Twelve Diseases That Changed Our World

Twelve Diseases That Changed Our World

Twelve Diseases That Changed Our World offers engaging observations on a dozen diseases to serve 2 goals. The opening chapters meet the title’s promise by tracing the impact of hereditary blood disorders porphyria and hemophilia on the succession of European monarchs in the 16th through 18th centuries. Also presented is a riveting account of the consequences of a potato blight in 1840s Ireland,...

A Patient That Changed Our Practice

The quarter that changed the world

BACKGROUND The California Department of Public Health (CDPH), California Tobacco Control Program (CTCP) is one of the longest-running comprehensive tobacco control programmes in the USA, resulting from a 1988 ballot initiative that added a 25-cent tax on each pack of cigarettes and a proportional tax increase on other tobacco products. This programme used a social norm change approach to reduce...

The Virus That Changed My World

When I first read this little poem in The Lancet in January 2003 (Heikkinen and Jarvinen 2003), it elicited little more than a bemused chortle. There are few who would deny the paradox that for all the medical advances providing cures for multitudinous diseases afflicting the human condition, there remains a large hole in the understanding of and treatment for the common cold. We know that it i...

A memorandum that changed the world

In the summer of 1939 Otto Frisch, who was in Copenhagen, received an invitation from Mark Oliphant, a professor of physics at Birmingham, to come to Birmingham for the summer to see if some arrangements might be made for Frisch to emigrate to Birmingham. War came that fall and Frisch could not return safely to Denmark. He was given a lectureship that enabled him to stay. The previous Christmas...