Twenty-five years ago, the specialty of geriatrics barely existed in American medicine. There was, however, a growing awareness that increasing numbers of people in developed countries were living into their 80s and 90s. It is now clear that geriatric ...

Primary pulmonary hypertension predominantly affects women, frequently in the prime of life, and usually leads to death from right ventricular failure within a few years after diagnosis. It is a vascular disease but is oddly confined to the small ...

To the Editor: Eriksson et al. (Nov. 1 issue)¹ report that fondaparinux was more effective than enoxaparin and equally safe in preventing venous thromboembolism after hip-fracture surgery. In their study, the first dose of enoxaparin was to be ...

To the Editor: Viscoli et al. (Oct. 25 issue)¹ report that estrogen-replacement therapy does not reduce the risk of stroke in women with a history of cerebrovascular disease. The fact that the women in this study were treated with estrogen alone, without ...

To the Editor: In his timely review of anthrax, Swartz (Nov. 29 issue)¹ states that “incision or débridement of such early [cutaneous] lesions should be avoided, since this may increase the possibility of bacteremia.” We believe that this prohibition ...

To the Editor: Like many other clinicians, we were disheartened by the report of the diagnosis of cutaneous anthrax in a seven-month-old child (Nov. 29 issue).¹ However, what we found most distressing about this and other cases was that the initial ...

To the Editor: Spironolactone should be added to Table 2 of the article by Huikuri et al. (Nov. 15 issue)¹ as an intervention that may prevent sudden death from cardiac causes. In the Randomized Aldactone Evaluation Study,² patients with New York Heart ...

To the Editor: Functional dyspepsia is a common and distressing chronic digestive disorder of unknown cause.¹,² We examined the effect of treatment of functional dyspepsia with capsaicin (trans-8-methyl-N-vanillyl-6-nonenamide), a component of red-pepper ...

In recent years, many historians have argued that the development of medicine in Great Britain during the Victorian era took place in an imperial rather than a national framework, but no one has tried to prove the point until now. Douglas M. Haynes's ...

For millions of years, the hand has helped define Homo sapiens. With its prehensile thumb, the hand first enabled humans to make and use tools. Our brains envisioned civilizations; our hands made them. So crucial are hands that they permeate language and ...