Yesterday I shared a room with 3,000 buzzing tsetse flies – the bugs that carry the sleeping sickness parasite. Tsetse flies live in Africa, but these guys are Yalies. They buzz and breed in racks of mesh cages on the 6th floor of Yale’s School of Public Health. (They also recite some Goethe – it’s […]
Health/Medicine
The procedure, developed in the late ’50s, is called fecal transplantation. Those of you who watch Grey’s Anatomy will have heard of it. And, yes, it is what you think it is. A physician takes poop from one person, and then he puts it into another. Don’t worry. The recipient doesn’t have to swallow the […]
You feel lousy. Some old lady sneezed on you in the subway. Now you’re achy and tired and feverish. Face it, Bud. You’ve got the flu. Better just crawl back into bed. What’s that? You have to fly to London? You’ve got an important meeting with a client? Well, I guess I can’t stop you. […]
Allison F. can pinpoint the exact day she fell ill. She was at work talking to her boss. “I suddenly felt like a truck hit me. I was weak, dizzy, achy, nauseous and feverish. It felt similar to the onset to the flu, but exceedingly more intense,” she writes. She went home, thinking she had […]
In perhaps the same way that Americans prattle on about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the French never tire of the death of Napoleon Bonaparte. In fairness, the circumstances surrounding the Little Corporal’s later years, death and burial are…unusual. At age 46, he was exiled to the godforsaken island of St. Helena. He was […]
This is the story of Massachusetts General Hospital case #31-2010: a 29-year-old woman whom I’ll call Melissa. I’m telling Melissa’s story not for its common-sense lesson—avoid interactions with cats*—but because it shows that doctor detective-work happens outside of TV Land. Melissa was a veterinary assistant at an animal hospital. One day, at work, a cat […]
Last fall, ninth-grader Jordan McFarland received a jab of seasonal flu vaccine and the vaccine to prevent pandemic H1N1 virus. The next day, he got a bad headache and the chills. His muscles began to spasm and shake. He couldn’t walk. One of the people working at Jordan’s after-school daycare called 911. He was diagnosed […]
Love hurts, especially when you are 3000 years old and dressed in rags. Thank you musician Josh Ritter and puppeteer Liam Hurley for the best mummy video I have ever seen.
