During the past decade, advances in perinatal care have resulted in increases in the survival of extremely small and immature infants¹,². Whereas few infants with birth weights below 750 g were actively treated before the 1980s, treatment is now accepted ...

The allocation systems for scarce cadaveric kidneys fall into three basic categories: physician-driven, patient-driven, and resource-driven. Although physicians have traditionally made all decisions regarding transplantations, the increased success and ...

During the past decade, there has been substantial improvement in the survival of both renal grafts¹–⁴ and patients among those with end-stage renal disease undergoing cadaveric renal transplantation. The importance of HLA mismatches in cadaveric ...

Case reports of ovarian tumors in women undergoing infertility treatment have raised questions about the potential neoplastic effects of ovulation-inducing agents used in the treatment of infertility¹–³. A recent analysis of 12 U.S. case-control studies ...

Figure 1. Norwegian Scabies in a Patient with AIDS.

A diffuse, nonpruritic, erythematous, macular rash developed in a 43-year-old man with the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and a CD4+ cell count of 22 per cubic millimeter. Initially, the rash ...

Influenza and its complications account for 10,000 to 40,000 excess deaths annually in the United States, of which more than 80 percent occur among the elderly¹. The Advisory Committee on Immunizations Practices of the Public Health Service and others ...

Drug treatment of cardiac arrhythmias is not uniformly effective and frequently causes side effects. Recently, new data have become available that more clearly delineate the risks of antiarrhythmic-drug therapy. At the same time, establishing a benefit of ...

Presentation of Case

A 55-year-old woman with idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura was admitted to the hospital because of left hemiparesis.

The patient had been well until 3 1/2 years earlier, when easy bruising developed and a diagnosis of idiopathic ...

The special vulnerability of very premature infants under the assault of modern intensive care techniques evokes strong responses: both the desire to sustain their fragile existence and doubts about the wisdom of doing so. The report by Hack et al. in ...

The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) was discovered and so named because of its association with allograft rejection in animals. Thus, when kidney transplantation in humans became a reality it was not surprising that the degree of matching of organ ...

More and more women are seeking treatment for infertility,¹ probably in part because they are postponing childbearing until an age when their ability to conceive is diminished. The number of office visits to U.S. physicians for infertility services rose ...

The first influenza vaccines were developed approximately 50 years ago by cultivating the virus in hens' eggs and inactivating it with formalin. Since influenza was viewed as a threat to military readiness, for many years thereafter the vaccines were ...

To the Editor: I am stunned by Dr. Poisson's explanation (May 19 issue)¹ of his behavior in regard to Protocol B-06 of the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project (NSABP). It is outrageous to suggest that it is permissible for an individual ...

To the Editor: Annas provides a thoughtful analysis of the Arato case (Jan. 20 issue),¹ in which physicians were sued for not informing a patient with pancreatic cancer of his prognosis. Since most Japanese doctors still withhold the truth from ...

To the Editor: Physician-assisted suicide and active euthanasia are topics of contentious debate in Michigan. After Dr. Jack Kevorkian assisted in a number of highly publicized suicides, the state legislature established the Michigan Commission on Death ...

To the Editor: Benjamin et al. (March 24 issue)¹ assert that the allocation of organs for transplantation follows rational principles that are embraced and applied ubiquitously -- in fact, legislated at the federal level. They further believe that “when ...

To the Editor: The addendum to Case 18-1994 (May 5 issue),¹ which describes a patient with tuberous sclerosis, stated that “the findings from a subsequent fine-needle aspiration biopsy of the left renal mass were consistent with an angiomyolipoma.” A ...

To the Editor: The differential diagnosis of corticotropin-dependent Cushing's syndrome and the localization of an ectopic source of corticotropin secretion are among the most difficult tasks in endocrinology. In his excellent discussion of the ...

To the Editor: Nienaber (May 12 issue)¹ presented an image of an aortic dissection obtained by transesophageal echocardiography in a horizontal plane. He described the dissection as located in the ascending aorta, approximately 3 cm above the aortic ...

To the Editor: I do want to make an apology to the American people for my role in what turned out to be the bad-apple hypothesis (March 17 issue)¹. It was all a terrible mistake. I remember very clearly the advice I gave to my economist colleague. It was ...

Jacalyn Duffin, a professor of the history of medicine, has spent a decade analyzing the unique wealth of daybooks and account books from the 1844-1889 medical practice of Dr. James Miles Langstaff of Richmond Hill, north of Toronto. She shares with us ...

Owsei Temkin is professor emeritus of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University and former director of the Johns Hopkins Institute of the History of Medicine. His style is direct and inviting, and he presents even the most complex material in a ...

During the second half of the 19th century in Germany, two schools of physiology disputed the nature of human visual perception. Heading the more established school was one of the most famous scientists of the time, Hermann von Helmholtz (1821 to 1894); ...

The functions of the digestive tract have always held a peculiar fascination, as evidenced by the positions of “Physician of the Belly of the Pharaoh” and “Guardian of the Anus” in the ancient Egyptian royal court. This scholarly work chronicles the ...

This remarkable sociological treatise, harking back to Talcott Parsons's perceptive elaboration of the sociology of professions, brings together 21 foremost social historians concerned with health care. Sprinkling in liberal and conservative viewpoints, ...