History does not Repeat Itself, but it Rhymes

Does history repeat itself in medicine?

Does history repeat itself? Wavelets and the phylodynamics of influenza A.

Unprecedented global surveillance of viruses will result in massive sequence data sets that require new statistical methods. These data sets press the limits of Bayesian phylogenetics as the high-dimensional parameters that comprise a phylogenetic tree increase the already sizable computational burden of these techniques. This burden often results in partitioning the data set, for example, by g...

History repeats itself.

To the Editor: In a recent issue of Circulation, Zaman et al1 report a model for the preoperative risk stratification of patients at risk for developing atrial fibrillation (AF) after isolated coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG). They studied 326 patients prospectively and demonstrated that prolonged signal-averaged P-wave duration (SAPD), advanced age, and male sex identified patients at a ...

Commentary: Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

In this commentary, the author asks, can educators learn from being reminded of moments of poor judgment or inappropriate behavior in the history of medical education, or should these incidents not be revived and revisited? The question is posed in relation to the accompanying article in this issue by Halperin, which examines the publication of a medical textbook that featured pin-up style phot...

Garments fire: history repeats itself.

One hundred years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City that caused the death of 146 garment workers, a garment fire on November 24, 2012 in Bangladesh resulted in 111 deaths under remarkably similar circumstances. The majority of these workers were also young women, economically disadvantaged, migrants, and, by any definition, vulnerable. Fires have been a persistent prob...