The past is another country: they do things differently there. Hartley LP. The go-between 1 ne indulgence accorded to those of us in our senior years is the ability to reflect on life' s circumstances many decades ago and compare them with those of today. My recollections of medical practice, as the son of a surgeon, stretch back to my schooldays. A lasting memory is of the many gifts, the so-c...

When one looks at the history of the medical profession in eighteenth-century England, the striking feature is the extent to which historians have concentrated on the minority of famous and distinguished medical men, mostly in London, and how little is known of the much more numerous rank-and-file practitioners of provincial England. This paper is part of a study that attempts to redress the ba...

Carbon case hardening, through natural evolution, commercialism, and economics, has become a process for which the possible number of variables is so large that it is hardly likely that any two companies will process exactly the same. There will always be some difference in choice of materials, equipment, or technique, and there will often be differences in the quality of the product. There may...

Following the leadership of an imaginative dean, the medical school, in Wilson's view, was prepared by 1909 to make changes in training and personnel that would have lifted the education of physicians out of the jumble of self-interest and narrow aims of nineteenthcentury schools and into a new era of university education as broad as it was deep. Two closely timed events, however, prevented thi...

“T anyone should condescend to die of cholera at the bidding of so insignifi cant a creature as the comma bacillus,” wrote Marcel Proust, should not be astonishing to those in the know. Plagued by illness from childhood, the author was very much in tune with medicine, which he pondered often in Remembrance of Things Past (1913), his monumental novel on the nature of memory. He also knew about c...

I n the current issue of CHEST (see pages 1255 and 1257), two thoughtful leaders of the American College of Chest Physicians (ACCP) frame an issue that confronts most physicians today—the relationship between us, the physicians, and the medical products industry. This relationship connects those who sell medical products (pharmaceutical or technology) and those who prescribe the use of those pr...

ociety is increasingly affected by degenerative diseases that need to be treated by modern medicine. In the advanced stages of such diseases, modalities for cure are often not available. Heart disease is the primary cause of death throughout the world, despite dramatic improvements that have been made in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases over the past decades. At present, heart transplan...

Clinical Interventions in Aging: a forum for practitioners of evidencebased “anti-aging medicine” In 1990, data from an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggested that the age-related decline in human growth hormone (hGH) production contributes, at least in part, to senescence (Rudman et al 1990). Youthful changes in body composition associated with hGH administration to...

In themiddle of the last century, the profession of medicine consolidated its identity firmly around an ideal: physicians were expected to be dedicated to thewelfare of their patients above all other considerations, committed to thepublicgood,and impervious to financial temptation or other self-interest. The insular training and longworkhours that set theprofessionapart frommostpeoples' experie...

The technological and industrial acceleration seen in Europe at the end of the 19th century began to change the patterns of daily life permanently. Transport and cars were prominent in this transformation. Car manufacturing started in Germany and France at this time, and the Fiat S.p.A. Company began operations in Italy in 1899. The massive technological change transformed people’s mobility and...