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…
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.
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.
On this day in 1964, Dr. Luther Terry released an earth-shaking, 150,000-word report entitled, "Smoking and Health."…
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.
