The Broken Staffs

Medical Staffs of Voluntary Hospitals

The decrease of charitable contributions and the greatly increased cost of the whole conduct of hospitals has compelled managers to require payment, directly or indirectly, from the great majority of patients. It is to the credit of the working-man of today that he has that spirit of independence which makes him unwilling to receive this benefit as a charity. He resents the inquiries of the alm...

Broken heart: Broken mind.

The increased frequency of sudden cardiac death after earthquakes and bombings has long proposed that emotional distress plays a role in acute coronary syndromes and arrhythmias. Since the 1960s, several controlled, prospective, epidemiological studies have reported emotional distress as a major risk factor for the onset and worsening of coronary heart disease (CHD) [1]. The Interheart study, a...

The Broken Spaghetti Noodle

A popular question in recreational mathematics is the following: If we drop a spaghetti noodle and it breaks at two random places, what is the probability that we can form a triangle with the three resulting segments? See for example [2, chap.1, sec.6], [3, p.6], [4, p.31], or [7, p.30-36]. This is an elementary problem in geometric probability. Clearly the length of the noodle (or equivalently...

The broken heart syndrome.

A Broken Metallic Tracheostomy Tube