Thoughts of a retired physician

  I have a confession to make. I am addicted to book reviews. This stems from my addiction to reading books, of course. As I grow older, the realization that I won’t be able to read all the books on my list before my time to join the Celestial Design Committee grows ever more acute. The book reviews in the New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, Atlantic, and others allow me to at least peek at a wide variety of books.  A book review is like a Polaroid snapshot through another person's eyes. I have written some reviews (not NYT material) and found the process interesting. The reviewer’s biases will always be there. Reading one review tells you something about the book as well as the reviewer. I often disagree with the reviewer but that is human. Reading is a personal experience and the purpose of books is to expand understanding and knowledge about our world. No one sees the world through the same set of lenses. I am behind in my book review reading, but I came across and rea

      Benjamin Franklin has long been my favorite Founding Father. This dates back to my childhood when my parents would take me via the Reading Railroad on Sunday trips to Philadelphia. It was quite a walk from the Reading Terminal at 12th and Arch in center city Philly to the Franklin Institute but that was my favorite destination. The Franklin Institute is a wonderful science museum with artifacts from Franklin’s long life. We also would walk to Christ Church Burial Ground at 5th and Arch where I always insisted on putting a penny on Franklin’s grave ( that tradition pitted the gravestone and has now been replaced with a bin to put pennies into , in accord with Franklin’s aphorism “a penny saved is a penny earned”).   Franklin’s forebears were devout Puritans of the Calvinist stripe but as a teenager, he declared himself a deist but an interesting deist. Thomas Kidd wrote that Franklin adhered to what might be called a doctrineless, moralized Christianity , where what one believes

  I have been busy this week with family stuff and things at our retirement community. I wanted to remark though on a Washington Post article about first-generation academics – people from a background that included parents who did not have an academic background. In economics, the trend has been toward Ph.D. economists increasingly coming from an elite background, i.e. one where the parents were doctoral-level academics. Elite here means privileged. I was not an academic, but I came from a household with the highest degree held by my parents was a high school diploma (mother) and a father who left school in the eighth grade to help support his family in the 1920s. I grew up in a small Pennsylvania city in the mid-20th century, educated in public schools and universities. I had scholarships in addition to low tuition in college and medical school. I certainly cannot claim I came from any sort of elite background but instead lived the American dream. A 3rd-generation American who made

  This morning in the Washington Post , Max Boot has an excellent column that I urge you to read. With the news of the past several weeks, the United States has continued to roll towards an abyss that will mean the end of our democracy unless we hit the brakes hard. The Supreme Court has abased itself, through a six-person conservative majority, into nothing more than a junta. The conservative justices obviously believe they are not a co-equal branch of government ⇒ they believe they are the Supreme branch of government. Overturning Roe v Wade will not be their final slash at American democracy. With the other rulings about guns, Miranda rights, and the environment, they made clear that SCOTUS as it is composed is nothing more than an arm of the GOP, both its MAGA crazies and the wealthy plutocrats who bought and paid for this moment like Charles Koch.  The fake concept of originalism, expounded by the Borks and Scalias and others of the Federalist Society, is plainly not what the F

  Politico Magazine published this article yesterday on 18 ways the Supreme Court just changed  America. They range from the alpha to the omega, nothing much changed to civil war. Let me warn readers upfront of my sentiments on the recent SCOTUS decisions, Roe and others. I think the right-wing MAGA faction of the Republican Party is in full ascendancy. I disagree vehemently with them and find it appalling that after 233 years under the Constitution, the Supreme Court has simply become an operative arm of the party that committed sedition and is still trying to overthrow our government. I view the six conservative justices as a wrecking ball to the law. I will dedicate my efforts to seeing that they won’t succeed. Okay, on to what we now face as a nation. The 18 mini-essays in the Politico Magazine piece include some delusions. Kristan Hawkins, who has long been an anti-abortion advocate, wants us all to sing kumbaya and now just come together. This is the sort of slap to the face o

  In case you did not have a chance to read retired Judge J. Michael Luttig’s written statement, submitted to the January 6 Committee , it is online here and in pdf format here . I also will list Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter from today because it is an important addition to Luttig’s statement and is illustrative of the work America has in front of it if we are to save our democracy. My poor words can add nothing to these two documents. The next hearing is on 23 June at 1300 EDT. You should watch it. 

  The Roman encyclopedist Aulus Cornelius Celsus in the first century CE noted the cardinal signs of inflammation in his book De Medicina : c alor , rubor , dolor , and tumor . In English, they are heat, redness, pain, and swelling. As a first-year medical student at Temple in Philadelphia many years ago (where does the time go?), this Tetrad of Celsus was introduced. At the time, our understanding of inflammation in medical conditions was limited and students in 2020 can now discuss inflammation as an entity directed by cells and their secretions that produce these classic findings of inflammation. This is a big toe with acute gout; the redness and swelling are obvious, it is warm to the touch, and the person will tell you it hurts.  Analogously, we are in the midst of the Tetrad of Celsus as a polity. Separating the cardinal signs we have a lot of redness and heat in the current political climate. As the first hearing of the January 6 Committee revealed, that heat came from people