the good old days… Archives

NIH, the source of so much knowledge and red-tape, had to start somewhere. The Scientist magazine recently published an article on where the organization was in its early days. Think of it like preliminary data for the NIH’s application to exist.

As epidemics swept across the United States in the 19th century, the US government recognized the pressing need for a national lab dedicated to the study of infectious disease. In 1887, the government set its sights on a small lab located in the Marine Hospital on Staten Island, New York. Its sole member, 27-year-old Joseph James Kinyoun, belonged to a new generation of scientists and hysicians who were beginning to understand how microscopic organisms underlay the terrible killers of their day, such as smallpox, yellow ever, and Asiatic cholera. That one-room lab on Staten Island, which Kinyoun originally called “the Laboratory of Hygiene,” ultimately evolved into the 27 institutes and centers that now make up the National Institutes of Health.

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Weeks after Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen published about the development of his X-ray machine, a physicist and a hospital director in Maastricht, The Netherlands, built their own version of the device. Recently, this 115 year old machine was taken out of deep storage, dusted off, and made to work again.
Wired science reports:

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We report daily on the latest medical devices and studies evaluating their performance on real human subjects. Rarely do we write about prostheses engineered and built three thousand years ago. Today we’re following up on a post we published in 2007 regarding a couple ancient Egyptian prosthetic toes that Jacqueline Finch from University of Manchester’s KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology has been studying. Her goal was to discover whether these toes were simply aesthetic items or maybe they actually were practical for their original wearers.
The money quote from the study article in The Lancet:

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Robert Novich, an internist in Westchester County, NY, worked with his son over a decade ago to build his own electronic medical record (EMR) system using commonly available software like Microsoft Office and Acrobat. He has optimized his practice to the point that today he has no receptionists, does his own billing, and picks up his own calls.
Here’s an article in Medical Economics from back in 2002 about his practice:

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If ever there was a strange case of a patient survival story unmatched by any other, the 1848 incident of Phineas Gage is surely it. While working on the construction of a railroad in Vermont, Gage accidentally detonated an explosive that sent an iron spear flying straight through his head and brain. He survived, apparently remaining conscious throughout the ordeal, but later exhibited strange changes in his personality. This has earned him the status as the one patient mentioned in about two thirds of introduction to psychology books. Recently the first known photo (daguerreotype, rather) of Gage has been identified and the Smithsonian magazine is running a fascinating story of how Flickr and a few observant folks helped discover it.
Read at Smithsonian: Phineas Gage: Neuroscience’s Most Famous Patient…

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