Lung cancer

At the intellectual heart of the new scientific medicine of the late 19th century was the idea of specificity: each disease had a single specific cause, and in time medicine would generate a specific and effective cure. This idea transformed the diagnosis and treatment of infectious diseases, but through the 20th century, as the burden of mortality shifted towards chronic diseases, its limitations became abundantly clear—nowhere more so than in the case of lung cancer. The historian will see you now: introducing Case Histories“I hope that Lord Grey and you are well”, wrote the Regency wit and clergyman Sydney Smith to his confidante Lady Mary Grey in February, 1836, “no easy thing, seeing that there are about fifteen hundred diseases to which man is subject”. Last year the editors of the Lancet journals announced the launch of The Lancet Clinic, a major online initiative which draws together an overview Seminar with the best current research from across the Lancet journals on 135 of the most globally important diseases. Full-Text PDF TuberculosisNo disease better illustrates the difficulties of early modern medical practice than tuberculosis. Arguments over heredity, nutrition, environment, and contagion all came together within the potent cultural frame of a condition that, by the early 19th century, killed about one in five Europeans. Rather than claiming thousands in swift, savage epidemics tuberculosis took its victims slowly, racking their bodies and exhausting their minds. Older names for the disease—consumption and pthisis (from a Greek word meaning to waste away)—reflect the way in which it seemed to destroy the body from within. Full-Text PDF DengueIn 1780 Benjamin Rush—a physician and a founding father of the USA—noted the appearance of an alarming epidemic in his home city of Philadelphia. Rush was familiar with the intricate nosologies of fevers generated by his late-Enlightenment colleagues, but this outbreak had a distinctive symptom: “the pains which accompanied this fever were exquisitely severe in the head, back and limbs”. He deployed the usual purging, soothing, and strengthening remedies, but with little success, and he observed that “its general name among all classes of people was the break-bone fever”. Full-Text PDF