Health Jul 23 How a hotel convention became ground zero for this deadly bacteria From July 21 to July 24, 1976, more than 2,000 members of the Pennsylvania chapters of the American Legion attended their annual state convention at a Philadelphia hotel. By Aug. 15, 182 Legionnaires who attended the convention were ill with…
Health Jun 29 The brilliant brothers behind the Mayo Clinic Although Will Mayo rose to become an assistant in surgery and a demonstrator in anatomy at Michigan, one of his professors told him he would never succeed in medicine.
Nation May 05 How Nellie Bly went undercover to expose abuse of the mentally ill Nellie Bly's investigative work became a classic in the annals of psychiatry and a cogent warning against inhumane treatment of the mentally ill.
Health Apr 12 Franklin D. Roosevelt’s painfully eloquent final words FDR’s health finally gave out after years of carrying the weight of the United States, and ultimately the free world, on his muscular shoulders.
Health Mar 21 Your trip to the dentist wouldn’t include anesthesia without this doctor Our collectively aching teeth thank you, Dr. Carl Koller.
Nation Feb 16 Column: The false, racist theory of eugenics once ruled science. Let’s never let that happen again Sir Francis Galton, who first coined the idea of eugenics, was born on this day in 1822. We come today not to praise Galton but to bury him along with his faulty and dangerous pseudoscience.
Health Jan 11 This surgeon general’s famous report alerted Americans to the deadly dangers of cigarettes On this day in 1964, Dr. Luther Terry released an earth-shaking, 150,000-word report entitled, "Smoking and Health."…
Health Dec 15 Doctors still argue about this prince’s early death For more than a century, Albert’s demise was attributed to typhoid fever. More recently, however, a parade of doctors and armchair pathologists have argued that it was something more than an infection that carted the prince away.
Health Nov 10 For Dostoevsky, epilepsy was a matter of both life and literature There were points in his life when Dostoevsky wrote he was grateful for his seizure disorder because of the “abnormal tension” the episodes created in his brain, which allowed him to experience “unbounded joy and rapture, ecstatic devotion and completest…
Health Oct 16 How a serious illness gave Eugene O’Neill his dark literary power Long before he sat down to compose the dramas that have long enlightened and haunted audiences, Eugene O’Neill contracted tuberculosis, and it forever changed him.