Aetiology and epidemiology Syphilis (also known as ‘The French Pox’) landed on England’s shores in about 1493. The term ‘French Pox’ was derived from the belief that the disease originally travelled from the New World and through France before arriving in England’s green and pleasant land. Controversially, it was believed to be Christopher Columbus’ own ship that brought such misery but this wa...

Nutrition has been central to the progress and well-being of mankind. Nutritional treatments and interventions, nutritional public policy and guidelines, issues related to agriculture and the food supply, nutritional genomics for individualized treatments, and other such topics remain vital areas of scientific inquiry. The foundation of progress in science is rigorous methods. Many of our metho...

The theme of suicide appears several times in ancient Greek literature. However, each such reference acquires special significance depending on the field from which it originates. Most of the information found in mythology, but the suicide in a mythological tale, although in terms of motivation and mental situation of heroes may be in imitation of similar incidents of real life, in fact is link...

AN APHORISM APPARENTLY FIRST STATED by Schopenhauer, and repeated in a variety of forms by others from Gandhi to Haldane, characterizes the reception to radical new ideas as a sequence beginning with their being simply ignored and progressing through ridicule, outright opposition, and finally acceptance that tends to be phrased as denial that one ever thought otherwise. I have described the his...

Jerrold H. Levy, MD The definition of what blood is has changed throughout history. In ancient Greece, Hippocrates characterized it as one of the four humors, along with yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. In the 18th century, William Hewson correctly described blood as “spherical red particles that pile up like coins (which are) diluted with serum.” Today, with our powerful electron microscop...

PAIN IS THE OLDEST MEDICAL problem and the universal physical affliction of mankind, yet it has been little understood in physiology until very recently. The philosophical, political, and religious meanings of pain defined the suffering of individuals for much of human history. Pain is the central metaphor of Judeo-Christian thought: the test of faith in the story of Job, the sacrificial redemp...

Progress in science has been marked through the ages by public airing of controversial issues. Indeed, the rewards for innovative progress have included banishment, imprisonment, casting out devils, and even burning at the stake (1). Those who dared to challenge prevailing concepts that matter was composed of four fundamental substances, earth, air, fire, and water (2), and that humors were ele...

The communication of information between neurons and between neurons and muscles or peripheral organs requires that signals travel over considerable distances. A number of notable scientists have contemplated the nature of this communication through the ages. In the second century ad, the great Greek physician Claudius Galen proposed that “humors” fl owed from the brain to the muscles along hol...

S pecific etiology was one of the most powerful and productive ideas in the entire history of medicine. Replacing a shadowy intellectual landscape of humors and miasmata with the notion that particular diseases had particular causes, it marked the beginning of the end for both diagnostic imprecision and clinical impotence. Within the domain we now recognize as microbiology, the prime mover was,...

Personality is the coherent patterning of affect, behavior, cognition, and desires (goals) over time and space. Just as a full blown emotion represents an integration of feeling, action, appraisal and wants at a particular time and location so does personality represent integration over time and space of these components (Ortony et al., 2005). A helpful analogy is to consider that personality i...