Sublime

house, he beat his native butler to death and narrowly escaped a capital sentence.

Semmelweis noticed that women examined by student doctors who had not washed their hands after leaving the autopsy room had very high death rates.

In 1906, George Bernard Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma first appeared on the London stage. The play concerns a physician, Sir Colenso Ridgeon, who’s discovered a cure for tuberculosis. Ridgeon’s dilemma is that he has a limited supply of the medication and a small staff to administer it. He can treat only ten patients at a time and so must decide

In recent years, Shaw’s turn-of-the-twentieth-century drama about the ethics and economics of healthcare has been seen as prescient, prefiguring the establishment of the National Health Service in Britain and the Affordable Care Act in the United States. Even with these developments, modern Colenso Ridgeons still grapple with limited resources,

Cigarettes—sixty cigarettes or more each day, lit one from the end of another—had been so desperately important to him for so long. Now Cain and Hurst confirmed what Dr. Gibson had told him in the ambulance: the smoking must stop immediately and completely. Lyndon Johnson tore the wrapper off a pack of cigarettes, opened the pack and pulled one

when the detective was lying about his service in Vietnam, he’d claimed to have a heart murmur.