AN AMERICAN-LED STRUGGLE AGAINST “THE ISLAMIC STATE”

The Struggle Against Sepsis **

The struggle against sepsis is as old as man. Primitive man believed that infections were inflicted upon him by the gods or by evil spirits. The Bible reflects this belief in that the boils of the plagues of Egypt were brought about under the Lord's direction, and Job's boils were due to Satan's ministrations.' The Hippocratic School made the first attempt to deal with the surgical treatment of...

A Struggle Against Forgetting

One of the most remarkable characteristics of living organisms is their ability to alter their behavior by learning. Human beings excel at processing new information, retaining it in their memory, and using it to develop new ideas. Studies in the mollusk Aplysia showed that learning involves the strengthening and increased effectiveness of preexisting synapses. Over time, it has become clear th...

The age-old struggle against the antivaccinationists.

n engl j med 364;2 nejm.org january 13, 2011 97 smallpox was hindered by a burgeoning antivaccination movement. The result was ongoing smallpox outbreaks and needless deaths. In 1910, Sir William Osler publicly expressed his frustration with the irrationality of the antivaccinationists by offering to take 10 vaccinated and 10 unvaccinated people with him into the next severe smallpox epidemic, ...

How to struggle against torture.

The Origins of the Islamic State

As a new actor on the Middle Eastern scene, the Islamic State (IS) has been the focus of all attention ever since its official appearance on June 29, 2014. This owes mainly to the group’s modus operandi (the beheading of Westerners dressed as Guantanamo prisoners), its rhetoric marked by equally extreme violence, its sudden challenging of state partitions established since the 1916 Cambon-Grey ...