David's last and early days

Care in the last days of life.

Baseline assessment Recognition that the person is dying or is approaching the last days of life Is the Recognising the Dying Person Flow Chart available to support decision-making? Yes  Diagnosis: Ethnicity: Lead practitioner name: Designation: Lead practitioner’s contact no: After-hours contact no: Note: The lead practitioner is the person’s GP, hospital specialist or nurse practitioner. The...

Early days and East Africa

Woofing and weeping with animals in the last days

The medieval eschatological tradition of the ‘15 Signs of the Last Days’ pays special attention to the anguish of animals. This attention seems unnecessary, as animals will not be judged, or resurrected, but only destroyed. Their unnecessary cries might be heard as the cry of life for itself, now useless to God and humans, and also as a reminder to humans of the richness of the worlded selves t...

ALIMD: the early days.

R I reviewed the minutes for the Association of Life Insurance Medical Directors (ALIMD) for 1889. These recorded the original organizational meeting of the group. Life insurance or assurance had started in this country in the early 1840s. Initially, the companies were mutual companies, owned by the policy holders and often dedicated to serving a specific clientele. The major risk in insuring t...

Early days with Carl

Science is all about making discoveries. That's it! It was my good fortune and Carl's good fortune to share an experiment that produced an unexpected result. In the 1960s, Carl became interested in the classification of bacteria with the ultimate goal of defining the relatedness of bacterial groups as well as events in the evolution of these organisms. He proposed to do this by studying the seq...