Surgery

Seasons change

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WN/MT September 4, 2020
Truths & mousetraps.
2450 words



One.

This September feels different. It’s no longer just a matter of seasonal daylight contraction, but also a fact of social shrinkage and much more. Summer 2020 was unlike any before and academics this autumn, from pre-school through medical school, will also be totally different. Innovation is in demand to navigate the crises in business, education, medical practice, public policy, sports, and much of everything else in daily life. The good news is that humans are good at creating new and better mousetraps, although not so good at escaping the mental mousetraps of their own follies. [Above: September ground litter, Scio Township 2018.]



Hunkering down in the first weeks of this 2020 Covid pandemic, I reread Howard Markel’s book, When Germs Travel: Six Major Epidemics That Have Invaded America and the Fears They Have Unleashed. Written in 2004 it holds up very well now, 16 years later, offering pandemic perspective. Howard, shown above, has frequent pieces on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), maintains the 1918 Influenza Epidemic Encyclopedia in a UM Digital Archive (chm.med.umich.edu), has a recent Medical Dispatch in the on-line New Yorker Newsletter (August 6, 2020), and a new book on genetics, called Helix, in the works.

Lessons learned from past infectious disasters tend to be forgotten. Face-masks, hygienic measures, social distancing, and validated vaccines unquestionably mitigate transmission and acquisition of germs – medical scientists and the informed public know this much is true, but why doesn’t everyone else?

Weaponization of those protections, particularly the ridiculously easy solutions of face masks and social distancing, as political gestures is sadly bizarre. Whether it’s a matter of ludditism, partisan ideology, or mere ignorance will be sorted out by future social critics. As a person who wore face masks in operating rooms for nearly 50 years – alongside uncounted colleagues, nurses, and scrub techs – the claims of “medical reasons” why some people “can’t wear a mask” are incredulous – as unconvincing as claims of pet snakes or birds as “medically-necessary” travel companions on airplanes. The parallel contention that the duty to wear masks violates personal freedom is certainly a far cry from anything reasonably derived from common sense or the American Constitution. It’s not surprising that similar skirmishes sprung up with the Great Influenza epidemic in 1918, when education and science had not quite universally settled the germ theory in minds, but it is astonishing to find such shenanigans a full century later. [Below: mask-wearers at University Hospitals, senior medical student Annie Minns and professors Cosmas Van De Ven and David Spahlinger – social distancing briefly waived for the photo op, Aug. 2020.]


Two.

Basic truths. Mousetraps for infectious diseases have come and gone, but routine hygiene and simple impediments to germ transmission (face masks & distancing) seem to be basic truths.

Historical medical relics were facts once true for their times. The iron lung for the respiratory failure of polio was a “better mousetrap” in the 1930s through the 1950s. The original iron lung used two vacuum cleaners to change pressure in an iron chamber, compressing and inflating chests and lungs of children lying within them. Philip Drinker (1894-1972), teacher of industrial illumination and ventilation at Harvard Medical School (alongside famed UMMS graduate Alice Hamilton), came up with a popular design, the “Drinker Lung.” Haven Emerson (1906-1997), son of NYC Health Commissioner, improved the device by placing the patient in a bellows within the chamber. Emerson’s Iron Lung was quieter, lighter and only $1,000, half the price of others. It remained in production until 1970, when polio largely had disappeared from much of the planet due to vaccination. Coincidentally this is a good opportunity to refer to Markel again. [H. Markel. “The genesis of the iron lung,” Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med, 1994; 148 (11): 1174-1180.]

Polio outbreaks were dreaded in the summer. As a child, I noticed post-polio limps in many people and heard about iron lungs, seemingly ubiquitous in every hospital. The July newsletter, Matula Thoughts, referred to our friend and colleague Skip Campbell who was hospitalized at “old” University Hospital as a youngster to treat his polio. That was just around the time polio began to disappear when field trails of Salk’s vaccine, directed from UM by Thomas Francis, proved it “safe, effective, and potent” in 1955. The Sabin vaccine soon proved better. Oddly, U.S. authorities supported only the Salk clinical trial, and Sabin had to prove his vaccine in field trials in the Soviet Union. This was no small feat in the political theater and Cold War of the 1950s, but Sabin, against the grain, organized the trials and the world ran to his better vaccine. Even now, however, global polio eradication is incomplete. [L. Roberts, Science, 367:14, 2020.]

Situational necessity, inspiration, and competition fuel better medical mousetraps, but innovations happen best in open societies. Iron lungs were useful in their times but gave way to better innovations. Modern respiratory physiology knowledge and more sophisticated ventilatory technology sprang from other responses to polio. [J. West. “The physiological challenges of the 1952 Copenhagen poliomyelitis epidemic and a renaissance in clinical respiratory physiology,” J. Appl Physiol (2005); 99:424-432.] So once again, let’s celebrate democracy and free speech: innovation -with its validation, dissemination, and improvement – thrive best in the fertile social soil of personal freedom and open expression.


Three.

Mousetraps.  “If you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door.” Such is the power of “the market” at large, whether the market is commercial or intellectual. Flat Earth maps may lead some mousetrap-seekers astray, but most people find their ways to better ideas and technologies. [Above: Conventional Victor Mousetraps at Barnes Ace Hardware two for $1.69 vs. Intruder’s Better Mousetrap two for $5.99.]

Ralph Waldo Emerson (above), the source of the phrase, actually wrote:

“If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house though it be in the woods.”

Emerson knew something about paths in woods, not only living among them, but also hiring Henry David Thoreau as his property caretaker when the journalist of Walden Pond needed a paying job. A future tenuous connection between Emerson and Ann Arbor materialized after James Elliott Cabot (below), Emerson’s friend, executor, and biographer, fathered Hugh Cabot, who instigated the first century of Michigan Urology in 1919. “Elliott” Cabot (1821-1903, shown below), as he was known, was a brother of Dr. Samuel Cabot III and shares facial physiognomy with at least three of his sons: Michigan’s first urologist Hugh Cabot, twin brother Philip, and internist brother Richard Clark Cabot.



Four.

Medicine has had its share of mousetraps. Enduring diagnostic tools from antiquity  – the medical history, physical examination, rudimentary vital signs, and uroscopy (body fluid observation) – have been tested and refined in medical marketplaces over millennia. For urine inspection, pottery gave way to glass matulas, microscopes extended visual inspection into the microscopic world, chemical analysis opened up molecular composition of urine, and bacteriology led to identification of pathogens. Innovation similarly propelled stethoscopes (1816), x-rays (1896), electrocardiograms (1920s), CAT scans (1970s), and MRIs (in wide use after 2000) into the clinical marketplace. The technology of modern urology is too rich a topic for further mention here, except to take note of Nesbit’s transurethral resection of the prostate, Lapides’s clean intermittent catheterization, and McGuire’s leak point pressure.

Amidst high-tech mousetraps of today, the simple face mask used in ORs around the world is clearly effective against dust and infectious droplets (liquid dust). A recent JAMA article by Brooks, Butler, and Redfield, suggests we implement universal masking for all healthcare workers and patients in clinical situations, affording both personal protection and source control. Aerosol particles range from sub micrometers (0.0001) to a full ten micrometers (microns) in diameter. By the way, 1000 microns equals 1 millimeter. Even simple cloth face coverings substantially limit forward dispersion of exhaled respirations in the 1-10 microgram range. [JAMA 324:635, 2020.]   [Above: ORs & face masks in Mainz, Germany. Below: airborne particles, source – Wikipedia, Particles. Horizontal axis in micrometers, or microns.] 

A higher level of filtration than routine face masks, the N95 mask, was designed to meet the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) specification of filtering at least 95% of airborne particles. To be fully effective, it requires “fit-testing,” an annual ritual at Michigan Medicine along with the TB testing, that few knew would become so useful in these Covid times. [Below: N95 mask.]



Some people, mainly constitutional textualists and originalists, claim that governmental agencies such as NIOSH were not “intended” by the Founding Fathers, who could hardly have known about aerosols, viruses, or the Internet. Yet the Founders surely knew that knowledge, technology, and monetary systems were changing the world and would continue to do so – Franklin, Jefferson, and Hamilton most certainly among them. Enough Founders anticipated that American governmental regulation and American free enterprise would need to work in tandem to support the foundational principles of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, and First Amendment protections. The NIOSH agency derives from any reasonable interpretation of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

The global nature of human challenges, even for a matter so small as dust particles, is stunning. Airborne dust, solid or liquid, has no national boundaries. A NASA global simulation of aerosol transportation in the troposphere over 12 months beginning 17 August 2006, takes about two minutes to watch and will expunge any notions of national exceptionalism. This video clip shows that the recent African dust storm this year was no anomaly.
[Title: Atmospheric Aerosol Eddies and Flows – NASA GSFC S.ogv
Author: NASA. Date: 1 January 2008, 23:17:03]

On the other hand, the Covid component of respiratory aerosols is fortunately not very durable in time or distance. Infectivity seems to drop off after 6 feet or some number of hours. Otherwise, the above NASA animation would be very alarming in the face of this pandemic. Furthermore, the best evidence indicates that long-range transmission of small-particle aerosols (<5 micrometers) is not the dominant mode of Covid infection. Close-range respiratory droplets (large aerosol particles >5 micrometers) is the far more likely threat, easily thwarted by face masks and a little distance. [M. Klompas et al, JAMA, 324:441, 2020.] 


Five.

Thermometry, a mainstay in the armamentarium of medical mousetraps, is a hot topic these days. Curiously, the fact of “normal human temperature” is not clear and some authorities believe that “normal” has been dropping. One wonders if normal temperature for communities of Inuit people living near the Arctic Circle is the same as “normal” of equatorial people, or could normal in infants be the same as for octogenarians? We don’t treat pulse or blood pressure with the same strict exactitude for all people, so why is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit held to such precision, even though we know it’s variability in health is narrower than other physiologic parameters? Epigenetic response to modern life (industrialization, central heating, air conditioning, air pollution, global warming, etc.) surely influences the “normal” core human temperatures. Time of day, season, and age must matter as well. The site, method, and precision of measurement also effect any number obtained.

The “normal” of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit traces back to Carl Wunderlich (1815-1877), a German physician who questioned things (above, per Wikipedia). In 1868 he proposed 37 degrees Celsius as normal after studies using a foot-long thermometer, requiring upwards of 20 minutes to register the temperature. Surgeons may recall the term Wunderlich Syndrome, a nontraumatic surgical emergency of spontaneous retroperitoneal hemorrhage that may be caused by renal neoplasms. Mackowiak, Wasserman, and Levine in 1992, updated Wunderlich’s number. [JAMA 268:1578-80, 1992]. Newer studies suggest that “normal” human temperature has dropped by 0.59 degrees centigrade for men and 0.32 degrees centigrade for women. Urologists and zoologists know that core body temperature is a few degrees too warm for optimal testicular function in man, along with many other species, hence the “social distancing” of their placement. Evolutionary biologists may want to take note that as core body temperatures decrease, there may be no thermal reason for human testes to descend, which may severely limit the market for pediatric urologists. Kangaroos, and other creatures too, may have to adjust their testicular placement to accommodate themselves to a warmer planet (their bifid penile anatomy, caudal to the gonads, is stranger still.) [Below, Wikimedia, photographer and kangaroo unknown.]

Crises test all creatures, from viruses to humankind, forcing epigenetic changes that allow adaptation and evolution not only of individuals, but also their societies. Homo sapiens has taken this force of nature to unprecedented levels, but just as every new era brings out innovation, each challenge uncovers new generations of Flat Earthers who retreat to comforting beliefs, dogmas, and ideologies. In the arc of human progress, truth usually wins out and each crisis finds its own necessary technologies, although the arc of progress is not smooth, but often wobbly and intermittently retrograde.


Postscripts.

Summer reading. Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson is a timely book. The title riffs on the first two lines and pun of Shakespeare’s 1593 play, Richard III: “Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York.” John Steinbeck echoed this in 1961 in the title of his final novel. Coincidentally, my summer reading also included the historical novel, Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, that imagined the lost life of Shakespeare’s only son (1585-1596). [Below: Title page First Quatro, Richard III.]



Caste (above) considers social and political power, but Wilkerson begins the book with “The afterlife of pathogens,” an astonishing coincidence with today’s pandemic news and world-wide political discontents. This first chapter describes a heat wave in the summer of 2016 that thawed Siberian permafrost and liberated anthrax spores from long-dead reindeer, thus causing a new epidemic in living reindeer and their indigenous herders, the Nedet people. Wilkerson then links that pathogen awakening to current political awakenings around the world.

“The anthrax, like the reactivation of the human pathogens of hatred and tribalism in this evolving century, had never died. It lay in wait, sleeping, until extreme circumstances brought it to the surface and back to life.”


Coincidences. G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), English writer and author of the Father Brown priest-detective books, called coincidences spiritual puns. A less spiritual person than Chesterton might call coincidences cosmic puns or stochastic puns, but the idea is the same: unrelated but concurrent events or facts may seem to have been “divinely ordered” or happen “by the luck of the draw.” Chesterton’s actual quote comes from his book, Irish Impressions, in 1919, a year that coincides with the start of the first century of urology at the University of Michigan:

 “All literary style, especially national style, is made up of such coincidences; which are a spiritual sort of puns. That is why style is untranslatable; because it is possible to render the meaning, but not the double meaning.”

Considering this first half of 2020, random chance is due to favor better luck in pathogens.

Thanks for reading Matula Thoughts this Labor Day, 2020.
Best wishes,
David A. Bloom

Ga-ga now and then

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DAB Matula Thoughts June 7, 2019

Ga-ga then and now

2172 words

[Above: Nesbit reception at 2019 AUA Annual Meeting in Chicago. Ice sculpture.]

 

One.             

Senior medical students are getting ready this month for the next big stage in their lives and careers, just as I did in June of 1971 heading west from Buffalo to Los Angeles, to start nine years of training at UCLA. I don’t recall much of the drive along the evolving interstate highway system, a vision of President Eisenhower only 20 years earlier, but the exhilaration of beginning something totally new with surgical residency under William P. Longmire certainly dominated my thoughts on the road. The intellectual and conjoined physical capabilities of surgery as a profession excited me. The first day of internship, in line to check in, I met fellow intern Doug McConnell and quickly befriended John Cook, Erick Albert, Ed Pritchett, Ron Busuttil, Arnie Brody, John Kaswick, Dave Confer and the rest of our 18 at the bottom of the UCLA training pyramid. Over the five-year process, we learned the knowledge base, skills, and professionalism of surgery through experience, teaching, study, and role models. In the blink of an eye 1971 has become 2019 and, suddenly I’m near the end of my career.

Reading Arrowsmith and the recent story of the Theranos debacle in John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood, I saw those protagonists wanting to change the world. My hopes in 1971 were not so grand, I just wanted to find my own relevance and hoped to become good in my career. Most people similarly want to make their mark in one way or another, through job, family, art, or community. Some, however, actually intend to change the larger world, although their idea of “change” may be someone else’s deformation.

Last month a large cohort of our University of Michigan urology residents, faculty, nurses, PAs, and staff met in Chicago at the annual AUA national meeting to learn, teach, exchange ideas, network, enjoy reunion, and circulate word of our new chair Ganesh Palapattu. The Michigan brand was strong with hundreds of presentations from our faculty, residents, and alumni. The MUSIC and Nesbit Alumni sessions were great gathering points. [Below: UM podium events with alumni Cheryl Lee, Jens Sønksen, Barry Kogan, and Julian Wan.]

Cheryl has been back in Ann Arbor this week as visiting professor.

A group of our residents and one incipient PGY1 were ga-ga at the AUA Museum booth. [Below in front: Juan Andino, Catherine Nam; back row: Adam Cole, Scott Hawken, Rita Jen, Ella Doerge, senior faculty member, Colton Walker, Matt Lee, Kyle Johnson, Udit Singhal.]

 

Two.

Surgery, the word, derives from Greek, kheirourgos, for working by hand and the term moved through Latin, Old French, and Anglo-French to become surgien in the 13th century. The epicenter of that world was the doctor/patient duality, based on an essential transaction as old as humanity with exchange of information, discovery of needs, and provision of remedies and skills. The knowledge base and tools are far better since Hippocratic times, but the professional ideals are much the same. It seemed pretty awesome to my 21-year-old self that I might one day be able to fix things with my hands like Drs. Longmire and Rick Fonkalsrud. History mattered to our UCLA professors who insisted that trainees know the back stories of each disorder and treatment.

New interns arriving next month, called PGY1s for their postgraduate year status, may have parallel thoughts to those of mine 48 years ago as they start their journeys. Pyramidal training models no longer exist – PGY1s can reasonably expect to complete their programs. Their experiences will be replete with contemporary expectations, notably patient safety, value propositions, clinical outcome assessments, co-morbidities, social determinants of disease, personal well-being, attention to patient experience, and teamwork with diversity, equity, and inclusion. Acronyms have proliferated, tools are more powerful, and regulation grows more burdensome. Nevertheless, essential transactions remain at the center of health care with needs of patients addressed by the knowledge, skills, and kindness of healthcare providers, one patient and one provider at a time.

While taking pride in the labels doctor, physician, surgeon, nurse, and physician’s assistant we realize now that teams of providers with many types of expertise congregate around each single patient, either immediately physically as “bedside teams” (in clinics as well), sequentially, or virtually (with office staff, coders, laboratories, or electronically). Teams offer exquisitely specialized expertise and “wisdom of crowds,” although patients often find no single person in charge of their care.

 

Three.

Patient safety was a given when I was a resident. It was wrapped up in regular Morbidity and Mortality conferences without explicit use of that phrase, patient safety. Around that time a young graduate student in sociology, Charles Bosk, embedded himself in an academic surgical team for 18 months to discover how surgery was learned, practiced, and lived at an unnamed “Pacific Hospital.” The result was his book in 1979, Forgive and Remember: Managing Medical Failure. Bob Bartlett, my friend and colleague in the Surgery Department, introduced me to it a few years later. A second edition in 2003 was reviewed by Williamson. [Williamson R. J Royal Soc Med. 97(3):147-148, 2004.]

Patient safety has grown since my internship from an obvious but unarticulated expectation to a distinct field of study modeled after other industries, notably aviation. Health care has learned much from other professions such as the concepts of safety culture, standardization of procedures, checklists, and so forth, although healthcare is more multidimensional and nuanced than those other worlds. Bosk recently reflected on the health care exceptionality in a Lancet article, “Blind spots in the science of safety,” written with Kirstine Pedersen, concluding:

“There is a science of safety to reduce preventable adverse outcomes. But health care also has an irreducibly relational, experiential, and normative element that remains opaque to safety science. The contribution of a kind and reassuring word; a well delivered and appropriately timed disclosure of a bad diagnosis; or an experience-based evaluation of a small but important change in a patient’s condition – all are difficult, if not impossible to capture in a performance metric. Accomplishing safety and avoiding harm depend on discretion, effective teamwork, and local knowledge of how things work in specific clinical settings. Finally, the successful practice of a science of safety presupposes in theory what is most difficult to achieve in practice: a stable functioning team capable of wisely adapting general guidelines to specific cases.” [Bosk CL, Pedersen KZ, “Blind spots in the science of safety.” The Lancet 393:978-979, 2019.]

 

Four.

The Michigan Urology Centennial is nearly here and the process of writing our departmental history has elicited many names and stories. Bookends demarcating any era may be discretionary choices and our starting point could easily be debated. Perhaps the first “urologic” procedure of Moses Gunn initiated this specialty at Michigan in the 1850s, or the first faculty appointments with the term lecturer on genitourinary surgery, held by Cyrenus Darling (1902) or clinical professor of genitourinary surgery by Ira Dean Loree (1907) might qualify. Unquestionably, though, the arrival of Hugh Cabot in the autumn of 1919 brought modern urology with its academic components to the University of Michigan. Cabot was the first to use the 20thcentury terminology, urology, at UM and he was Michigan’s celebrity in the field. He literally brought Modern Urology to Ann Arbor, as that was the name of his two-volume state-of-the art textbook of 1918, repeated in a second edition in 1924. Cabot probably didn’t anticipate becoming Medical School dean when he left Boston two years earlier, but his advancement was hardly accidental. A number of other prominent faculty members were well-positioned to replace Dean Victor Vaughan, but Cabot played his political cards well and won the job.

Frederick George Novy (1864-1957) was the strongest competitor. Born and raised in Chicago, Novy obtained a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Michigan in 1886. His master’s thesis was “Cocaine and its derivatives” in 1887. Teaching bacteriology as an instructor, his Ph.D. thesis in 1890 was “The toxic products of the bacillus of hog cholera.” After an M.D. in 1891 he followed the footsteps of his teacher Victor Vaughan as assistant professor of hygiene and physiological chemistry. Visiting key European centers in 1894 and 1897, Novy brought state-of-the-art bacteriology to Ann Arbor, rising to full professor in 1904 and first chair of the Department of Bacteriology. His studies of trypanosomes and spirochetes, laboratory culture techniques, anaerobic organisms, and the tubercle bacillus were widely respected. Our colleague Powel Kazanjian wrote a first-rate book on Novy.

 

Five.

Paul de Kruif (1890-1971), one of Novy’s students, bears particular mention. [Above: de Kruif, courtesy Bentley Library.]  de Kruif came from Zeeland, Michigan, to Ann Arbor for a bachelor’s degree in 1912 and then a Ph.D. in 1916. He joined the U.S. Mexican Expedition (“the Pancho Villa Expedition”) against Mexican revolutionary paramilitary forces in 1916 and 1917, then saw service in France with the Sanitary Corps, investigating the gas gangrene prevalent in the trenches of WWI. de Kruif returned to Michigan as assistant professor in 1919 working in Novy’s laboratory, publishing a paper on streptococci and complement activation.

Novy helped de Kruif secure a prestigious position at the Rockefeller Institute in 1920, to study mechanisms of respiratory infection. While there de Kruif wrote an anonymous chapter on modern medicine for Harold Sterns’s Civilization in 1922. The 34 chapters were mainly written by prominent authors, including H.L. Mencken, Ring Larder, and Lewis Mumford, so how de Kruif, a young bacteriologist (and non-physician), came to be included in this compilation is a mystery. de Kruif’s 14-page chapter, however, caused the biggest stir, skewering contemporary medical practice and doctors for “a mélange of religious ritual, more or less accurate folk-lore, and commercial cunning.” de Kruif viewed medical practice as unscientific “medical Ga-Ga-ism,” but his article was sophomoric at best.

Once de Kruif was revealed as author the Rockefeller Institute fired him in September, 1922. The newly unemployed bacteriologist came in contact with a newly prominent author, Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), praised for Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922). Lewis was ready for his next novel and two friends, Morris Fishbein and H.L. Mencken, persuaded him to focus on medical research. Lewis, son and grandson of physicians, knew little of medical research, so Fishbein, editor of JAMA, connected Lewis to de Kruif. A bond and collaboration ensued for Arrowsmith (1925) in which a central character, Max Gottlieb, was modelled around Novy. Lewis gave de Kruif 25% of the royalties for the collaboration, but held back on sharing authorship, claiming that it might hurt sales. At the time de Kruif thought his share generous, but later became somewhat embittered as book sales soared with Lewis as sole author. [Henig RM. The life and legacy of Paul de Kruif. Alicia Patterson Foundation.]

Arrowsmith was selected for the 1926 Pulitzer Prize, but Lewis refused the $1,000 award, explaining his refusal in a letter to the Pulitzer Committee:

“… I invite other writers to consider the fact that by accepting the prizes and approval of these vague institutions we are admitting their authority, publicly confirming them as the final judges of literary excellence, and I inquire whether any prize is worth that subservience.”

Four years later, however, Lewis accepted the $46,350 Nobel Prize. His Nobel lecture was “The American Fear of Literature.”

Leaving lab behind, de Kruif became a full-time science writer, one of the first in that new genre of journalism. His Microbe Hunters, published in 1926, became a classic and inspired me when I read it as an early teenager, unaware of the controversies around it. [Chernin E. “Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters and an outraged Ronald Ross.” Rev Infec Dis. 10(3):661-667, 1988.] Arrowsmith was re-published in 2001 by Classics of Medicine Library and Michigan’s Howard Markel provided the introduction. [Markel H. “Prescribing Arrowsmith.”]

 

Ga-ga notes

de Kruif’s adjective ga ga for American medicine in the 1920s intended to mean foolish, infatuated, or wildly enthusiastic. It can also denote someone no longer in possession of full mental faculties or a dotard. (Dotard recently came into play in the peculiar rhetoric of the North Korean and American leaders.) The ga ga origin may be from early 20thcentury French for a senile person based on gâteux, variant of gâteur and hospital slang for “bed-wetter.” Gateau, of course, is also French for “cake” and gateux is the plural. de Kruif himself was negatively ga-ga with his criticism of medical specialism. Lady Gaga brings the term to a new level of consciousness and a new generation.

The past week was big on three continents for those who go ga-ga over historic anniversaries. Two hundred years ago, on 31 May 1819, Walt Whitman was born on Long Island. His Leaves of Grass, among much else, had the intriguing phrase “I am large, I contain multitudes,” a prescient reminder of our cellular basis, microbiome, or the plethora of information that leads to TMI (“too much information”) or burnout. Seventy-five years ago, on 4 June 1944, Operation Overlord at Normandy, France, initiated the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe. Thirty years ago, on 4 June 1989, protests in a large city square between the Forbidden City and the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong turned violent and are now referred to as the June Fourth Incident in the People’s Republic of China.

 

David A. Bloom

University of Michigan, Department of Urology, Ann Arbor