The concept of photocarcinogenesis is of fairly recent duration. Although cancer of the breast is described in the ancient Greek medical literature, skin cancer is not mentioned even as late as the 18th Century. This is most likely due to the poor survival of humans, 80% of people did not live past 40 years, and only 6% lived longer than 60 years. The first association of skin cancer (face and ...

M.A. Rodriguez-Bigas et al. (eds.), Hereditary Colorectal Cancer, M.D. Anderson Solid Tumor Oncology Series 5, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-6603-2_2, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 Abstract In 1895, Aldred Warthin, M.D., a pathologist with a keen interest in patients, and a good listener, noted that his seamstress appeared to be depressed. He pursued this in detail, and she told him it w...

Infective endocarditis was a fatal disease three generations ago. Temporal evolution of knowledge made possible important advances in diagnostic techniques, especially in echocardiography, the possibility of cardiac surgery during the active infectious process and new guidelines for antibiotic prophylaxis before interventional procedures. Nowadays, infective endocarditis is curable. In this rev...

The history of malaria has been dominated by the discoveries of Ronald Ross and Giovanni Battista Grassi, and the malaria eradication campaign of the World Health Organization. Much of this has tended towards the hagiographic or celebratory, although reviews of the malaria eradication programme have become increasingly critical. Recent literature on the history of malaria has been set within a ...

In Denmark, as well as in all other countries, there was no such thing as psychiatry before the end of the 17th century. Psychiatric illness had always been familiar on a partly biological and genetic basis, and is as old as the human condition. Still, psychiatry had not been a discipline to which a group of physicians devoted themselves with a common sense of identity. Except for surgery, few ...