes up early Sunday morning to walk along the Carolina shore. The sand feels cool under his bare feet. He passes a fisherman preparing flies for his pole. He stops to watch the brilliant orange sun rise over the horizon. The blue green ocean is still. Gently kicking the…
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Forty years a watchdog: Sidney Wolfe, M.D.
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Somebody has to look out for the people who are being manipulated by hospitals, doctors, insurance and drug companies.”– Sidney Wolfe, MD, 1993 Sidney Wolfe, MD, (1937–2024) was the co-founder in 1971 of the Health Research Group (HRG), a consumer and health advocacy lobbying organization. After earning his medical degree from what…
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On rival priority in publishing
JMS PearceHull, England Rival claims for priority in describing diseases or related investigations are only too common. Such vexing disputes are neither recent nor confined to medicine and science. An early example of publication rivalry is in Vergil’s Proverbiorum Libellus (Venice, 1498), often known as the Adagia, the first collection of Latin proverbs, which preceded…
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Mumps: Dolor et tumor
Mumps usually occurs in outbreaks, most often between the ages of 5–9, usually in the winter and spring in temperate climates but at any time in the tropics. After infecting the upper respiratory tract, this contagious virus spreads to the salivary glands, the lymph nodes, the blood, and throughout the body. Symptoms at first are…
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Andronicus III, malaria, and Byzantium
The decline and fall of the over one-thousand-year-old Byzantine empire constitutes an epic tragedy. Year after year, decade after decade, this once great empire became weaker and less likely to survive. In 1204, the Crusaders and Venetians conquered and plundered its capital, Constantinople, and divided the empire into four kingdoms. A newly established Latin empire…
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Pertussis—A new or ancient disease?
Pertussis is a respiratory disease characterized by the whoop, the sound made by patients during coughing fits, and popularly known as whooping cough. It may be a more ancient disease than is usually assumed. Mentioned in an ancient Chinese medical classic from before the first century, it was described during the Sui Dynasty by the…
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History of ectopic kidney
Mostafa ElbabaDoha, Qatar “There are many errors in the development of the kidneys which are of great surgical and pathologic interest. Most of these errors are easily explainable by the remarkable evolutions which attend the development of the urinary apparatus. If anyone doubts the utility of a careful study of this subject, let him contemplate…