Thoughts of a retired physician

  I have been writing postcards and letters to voters in Pennsylvania and Virginia and have a lot more to go so this week’s blog post is short and devoted to photography. Margan and I got into digital photography 20 years ago and have had a blast with it since. I post to Flickr , Redbubble , and 500px . My work is available for sale on Redbubble and 500px. Here are a few photos for you to enjoy. Study in Chlorophyll I hear the train a’coming I See You (as mouse pad) Blue Abstract #1 More of substance next week. In the interim, I hope you enjoy the photos.

  Just finished slides for our Current Events session on Tuesday, topic Antivaccination and Covid. The opposition to vaccination is longstanding, beginning even before vaccines when there was opposition to the practice of inoculation for smallpox. After Jenner described protection from smallpox by introducing cowpox to an 8-year old boy named James Phipps and then exposing him to smallpox two months later (no Institutional Review Boards then), humankind had its first real vaccine. The opposition to vaccination came quickly.  George Gibbs, an opponent of smallpox vaccination in Great Britain in the mid-19th century, wrote a book that sounds like it could have been written by the anti-vaxxers of today. Gibbs opposed mandatory vaccination for smallpox. He felt the law was an intrusion of personal rights; it was written to benefit the medical trade; the law treated people as too stupid to make their own health decisions; it mandated a practice that was not universally accepted by phys

  The state of Texas (or, the Confederate Taliban) has passed a law making abortion after 6 weeks illegal. The provisions of the law are unique. The state will not enforce this law; rather, they have farmed out enforcement to anonymous tipsters who would be rewarded $10,000 or more for a tip leading to a woman who seeks or any entity that provides or abets a legal abortion. The law is a shadow law, not intended to overturn Roe v Wade but rather as a step to make it impossible by other means for a woman to make a choice about an unplanned pregnancy. There is no exemption for pregnancies due to rape and incest. There is no exemption for a woman with a fatally deformed fetus, such as a trisomy. This is the same Texas legislature that just decided that democracy is not for their citizens by passing a voter suppression act. This is the same Texas that just passed a law allowing almost anyone to carry a handgun without training or license. This is the same Texas whose governor flouts public

  Covid-19. Some say the playing field has changed with the advent of the Delta variant. I think the playing field remains the same but in baseball terms, the minor league club we were playing was switched out for the San Francisco Giants or the Chicago White Sox. Delta is a fitter virus, with both greater transmissibility and data that suggests greater lethality. We need to play the game with the tools we have, which are very good. Nonpharmaceutical interventions (especially masks and improved ventilation) along with vaccines work. If they are applied. In the 12 August edition of The Atlantic , Ed Yong wrote that the pandemic will end but just not the way we all hoped for. This means the virus, SARS-CoV-2, will become endemic, as other cousin coronaviruses have become. This will happen when we can disconnect the virus infection with SARS-CoV-2 with the disease Covis-19. That road will heavily depend on a vaccinated population and Yong correctly points out that means a globally vacci

  Love is blind . That idiom came up in a dinner conversation with friends several days ago. We were discussing the ongoing mess in Afghanistan in the context of American exceptionalism. One of our dinner companions posited that the idiom applies to too many Americans when we think about our country. He said that love is when you recognize the faults of another but choose to love them anyway; it is not blind but discerning and all the more meaningful because of that recognition.  Commodore Stephen Decatur gave a toast at a celebratory dinner after his victory over the Barbary pirates in 1816. He said, “ Our country - In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right and always successful, right or wrong .” That was paraphrased into the more jingoistic conclusion “... but our country, right or wrong .” But Carl Schurz, a Union general during the Civil War and later a U.S. Senator made the conclusion “... if right, to be kept right, and if wrong, to be set right .” I

The world looks bleak. Afghanistan. Covid. Climate change. Sedition. I am taking one post off. Back soon.

  In one of Sam Kean’s popular books on science, Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Air Around Us , he makes the fascinating point that your next inhalation may very well include molecules of the air expelled with Julius Caesar’s last breath. The human body contains an estimated 7 octillion atoms -- that is the number 7 followed by 27 zeros. Preservation of mass means that these are atoms that have been in existence for billions of years. Everything we see and touch and ingest and inhale is ancient. We are literally made up of star-stuff . In the mid-20th century, man found out how to make certain elements lose mass -- nuclear fission. The rush to do that involved a terrible war and the prospect that our enemies would beat us to unlocking the secret. Of course, it was a race that the United States (with help from our allies and scientists expelled from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy) won. On 16 July 1945 the first nuclear device, called The Gadget, exploded in New Mexico. Only 1.06