EVERY NOW AND THEN I FALL APART: TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE MITRAL VALVE

I Wish I Knew Then What I Know Now

W e have all probably felt that way at some point in our lives, whether in our personal matters, in business, or in our medical profession. This statement seems to apply to the story of Sandy Koufax, one of the best all-time pitchers in the history of professional baseball. Sandy Koufax was forced to retire in 1966 during the peak of his career due to severe elbow pain. He has reportedly said t...

The Technique of Total Mitral Valve Replacement.

Total mitral valve replacement was first successfully accomplished by Starr and Edwards (1961) using a ball valve prosthesis. We have adopted their method for patients in whom the pathological changes make it impossible to obtain a mobile anterior mitral leaflet due to calcifications or shortened fused chordae tendineae. This paper describes an instrument that holds the ball valve prosthesis in...

Schizophrenia: Then and Now

EPS—Then and Now

"Slime" played a brief and spectacular role in the 19th century founded by the theory of primordial slime by Ernst Haeckel. However, that substance was never found and eventually abandoned. Further scientific attention slowly began in the 1930s referring to slime as a microbial product and then was inspired by "How bacteria stick" by Costerton et al. in 1978, and the matrix material was conside...

If I only knew then what I know now.

For eleven years I begged my obstinate elderly father to allow a caregiver to help him with my ailing mother, who needed full-time care after a massive heart attack. But he adamantly insisted on taking care of her himself. Every caregiver I hired lasted about three days and then I'd get the familiar call: "Jacqueline, I just can't work with your father. His temper is impossible to handle. He sc...