Medicine, Health, and History | A Blog by Paul E. Stepansky, Ph.D.

In a “Viewpoint” published in JAMA a month ago,[1] Michael Nochomovitz and Rahul Sharma suggest that the time has come to create a new medical specialty: virtual medicine.  Extrapolating from the manner in which medical specialties have traditionally...

Winner of an Independent Publisher Books Award Bronze Medal for 2017, Paul Stepansky’s In the Hands of Doctors:  Touch and Trust in Medical Care is now available in paperback.  For the paperback edition, Stepansky has written a new preface, a stirring...

[The sixth and final essay about the gallant nurses of World War I commemorating the centennial of America’s entry into the war on April 6, 1917]
PLAGUE
Influenza.  The Plague. The great pandemic of 1918.  The Spanish flu, which, as best we can determine, originated not in Spain but in Camp Funston in northeastern Kansas and Camp Oglethorpe in northwestern Georgia in March and April, 1918.  From there...

“They were very pathetic, these shell shocked boys.”
[The fifth of a series of essays about the gallant nurses of World War I commemorating the centennial of America’s entry into the war on April 6, 1917]
Every war has mental casualties, but each war has its own way of understanding them.  Each war, that is, has its own nomenclature for what we now term “psychiatric diagnosis.”  To Napoleon’s Surgeon in Chief, Dominique-Jean Larrey, we owe the diagnosis...