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This chapter discusses the case of Ms Wei who died because of an incorrect diagnostic procedure. After giving birth in 1831, Ms. Wei fell ill and was diagnosed as suffering from internal stagnation of blood. Diagnosis of blood stagnation was common in cases of postpartum abdominal pain accompanied by distension. As a response to these symptoms, the doctor prescribed her zedoary rhizome and bur-reed rhizome, but after taking the medicines, Ms. Wei became mentally confused and began to babble. The doctor responded by increasing the dosage of the medicines which unfortunately only deteriorated Ms. Wei's condition, and her vital signs abruptly ceased. After the death of Ms. Wei, her husband concerted a medical study and found out that his wife was a victim of incorrect diagnosis regarding the stagnation of blood.

Early studies of medical harm appeared in the 1950s, with rates of injury little different from those reported 50 years later. Philosopher Ivan Illich criticized medicalization of everyday life, using annual deaths from auto accidents as an example. Malpractice concerns became entangled with safety, and the first malpractice crisis in the US came about due to advances, rather than deficiencies, in care. The Harvard Medical Practice Study (HMPS) renewed interest in medical harm as a cause of malpractice suits in a series of four papers in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. Although it was not a pre-defined outcome of the study, one paper by Lucian Leape reframed the problem as one of medical “error”; the other three did not use the term. Lucian Leape fortuitously drew on error research in cognitive psychology and other safety science work on “error” stemming from the research triggered by the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster and other accidents. He formulated those concepts in a form digestible by health professionals and published them in the widely read medical journal JAMA—Journal of the American Medical Association. The figure of 100,000 annual deaths was first circulated.

This chapter describes the political pressures that led to the creation of the Office for the Study of Unconventional Medical Practices. The exponential growth for medical costs starting in the 1970s spurred the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to find and justify the substitution of alternative therapies for orthodox medicine's more costly treatments. In 1991, Senator Thomas R. Harkin, chair of the appropriations subcommittee with oversight of the NIH, added a clause in the NIH 1992 appropriation creating a twenty-person advisory panel to recommend a research program that would “fully test the most promising unconventional medical practices.” Within a year of the committee's deliberations, the NIH created the Office for the Study of Unconventional Medical Practices, which later became known as the Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM).

This chapter considers the question of whether the institutionalized and formalized practice of informed consent in the context of clinical research has been stretched beyond breaking point. It focuses on the kinds of research where the potential participants are patients (i.e., not healthy volunteers) and where they have some important health interest at stake, usually because they have a serious illness and the research project is a trial of a new therapy. This kind of research includes the standard, double blind, randomized trial, as well as a range of other trial designs. The chapter begins with a brief account of the concept of informed consent and of its possible philosophical justifications. It then analyzes what is known about the way in which potential trial participants make their decisions concerning whether or not to participate and considers the implications of this knowledge for informed consent. Finally, the chapter provides a more theoretical discussion of whether informed consent is the right kind of transfer mechanism for rights to control health information or tissue samples.

This chapter presents the relationship observed between physical fears and early radiation effects, and how they could turn into lifetime bodily concerns. During the years that followed, these fears and concerns became greatly magnified by a development which has come to epitomize the hibakusha's third encounter with death: his growing awareness that medical studies were demonstrating an abnormally high rate of leukemia among survivors of the atomic bomb. There has thus arisen the scientifically inaccurate but emotionally charged term “Abomb disease,” which has taken for its medical model this always fatal malignancy of the blood-forming organs. In 1948, an increased incidence of leukemia was first noted, and it reached a peak between 1950 and 1952.

This chapter examines Tennyson's poetics in detail, arguing that they constitute the most important intervention in the poetic culture of the heart. It shows how Hallam's death from a heart-related complaint influences the use of heart metaphor in In Memoriam, a poem which repeatedly references the heart, and where the steady rhythmic beat can be interpreted as the pulse. It then turns to Maud, which is read as a sustained and deliberate investigation of the pathological heart, as the speaker takes on all the characteristics of a medical case-study into heart disease.

This chapter focuses on Jewish doctors and surgeons in Umbrian communes in the late Middle Ages. Public records, notarial deeds, and contracts in Hebrew and Latin all bear witness to the presence and activity of a host of Jewish doctors, hired by the communes to treat the people of any given town and contado. The practice appears to have been widespread throughout Italy, and its roots are to be sought less in the supposed Jewish penchant for medical studies than in the fact that such studies were virtually the only ones to which Jews had access in the Italian universities of the time. Moreover, the privileges and prestige which often accompanied the medical profession constituted an appreciable attraction for Jews in search of a social standing that might exempt them from the restrictions that went with their identity. Such advantages included above all the right of citizenship, with its attendant privileges, primarily that of being able to acquire property and enter it in the town's land register; exemption from payment of city tributes and special taxes; authorization to carry defensive weapons; and dispensation from wearing the distinctive badge. However, from the mid-fifteenth century onwards, the employment of Jewish doctors by the communes began to be hotly and openly contested.

“IOM and Public Disclosure of the Error Problem—To Err Is Human,” considers the steps that led the Institute of Medicine (renamed the National Academy of Medicine) in 1999 to publicly declare that upwards of 100,000 Americans were dying annually as a result of medical error. Their public declaration came after more than two decades of research had documented to the profession the toll of medical error, first in California (under the leadership of Don Harper Mills) and later in a number of other states (notably by the Harvard Medical Practice Study team). In the face of these findings, the healthcare industry had not acted on safety so the researchers chose to go public with their findings.

This chapter discusses how Niels Jerne continued his combination of medical studies and statistical musings after a week's vacation with Tjek and the children in Lokken in the summer of 1943. The fall term continued in the surgical clinic, with courses in radiology, neurology, epidemic diseases, skin and genital diseases, ophthalmology, otorhinolaryngology, and cowpox inoculation, followed by a month's internship at a psychiatric department. In Niels's spare hours, Fisher's statistical “bible” was his constant companion. In a sense, his preoccupation with statistics was the essence of what he called “peripheral abstractions.” He did not, however, have to suppress his pulsing blood and the feelings in his heart—Erna Morch took care of that.

This chapter looks at the design principles of the reforms of GCSE and A level, which have sought to reduce the number of subjects offered by outlawing 'overlap' between subjects, in other words the very interdisciplinarity that this book is seeking to inspire and support. In England now, with the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) and 'new' A levels defined by content rather than concepts, the book's arguments suddenly find themselves fighting 'hand-to-hand' with government policy. These reactionary outbursts represent a rejection of pretty much all of the philosophical movements of the last fifty years, ironically there is a darkly quirky postmodernism in the conception of these 'reforms'. Ultimately, this book encourages more radical thinking about Media Studies and 'Critical Studies'. The chapter then considers the importance of going back to reading not only as a basic skill or an educational tool but as 'only one aspect of consumption, but a fundamental one'.

A doctor reports a “promising” new treatment. Is the claim believable, or is it based on biased or other questionable data? An environmentalist says a waste dump causes cancer, but an industrialist indignantly denies this. Who's right? Meanwhile, experts keep changing their minds about what we should eat to help us stay healthy. Other experts still debate what did in the dinosaurs. Which scientific studies should you believe? This chapter deals with the use (and sometimes misuse) of statistics. But don't let this S-word panic you. Being a good science writer doesn't require heavy-lifting math. It does require some healthy skepticism, and the ability to ask good questions about various things that can affect research studies and other claims. To separate the probable truth from the probable trash, you need to get answers to these questions: 1. Has a study been done, or is a claim being made on the basis of only limited observations? If a study was done, how was it designed and conducted? 2. What are the numbers? Was the study large enough (did it have enough patients or experiments or whatever) to reach believable conclusions? Are the results statistically significant? That phrase simply means that, based on scientific standards, the statistical results are unlikely to be due to chance alone. 3. Are there other possible explanations for the study's conclusions? 4. Could any form of bias have affected the study's conclusions, unintentional or otherwise? 5. Have the findings been checked by other experts? And how do the findings fit with other research knowledge and beliefs? To find the answers to these questions, we must understand five principles of scientific analysis: Experts keep changing their minds not only about what we should eat to stay healthy but also about what we should do when we get sick. A growing number of drugs and other treatments have been discredited after new research has raised questions about their effectiveness or safety. Even the shape of the universe (more precisely, how astronomers think it's shaped) has changed from one study to another. To some, these and other flip-flops give science a bad name. But this is just part of the normal scientific process, working as it's supposed to work.