Have you ever read a book where someone had pleurisy, or gout, or hysteria, and wondered…how come I never hear about anybody getting that anymore? Well, you’re in luck: It’s Outmoded Diseases Week at LWON, and we’re going to tell you. About some of them, anyway. We’re starting off with neurasthenia, a disease suffered by […]
psychiatry
Last November, I spent the hottest hours of a West African afternoon camped outside Tamba Aruna’s office. He’s a slight, soft-spoken man who listens to the sorrows of others each day. His job – mental health supervisor at the emergency clinic operated by Doctors without Borders (or MSF) in Sierra Leone – makes Aruna a […]
Whenever one paradigm gives way to another in science, the transition is traumatic. Hard-earned knowledge from the earlier perspective cannot be meaningfully compared with new research in the next paradigm, because even the language of the new scientific generation is slightly different. Information is lost or devalued. Such is the price of progress. The coming […]
At 5:04 p.m. on October 17, 1989, two decades after he served as a combat soldier in Vietnam, Lance Johnson felt the tremors of San Francisco’s Loma Prieta Earthquake from his apartment in Marin County. He took his cup of coffee to the couch, switched on the news and saw a live feed of the […]