Over the last 10 years, we are proud of the fact we have finally begun to reduce in-hospital mortality following severe sepsis in some countries worldwide [1]. Further, mortality from acute lung injury has fallen dramatically, as the control group mortality in a recent large Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome Research Network (ARDSnet) trial was strikingly only 16% [2]. But the fundamental que...

BACKGROUND In post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) there is a need for self-rating scales that are sensitive to treatment effects and have been tested in a broad range of trauma survivors. Separate measures of frequency and severity may also provide an advantage. METHODS Three hundred and fifty-three men and women completed the Davidson Trauma Scale (DTS), a 17-item scale measuring each DSM-...

Feelings of guilt have tormented Holocaust survivors, ranging from immediately after the liberation to later in life, for shorter or longer periods, and persisting for some throughout their entire post-war lives. Descriptions of the guilt experienced by survivors of the Nazi camps occupy an impressive amount of literature: "Why me?" was the question, when a younger and more able family member p...

Risks of non-cancer outcomes after exposure to atomic bomb (A-bomb) radiation have been evaluated among the Life Span Study (LSS) cohort and its subcohort, the Adult Health Study (AHS). Information regarding non-cancer outcomes in the LSS is obtained from death certificates. In the AHS, members undergo clinical examinations biennially to determine their health status. Many AHS studies have been...

D OF COUNTRIES around the world have suffered civil conflicts in the past few decades, with the highest concentration in Sub-Saharan Africa. The humanitarian consequences have been staggering: at least 3 million civilian deaths in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (the former Zaire) civil war, and millions of other deaths in Sudan, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Angola, Somalia, Uganda, Mozambique,...

BACKGROUND Repeated traumatic experiences, e.g. torture and war, lead to functional and structural cerebral changes, which should be detectable in cortical dynamics. Abnormal slow waves produced within circumscribed brain regions during a resting state have been associated with lesioned neural circuitry in neurological disorders and more recently also in mental illness. METHODS Using magnetoe...

The Paterson Lectureship was created by Associated Medical Services some years ago to support the annual program of the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine, and to recognize the contributions made by G. R. Paterson to the CSHM while he was Executive Director of the Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine. I thank the selection committee ; I am honored to be invited to be the AMS/P...

This Article investigates the effects of the federal government's policies on postwar mortality of Union Army (“UA”) Civil War veterans. Decisions to raise a mass army, commission some soldiers as officers, and reject prisoner exchanges, among other policies, shaped the men's wartime experience and influenced their postwar lives; the decision to provide pensions for the war's survivors is anoth...

Following World War I, louse-borne diseases reached epidemic proportions in Europe. Particularly in Russia, in the years 1920 lo 1922, when famine drove many people from tlie Volga region into Leningrad and other cities, relapsing fever and typhus became extremely prevalent. It was soon observed tliat many patients with relapsing fever developed an unusually severe disease, attended by high fat...

Humans exposed to war and terrorist attacks are at risk for the development of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Numerous reports indicate that the incidence of PTSD in both returning Operation Enduring Freedom/Operation Iraqi Freedom (OEF/OIF) military personnel and survivors of the 9/11 World Trade Center (WTC) attacks is significant. These situations have served to motivate research on h...