the good old days… Archives

There’s nothing like turn of the (last) century humor publications. They’re dense with amazingly drawn cartoons as well as poetry…such a lost art. In the FDA’s Update magazine, Dr Suzanne White Junod covers the “Microbe Mania”, which consumed the US in the wake of discoveries by such luminaries as Pasteur that microbes: 1) exist all over, and 2) cause diseases.
Where today can you find such great content as

Disregard my advice if you dare
And your daring you’re certain to rue;
You must sterilize all that you wear
Or look at, or taste of, or chew.
The Bacillus don’t stop to ask “Why?”
And the deadly Spirillum is coiled.
Micrococci are hanging around too.
So water must always be boiled!

All of the excerpts come from early-1900s issues of Puck. Seeing all of these old cartoons brings back memories of AP History, where a political cartoon could (rightly) be used as the centerpiece of a frantically scrawled essay.
The article is relatively lean in its own content, but serves up a bounty of references for anyone interested in the interaction of science, public health, business and politics of a bygone era (a saying about history repeating itself comes to mind).
More from the FDA: html version (no graphics) / pdf version (with graphics)
NOTE: We will not be posting for the rest of the week. Please come back on Monday for a special announcement.

Last week, the New England Journal of Medicine published the results of a large trial on the reliability of screening for Down Syndrome. Now women at just 11 weeks gestation can learn if the fetus they’re carrying has the disorder.
More information can be a good thing — giving some mothers time to prepare for a disabled child, helping others decide to abort while it’s safer and less traumatic. But the decision is never easy, as this poignant Washington Post reporter describes.

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Orac from Respectful Insolence visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to see The Art of Medicine in Ancient Egypt exhibit. His account, originally published in this Respectful Insolence post, is reproduced below with his kind permission. As you might recall, the Edwin Smith Papyrus has been covered by us on a number of previous occasions. Now we wanted to bring to your attention, dear reader, an account by someone in the medical field who has made it to the exhibit. Thanks, Orac!

… The Egyptian exhibit was far more modest in scale, being contained in one relatively small gallery. However, to me, it was probably more interesting because of the centerpiece of the exhibit, the Edwin Smith Papyrus. This papyrus was named after the American Egyptologist who purchased it in Luxor in 1862 and brought it back to the U.S. The papyrus dates to approximately 1600 B.C. and appears to be a copy of a document that dates back 200-300 years earlier still. What fascinated me is that this papyrus was a practical guide to the treatment of various ailments and embodied the medical thinking of Egyptian physicians of the time. Even more fascinating is that the knowledge contained in the scroll was presented as several cases. Most of the cases were, as might be expected, how to deal with traumatic wounds. There are also included eight magic spells purported to protect against airborne disease, but there is also one for preventing harm from an accidentally swallowed fly. Showing that some things never change, there were also two prescription for cosmetic purposes, one of which was for an ointment to combat a head cold, as well as for “rejuvenation of the skin and repelling of wrinkles, any age spots, any sign of old age, and any fever that may be in the body.”

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Acetaminophen. Paracetemol. APAP. Tylenol. Any way you say it, this drug has become synonymous with pain and fever relief. And this week, Tylenol turns 50. What began as a children’s elixir has now hit middle age.
The story of its discovery is steeped in the organic chemistry of urine metabolites of the analgesics in use during the 1890′s. It was not until decades later that scientists realized acetaminophen was far less toxic than other alternatives:

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Note: The Good Old Days is our regular Friday column. It is presented today as a special for Halloween.
On this Halloween, we present a story that starts as a tale of the macabre, and evolves into star-studded massacre.

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One of the many eye-opening experiences for us in medical school was seeing beer on our teaching hospital’s formulary. It’s a holdover from the days before current withdrawal regimens. Indeed, the interaction between the medical establishment and the beer world goes way back.
Today we’ll dwell primarily on one aspect of this interaction — a Prohibition-era skirmish over a physician’s right to serve beer. That’s right: long before the debate on medical marijuana, there was … medical beer.

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For this week’s ‘the good old days‘, we go to The St. Petersburg Times and the AP story about Percy Skuy, the former president of Ortho-Macneill, who has donated his 700+ item collection of historical contraceptives to the Dittrick Medical History Center in Cleveland, Ohio. The center is affiliated with Case Western Reserve University. From the article:

Sponges and contraceptive foams were used in ancient Egypt, but as a contraceptive foam women were encouraged to use honey and crocodile dung as a spermicide. Aristotle suggesting layering the vagina with oil of cedar. Some sponges were soaked in lemon juice, something that actually worked because lemon is a mild spermicide.

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It’s Columbus Day weekend in the United States, and naturally our thoughts turn to venereal diseases. Specifically, did Columbus bring syphilis from the New World, back to the Old?
It turns out, the spread of syphilis (T. pallidum) is a contentious issue. Here’s a snippet from Science on the matter:

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We were very excited when rumors surfaced about a series of lectures from Tom Cruise, free on the web, about scientology and psychiatry. At last, we thought, a chance to glimpse the non-evidence-based innards of Hollywood’s favorite pasttime, without paying exorbitant fees (and yes, I’m talking about Scientology, not psychiatry):

Continuing his vigorous advocacy for Scientology’s solutions to mental health problems, Tom Cruise will deliver a series of four lectures on topics related to “The Modern Science of Mental Health” beginning next month….

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