In 1993 there will be approximately 152,000 new cases of colorectal cancer in the United States and 57,000 deaths from this disease¹. The cause of colorectal cancer is unknown, although associations have been reported with family history, diet, alcohol, ...

Perioperative blood transfusions may have a deleterious effect on the survival of patients with a variety of solid tumors,¹,² possibly because of an immunosuppressive effect³,⁴. This possibility is supported by studies in animals in which tumor growth was ...

Transcutaneous pacing before hospital admission has achieved moderate success in patients with bradycardia who were not in full cardiac arrest¹–¹⁶. With rare exceptions, however, transcutaneous pacing has failed in patients with asystole and full cardiac ...

The deployment of over 500,000 soldiers to the Arabian peninsula during Operation Desert Storm exposed immunologically naive hosts to infectious pathogens uncommon in North America¹,². Kala-azar (visceral leishmaniasis) was thought to be rare in eastern ...

Figure 1. A Ferruginous Body.

The classic dumbbell-shaped, sometimes beaded appearance of an asbestos fiber, also known as a ferruginous body, is evident in an iron-mucopolysaccharide matrix on scanning electron microscopy (x1595). The fibers were ...

Traditionally a discipline based on physiology for the functional assessment of patients with lung disease, pulmonary medicine has been moving over the past decade into the realm of cellular and molecular biology in an attempt to unravel mechanisms of ...

Beginning with chlordiazepoxide in 1960, benzodiazepines have been used extensively for the treatment of anxiety and related disorders. Eight benzodiazepine derivatives have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for this purpose (Table 1). ...

Presentation of Case

A 39-year-old man was admitted to the hospital because of fever, sweats, and weight loss a few months after radiation treatment for Hodgkin's disease.

The patient had been well until about one year earlier, when he felt a lump in the ...

Remarkable progress has been made over the past 25 years in understanding the biologic aspects of colorectal cancer and developing methods to detect it early or even prevent it entirely¹. Colorectal cancer arises from a precursor lesion, the adenomatous ...

To the Editor: We believe Shapiro et al. (Dec. 17 issue)¹ had inadequate evidence to support their recommendation for nontreatment of deer-tick bites. The population samples were much too small for a meaningful comparison of the risks of serious late ...

To the Editor: Dr. Peter's review of childhood immunizations in the United States (Dec. 17 issue)¹ mentions policies that differ from those of the World Health Organization (WHO), especially with respect to immunization against cholera and poliomyelitis. ...

To the Editor: The in vitro cultivation of rochalimaea species from lesions of bacillary angiomatosis by Koehler and colleagues (Dec. 3 issue)¹ is an exciting development in the efforts to understand the etiologic process and pathogenesis of bacillary ...

To the Editor: McIntyre and colleagues recently described a way to predict the pulmonary-capillary wedge pressure (PCWP) from changes in peripheral arterial “pulse-volume” following the Valsalva maneuver (Dec. 10 issue)¹. They claimed that their method ...

To the Editor: The role of bronchial hyperresponsiveness in the pathophysiology of dyspnea in congestive heart failure has been a subject of considerable interest¹–³. Although there is no doubt that patients with heart failure have increased airways ...

To the Editor: There are several errors in the meta-analysis by Pignon et al.¹. Our analysis of their data fails to support their conclusion that a statistically significant benefit has been demonstrated for radiotherapy combined with chemotherapy.

...

To the Editor: When incising and draining an abscess, it is common to perform blunt soft-tissue dissection with a gloved finger. This practice is potentially dangerous. A 32-year-old man with a history of chronic intravenous drug use was evaluated in the ...

To the Editor: In addition to the traditional types of gifts from pharmaceutical companies recently alluded to in the Journal,¹,² I wish to alert readers to the distribution of unsolicited gifts through the mail. Recently, I received a preprogrammed auto-...

In the United States, by 1900, the staff of Aesculapius (in heraldry, a knotty rod, sometimes fruited and leaved, with a snake entwined) had been confused with the caduceus of Hermes (a winged staff, with two snakes intertwined). This book describes how ...

As urban civilization developed in the ancient world -- Sumer, Egypt, Assyria -- about 4000 B.C., so did the professional army. As the vastness of the armies grew and weapons improved, the care of the sick and wounded became increasingly complex. Military ...

It is difficult to imagine a more dreadful existence than that faced by the half-million Jews imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto from 1940 to 1943. Under the pretext of a quarantine (for typhus), Nazi authorities ordered walls to be erected around the ghetto,...

Physicians everywhere work in the shadow of the Nazi epoch. Whether they recognize it or not, what happened in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945 has some influence on the treatment of patients and the standards of permissible research and experiments. ...

In August 1947, 15 Nazi physicians were convicted by one of the Nuremberg tribunals of immersing concentration-camp inmates in freezing solutions, exploding them in low-pressure chambers, infecting them with typhus, forcing them to drink sea water, and ...

Authors are aware of the predilection of publishers to pick titles that sometimes make it difficult for a reader to judge the book by its cover. Of the two titles above, the latter is a more accurate choice than the former. The perversion of medicine in ...