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.
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.
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."…
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…
Born on this day in 1851, Walter Reed proved the theory that mosquitoes transmitted yellow fever to human beings.
Just as his Michigan peers Henry Ford and Thomas Edison ruled over their vast empires of automobiles and electricity, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg was the industrial king of wellness, giving the nation a thorough cleansing from the grime and sickness…
Over the past 96 years, the Veterans Administration -- now with over 1,700 care facilities serving more than 8.76 million veterans annually -- has experienced a roller-coaster ride of accomplishment, public opinion, resource allocation and criticism.
The Constitution describes the legal transfer of presidential power to the vice president if the former resigns or dies while in office. But this guiding document does little to describe what happens if the president becomes seriously ill, or who…
Long before the opiate and opioid epidemics struck American life with such resounding force, there were plenty of other prescription drugs abused to excess with deadly results. Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe consumed, if not abused, a great deal of them.
