By Professor Allen B Weisse MD

If laughter is nice drugs, then the twenty-two essays provided right here through Dr. Allen B. Weisse should still turn out a hearty antidote to a bunch of ills suffered by way of medical professionals, scholars and would-be scholars of drugs, novice clinical historians, and, after all, sufferers, these people who ask yourself what the scientific career is all approximately and the way it impacts us.Often funny and continually informative, those essays conceal a huge diversity of clinical topics. Weisse tackles scientific ethics, bargains suggestion to clinical and premedical scholars and their households, delves into strange episodes in scientific historical past, confronts concerns of getting older and self-image, and discusses the vagaries of rewards and popularity on hand from clinical study. He additionally examines honesty in scientific pondering, investigates methods of facing bureaucracies, and considers methods of studying to reside with oneself. eventually, he evaluates the altering nature of medication and clinical examine and appears into the jobs of minorities and girls in medicine.Weisse is familiar with whereof he speaks, enlivening every one essay with own anecdotes. whilst he explains prior and present clinical tuition admissions regulations, for instance, he methods the topic with the mixed wisdom of a former premedical scholar, a clinical pupil, a college member, and an admissions chairperson over the last thirty years. As a scientific researcher whose leader grew to become opposed to him, he definitely is aware what he's conversing approximately in "Betrayal." He additionally writes with authority in his funny account of ways he, as a senior general practitioner, struggles to maintain on most sensible of the overpowering onslaught of clinical advances ("Confessions of Creeping Obsolescence"). And in an essay to spice up all of our spirits, he tells how an ivory tower health professional (Weisse himself) will get drawn up within the carrier of the IRS forms and lands up tweaking its nostril a section ("In the carrier of the IRS").Perhaps not anything larger illustrates the power, wit, and ?lan that signify Weisse’s essays than his titles. "On chinese language eating places" bargains with strange syndromes and how during which they've got advanced and affected the best way we glance at ourselves. different titles are "Pneumocystis and Me," "The Vanishing Male," "Say It Isn’t ‘No," "Bats within the Belfry or insects within the Belly?: Helicobacter and the Resurrection of Johannes Fibiger," and "PC: Politically right or probably Corrupting?"Finally, phrases during this book’s subtitle succinctly signify Weisse’s essays: pertinent and impertinent—germane and irreverent info rakishly offered.

Show description

Read or Download The Staff and the Serpent: Pertinent and Impertinent Observations on the World of Medicine PDF

Best special topics books

Bio-Implant Interface: Improving Biomaterials and Tissue Reactions

Reaching sturdy scientific results with implanted biomaterials depends on reaching optimum functionality, either mechanical and organic, which in flip depends on integrating advances learned in organic technology, fabric technology, and tissue engineering. As those advances thrust back the frontiers of biomaterial medication , the keep an eye on and patterning of bio-implant interface reactions could have an enormous effect on destiny layout and clients of implant remedies.

Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550-1680

It is a significant synthesis of the information and perform of early smooth English drugs, as expressed in vernacular texts set of their social and cultural contexts. The publication vividly maps out a few principal components: treatments (and how they have been made credible), notions of disorder, suggestion on preventive medication and on fit residing, and the way and why surgeons labored at the physique.

Leitfaden Ernährungsmedizin

Ernährungsmedizin kompakt und konkret für Mediziner, Diätassistenten und Ökotrophologen: Grundlagen der Ernährungsphysiologie und Lebensmittelkunde Darstellung der Ernährungs- und Diätformen mit Bewertung aus ernährungswissenschaftlicher SichtErnährung in bestimmten Lebenssituationen (z. B. Schwangerschaft, ältere Patienten)ausführlicher Praxisteil zu Diagnostik und Therapie der ernährungsabhängigen und ernährungsbedingten Krankheiten sowie Tipps für PatientenGrundlagen und Durchführung der künstlichen ErnährungAnhang mit Tabellarien

History of Cognitive Neuroscience

Historical past of Cognitive Neuroscience records the most important neuroscientific experiments and theories during the last century and a part within the area of cognitive neuroscience, and evaluates the cogency of the conclusions which have been drawn from them. presents a significant other paintings to the hugely acclaimed Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience - combining clinical aspect with philosophical insightsViews the evolution of mind technology in the course of the lens of its critical figures and experimentsAddresses philosophical feedback of Bennett and Hacker's past bookAccompanied by means of greater than a hundred illustrations

Extra info for The Staff and the Serpent: Pertinent and Impertinent Observations on the World of Medicine

Example text

I have no doubt that, if we search long and hard enough, we will find literally thousands of species of insects in which, if not outrightly killed in the act of creation, the males are, at the very least, severely ostracized thereafter—much like the drones in the beehive after they have served their purpose.  Some of these males will wind up with harems, but my sympathy invariably goes to the losers who must wind up with what can only be described as a terrible headache with nary an aspirin in sight for relief.

CC Thomas, 1958.  Virginia Press, 1982.  Arch Int Med 1980; 140:73­76. Page 37 5 Tuberculosis Why "The White Plague"? (Another Detective Story) The imprints that diseases leave upon the societies they have descended upon are reflected in the various terms that have been applied to them historically. Tuberculosis, for example, has frequently been referred to as "The White Plague" in years past, although both components of that designation may be called into question.  It claimed over 130,000 lives in a five­year period and included almost one­third of the city's foot soldiers and cavalrymen.

In youth there are a few fleeting years when we are very conscious of the fact that males can run faster, jump higher, and lift heavier weights, but, over the span of an entire lifetime, this diminishes in importance.  There were a scattering of fond father­son memories and recollections of evanescent exploits on playing fields, in gymnasia, or somewhere outdoors. On the whole, though, they seemed to speak mainly of loneliness, of lost opportunities, lost ambition, lost loves, and lost illusions.

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.77 of 5 – based on 25 votes