Thoughts of a retired physician

  Tomorrow is Memorial Day, the time to remember all of the Americans who have fallen fighting the wars America has waged. Sadly, Republicans in the Senate voted against a bipartisan commission 3 days before Memorial Day that would investigate the January 6th storming of the U.S. Capitol building -- because their party bears culpability for the attempted coup. This dishonors all Americans who have fought for over 200 years to defend democracy.  I am done with the Krazy Kult that the Republican Party has become. As a military veteran who served during war, I cannot countenance a political party that is aligned with opponents of democracy, both foreign (Putin) and domestic (white supremacist terrorists). I will do all that is in my power to turn them out of office. You can join in that effort. Remember Memorial Day. Remember the 28th of May. Remember the 6th of January.

  I have not posted for several weeks -- life has been extraordinarily busy here but is now at a more even and manageable keel. The Covid-19 pandemic continues its devastation around the globe, with India and Brazil as current global hotspots. The situation in the United States is clearly improving . Understanding the variations in the pandemic provides clues to what works and doesn’t work to contain and mitigate it.  India’s situation is indicative of what can happen when control measures (masks, social distancing, ventilation, avoidance of crowds) lapse. India’s curve from Johns Hopkins statistics is here: After a surge last fall, cases dropped precipitously until mid-March 2021 -- then literally exploded. What happened? A good analysis was made in Time magazine . After major efforts in 2020, including massive lockdowns, blunted the epidemic in India, a narrative emerged that India’s self-reliance had overcome Covid-19. Political leadership trumpeted this. On 21 February, the ruli

  Happy Mother’s Day to all Moms!!!

I became fascinated by microbiology early in college. I trace my career in infectious diseases to this. I read Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century when I was an ID fellow; its 5th chapter was described as the single best description of the Black Death in Europe, the second of the three great plague pandemics. And so I became hooked on the history of medicine, the history of epidemics, and epidemiology. It took me a while but I finally received a Masters in Public Health as the natural outgrowth of this. A common question posed of epidemiologists and public health people prior to 2020 was, What pandemic disease do you most fear? The overwhelming answer was influenza. Influenza has caused multiple pandemics. The 1918 “Spanish Flu” is perhaps the best remembered, although the name elides past its true genesis somewhere on the Western Front in France or in an Army camp in Kansas . Deaths from influenza surpassed deaths from the Black Death. I spent the final 11

This has been an extra busy week for a retired physician! I am taking a semi-break but wanted to throw out several books that will form a topic of writing for me. They all concern walking, something that most people never even think about as they do it. The first is In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration by Shane O’Mara , an Irish neuroscientist. I listened to this while doing my walks and it was delightful. Made me think and the narrator, Liam Gerrard, had the most satisfying Irish accent. The second book is one I am reading right now: Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding , by Daniel Lieberman , a professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. The third is a book whose review I read today in the New York Times . The title is First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human by Jeremy DeSilva, an anthropologist at Dartmouth. I admit to a conceit that this feels to me a little like taking a course. Anyway, the topic of why and how hum

  On Friday 17 April 1970, I had finished my finals as a senior at the University of Pittsburgh. Commencement was 9 days away. I was at home in Reading for the first Earth Day on 22 April 1970. I attended the celebration in Reading with several of my friends from high school and college. I do not remember much about the program. One thing is certain, it did not include anything that related to climate change. People urged each other to do something positive for the environment. I remember deciding not to use leaded gasoline, figuring out that lead was highly toxic and it was wise not to dispose of it into the air, soil, and water. A small step. The 1960s were an interesting time. My generation, the Baby Boomers, was just coming of age and we were determined to do better in the world than our parents had done. We had read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and were knowledgeable about the horrors of DDT. We had seen the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio catch fire because it was so pollute

  In early March, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a podcast on its website that questioned the idea that racism existed in medicine. The blowback was immediate and warranted . Howard Bauchner, the JAMA editor-in-chief, was placed on administrative leave on 25 March and the medical community boycotted JAMA over this and prior examples of racism in its pages.  The sad truth is that, as in America itself, racism is endemic in medicine and has been for hundreds of years. Perhaps the single best book on this subject is Harriet Washington’s award-winning Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present . I pulled out my medical school yearbook from 1974 and it provided confirmation of exactly what I remembered. My class was overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male. The faculty composition was parallel; wonderful professors but almost all white males as well.  In thinking about this no