Sublime

One reason for the compulsive urge to test and screen and monitor is profit, and this is especially true in the United States, with its heavily private and often for-profit health system. How is a doctor—or hospital or drug company—to make money from essentially healthy patients?

Using public sanitation and access to clean drinking water as metrics, researchers revealed a striking relationship: countries with greater levels of hygiene had increased incidence of Alzheimer’s disease, in a perfect linear correlation.

In 1979, police officers chased thirty-three-year-old insurance salesman Arthur McDuffie on his motorcycle, claiming he’d made a vulgar gesture at them. When McDuffie toppled off the bike, police removed his helmet, beat him to death, and then replaced the helmet. My father used to have a copy of a poem about this event on his wall, titled “Who

Mississippi appendectomy.”84

lurid

anthropomorphically.”

On average, in Boult’s study, the geriatric services cost the hospital $1,350 more per person than the savings they produced, and Medicare, the insurer for the elderly, does not cover that cost.