skin

link to excellent 5 min. video

link to excellent 11 min. video

link

link to full textbook: Physical Geology

link to American tectonics website and 2 min. video

book info

excerpt:

“When I was seventeen and staring up the skirts of eastern valleys, I was taught the rudiments of what is now referred to as the Old Geology.

The New Geology is the package phrase for the effects of the revolution that occurred in earth science in the nineteen-sixties, when geologists clambered onto seafloor spreading, when people began to discuss continents in terms of their velocities, and when the interactions of some twenty parts of the globe became known as plate tectonics. There were few hints of all that when I was seventeen, and now, a shake later, middle-aged and fading, I wanted to learn some geology again, to feel the difference between the Old and the New, to sense if possible how the science had settled down a decade after its great upheaval, but less in megapictures than in day-to-day contact with country rock, seeing what had not changed as well as what had changed.

The thought occurred to me that if you were to walk a series of roadcuts with a geologist something illuminating would in all likelihood occur. This was long before I met Karen Kleinspehn, or, for that matter, David Love, of the United States Geological Survey, or Anita Harris, also of the Survey, or Eldridge Moores, of the University of California at Davis, all of whom would eventually take me with them through various stretches of the continent.

What I did first off was what anyone would do. I called my local geologist. I live in Princeton, New Jersey, and the man I got in touch with was Kenneth Deffeyes, a senior professor who teaches introductory geology at Princeton University. It is an assignment that is angled wide. Students who have little aptitude for the sciences are required to take a course or two in the sciences en route to some cerebral Valhalla dangled high by the designers of curriculum. Deffeyes’ course is one that such students are drawn to select. He calls it Earth and Its Resources. They call it Rocks for Jocks.”

link to article

link to full article

book info

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Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.

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"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."

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There are various problems as regards language.

First, there is the problem what actually occurs in our minds when we use language with the intention of meaning something by it; this problem belongs to psychology.

Secondly, there is the problem as to what is the relation subsisting between thoughts, words, or sentences, and that which they refer to or mean; this problem belongs to epistemology.

Thirdly, there is the problem of using sentences so as to convey truth rather that falsehood; this belongs to the special sciences dealing with the subject-matter of the sentences in question.

Fourthly, there is the question: what relation must one fact (such as a sentence) have to another in order to be capable of being a symbol for that other?

This last is a logical question, and is the one with which Mr. Wittgenstein is concerned.

 The instruction of Dua-Khety:   “Sharing knowledge is the greatest of all callings.  There's nothing like it in the land.”   ... regarding the value of written language (to his son, as he entered scribe school  c. 2,000 BC,  Egypt - Middle Kingdom).

link to video - 52 min. documentary

'Book of the Dead' papyri are first found in the early New Kingdom c.1450 BC and the finest (like Hunefer's) were written by expert scribes and decorated by master draftsmen. Perhaps, as royal scribe, it was Hunefer himself who put brush to ink to inscribe his own papyrus.

Full size polychrome vignette of Hunefer in judgement scene.

From left: above, Hunefer kneels in adoration before a company of deities, who are named as Ra, Atum, Shu, Tefnut, Geb, Nut, Horus, Isis, Nephthys, Hu and Sia, and the Southern, Northern and Western 'roads'. Below, the jackal-headed Anubis leads Hunefer towards the balance of judgement, where Anubis is depicted again, kneeling to adjust the plumb-weight on the balance.

On the left scale-pan is Hunefer's heart, and on the right the feather hieroglyph which symbolises Maat. Below the balance crouches Ammit, the 'Devourer of the Damned', accompanied by a short inscription which describes her: 'Her front is a crocodile, her rear a hippopotamus, her middle a lion.' To the right, Thoth, ibis-headed, holds a pen and scribal palette to record the outcome of the weighing. Horus then conducts Hunefer to a shrine in which Osiris sits enthroned, accompanied by the goddesses Isis and Nephthys. The four Sons of Horus stand on a large lily (lotus) which grows from a pool of water beneath Osiris' throne.

The lines of inscription above the scenes contain passages from spell 30B of the Book of the Dead.

source

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The Book of the Dead developed from a tradition of funerary manuscripts dating back to the Egyptian Old Kingdom. The first funerary texts were the Pyramid Texts, first used in the Pyramid of King Unas of the 5th Dynasty, around 2400 BC. These texts were written on the walls of the burial chambers within pyramids, and were exclusively for the use of the pharaoh (and, from the 6th Dynasty, the queen). The Pyramid Texts were written in an unusual hieroglyphic style; many of the hieroglyphs representing humans or animals were left incomplete or drawn mutilated, most likely to prevent them causing any harm to the dead pharaoh.

The purpose of the Pyramid Texts was to help the dead king take his place amongst the gods, in particular to reunite him with his divine father Ra; at this period the afterlife was seen as being in the sky, rather than the underworld described in the Book of the Dead. Towards the end of the Old Kingdom, the Pyramid Texts ceased to be an exclusively royal privilege, and were adopted by regional governors and other high-ranking officials.

source

Natural Language Processing - Wikipedia

link to website

link to website

link to site

link to 43 min. video - discussion of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language

link

link

source

source

Le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point. On le sent en mille choses. C’est le cœur qui sent Dieu, et non la raison. Voilà ce que c’est que la foi parfaite, Dieu sensible au cœur.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. We know this in a thousand ways. It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.

about

link to full text

book info

excerpts:

He [Poggio Bracciolini] was a superbly well-trained scribe, with exceptionally fine handwriting, great powers of concentration, and a high degree of accuracy. It is difficult for us, at this distance, to take in the significance of such qualities: our technologies for producing transcriptions, facsimiles, and copies have almost entirely erased what was once an important personal achievement. That importance began to decline, though not at all precipitously, even in Poggio’s own lifetime, for by the 1430s a German entrepreneur, Johann Gutenberg, began experimenting with a new invention, movable type, which would revolutionize the reproduction and transmission of texts. By the century’s end printers, especially the great Aldus in Venice, would print Latin texts in a typeface whose clarity and elegance remain unrivalled after five centuries. That typeface was based on the beautiful handwriting of Poggio and his humanist friends. What Poggio did by hand to produce a single copy would soon be done mechanically to produce hundreds.

But this achievement lay in the future, and, in any case, the printers who set the books in type still depended on accurate, readable, handwritten transcriptions, often of manuscripts that were illegible to all but a few.

…

Most books in the ancient world took the form of scrolls—like the Torah scrolls that Jews use in their services to this day—but by the fourth century Christians had almost completely opted for a different format, the codex, from which our familiar books derive. The codex has the huge advantage of being far easier for readers to find their way about in: the text can be conveniently paginated and indexed, and the pages can be turned quickly to the desired place. Not until the invention of the computer, with its superior search functions, could a serious challenge be mounted to the codex’s magnificently simple and flexible format. Only now have we begun once again to speak of “scrolling” through a text.

Since papyrus was no longer available and paper did not come into general use until the fourteenth century, for more than a thousand years the chief writing material used for books was made from the skins of animals—cows, sheep, goats, and occasionally deer. These surfaces needed to be made smooth, and hence another tool that the monastic librarian distributed was pumice stone, to rub away the remaining animal hair along with any bumps or imperfections. The scribe to whom a poor-quality parchment had been given was in for a very disagreeable task, and in the margins of surviving monastic manuscripts there are occasional outbursts of distress: “The parchment is hairy” . . . “Thin ink, bad parchment, difficult text” . . . “Thank God, it will soon be dark.” “Let the copyist be permitted to put an end to his labor,” a weary monk wrote beneath his name, the date, and the place where he worked; “Now I’ve written the whole thing,” wrote another. “For Christ’s sake give me a drink.”

Humanistic Script - link to extensive collection of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts

De rerum natura - c. 55 BC - On the Nature of Things - Lucretius

To the Greek philosopher Epicurus, the unhappiness and degradation of humans arose largely from the dread which they entertained of the power of the deities, from terror of their wrath. This wrath was supposed to be displayed by the misfortunes inflicted in this life and by the everlasting tortures that were the lot of the guilty in a future state (or, where these feelings were not strongly developed, from a vague dread of gloom and misery after death). Epicurus thus made it his mission to remove these fears, and thus to establish tranquility in the minds of his readers. To do this, Epicurus invoked the atomism of Democritus to demonstrate that the material universe was formed not by a Supreme Being, but by the mixing of elemental particles that had existed from all eternity governed by certain simple laws. He argued that the deities (whose existence he did not deny) lived forevermore in the enjoyment of absolute peace—strangers to all the passions, desires, and fears, which affect humans—and totally indifferent to the world and its inhabitants, unmoved alike by their virtues and their crimes. This meant that humans had nothing to fear from them.

Lucretius's task was to clearly state and fully develop these views in an attractive form; his work was an attempt to show through poetry that everything in nature can be explained by natural laws, without the need for the intervention of divine beings. Lucretius identifies the supernatural with the notion that the deities created our world or interfere with its operations in some way. He argues against fear of such deities by demonstrating, through observations and arguments, that the operations of the world can be accounted for in terms of natural phenomena. These phenomena are the result of regular, but purposeless motions and interactions of tiny atoms in empty space.

source

book info

How Handwriting Developed - Graphic Design History website

link to webpage

website

book info

source

excerpt:

Because form cannot be long sustained in the living, we collapse inward with age. We die. Our bodies, which were the product of a kind of hidden teaching by an alphabet we are only beginning dimly to discern, are dismissed into their elements. What is carried onward, assuming we have descendants, is the little capsule of instructions such as I encountered hastening by me in the shape of a running seed. We have learned the first biological lesson: that in each generation life passes through the eye of a needle. It exists for a time molecularly and in no recognizable semblance to its adult condition. It instructs its way again into man or reptile. As the ages pass, so do variants of the code. Occasionally, a species vanishes on a wind as unreturning as that which took the pterodactyls.

Or the code changes by subtle degrees through the statistical altering of individuals; until I, as the fading Neanderthals must once have done, have looked with still-living eyes upon the creature whose genotype was quite possibly to replace me. The genetic alphabets, like genuine languages, ramify and evolve along unreturning pathways.

If nature's instructions are carried through the eye of a needle, through the molecular darkness of a minute world below the field of human vision and of time's decay, the same, it might be said, is true of those monumental structures known as civilizations. They are transmitted from one generation to another in invisible puffs of air known as words—words that can also be symbolically incised on clay. As the delicate printing on the mud at the water's edge retraces a visit of autumn birds long since departed, so the little scrabbled tablets in perished cities carry the seeds of human thought across the deserts of millennia. In this instance the teacher is the social brain, but it, too, must be compressed into minute hieroglyphs, and the minds that wrought the miracle efface themselves amidst the jostling torrent of messages, which, like the genetic code, are shuffled and reshuffled as they hurry through eternity. Like a mutation, an idea may be recorded in the wrong time, to lie latent like a recessive gene and spring once more to life in an auspicious era.

… from Brock Biology of Microorganisms - 16th ed. - 2021

… from Brock Biology of Microorganisms - 16th ed. - 2021

The Story of Philosophy

… from the preface:

Human knowledge had become unmanageably vast; every science had begotten a dozen more, each subtler than the rest; the telescope revealed stars and systems beyond the mind of man to number or to name; geology spoke in terms of millions of years, where men before had thought in terms of thousands; physics found a universe in the atom, and biology found a microcosm in the cell; physiology discovered inexhaustible mystery in every organ, and psychology in every dream; anthropology reconstructed the unsuspected antiquity of man, archeology unearthed buried cities and forgotten states, history proved all history false, and painted a canvas which only a Spengler or an Eduard Meyer could vision as a whole; theology crumbled, and political theory cracked; invention complicated life and war, and economic creeds overturned governments and inflamed the world; philosophy itself, which had once summoned all sciences to its aid in making a coherent image of the world and an alluring picture of the good, found its task of coordination too stupendous for its courage, ran away from all these battlefronts of truth, and hid itself in recondite and narrow lanes, timidly secure from the issues and responsibilities of life.

Human knowledge had become too great for the human mind. All that remained was the scientific specialist, who knew “more and more about less and less,” and the philosophical speculator, who knew less and less about more and more. The specialist put on blinders in order to shut out from his vision all the world but one little spot, to which he glued his nose. Perspective was lost. “Facts” replaced understanding; and knowledge, split into a thousand isolated fragments, no longer generated wisdom. Every science, and every branch of philosophy, developed a technical terminology intelligible only to its exclusive devotees; as men learned more about the world, they found themselves ever less capable of expressing to their educated fellow-men what it was that they had learned.

The gap between life and knowledge grew wider and wider; those who governed could not understand those who thought, and those who wanted to know could not understand those who knew. In the midst of unprecedented learning popular ignorance flourished, and chose its exemplars to rule the great cities of the world; in the midst of sciences endowed and enthroned as never before, new religions were born every day, and old superstitions recaptured the ground they had lost. The common man found himself forced to choose between a scientific priesthood mumbling unintelligible pessimism, and a theological priesthood mumbling incredible hopes.

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excerpt:

The large societies found in some other species, such as ants and bees, are stable and resilient because most of the information needed to sustain them is encoded in the genome. A female honeybee larva can, for example, grow up to be either a queen or a worker, depending on what food it is fed. Its DNA programmes the necessary behaviours for whatever role it will fulfil in life. Hives can be very complex social structures, containing many different kinds of workers, such as harvesters, nurses and cleaners. But so far researchers have failed to locate lawyer bees. Bees don’t need lawyers, because there is no danger that they might forget or violate the hive constitution. The queen does not cheat the cleaner bees of their food, and they never go on strike demanding higher wages. But humans do such things all the time.

Because the Sapiens social order is imagined, humans cannot preserve the critical information for running it simply by making copies of their DNA and passing these on to their progeny. A conscious effort has to be made to sustain laws, customs, procedures and manners, otherwise the social order would quickly collapse. For example, King Hammurabi decreed that people are divided into superiors, commoners and slaves. Unlike the beehive class system, this is not a natural division–there is no trace of it in the human genome. If the Babylonians could not keep this ‘truth’ in mind, their society would have ceased to function. Similarly, when Hammurabi passed his DNA to his offspring, it did not encode his ruling that a superior man who killed a commoner woman must pay thirty silver shekels. Hammurabi deliberately had to instruct his sons in the laws of his empire, and his sons and grandsons had to do the same. Empires generate huge amounts of information. Beyond laws, empires have to keep accounts of transactions and taxes, inventories of military supplies and merchant vessels, and calendars of festivals and victories.

For millions of years people stored information in a single place–their brains. Unfortunately, the human brain is not a good storage device for empire-sized databases, for three main reasons. First, its capacity is limited. True, some people have astonishing memories, and in ancient times there were memory professionals who could store in their heads the topographies of whole provinces and the law codes of entire states. Nevertheless, there is a limit that even master mnemonists cannot transcend. A lawyer might know by heart the entire law code of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, but not the details of every legal proceeding that took place in Massachusetts from the Salem witch trials onward. Secondly, humans die, and their brains die with them. Any information stored in a brain will be erased in less than a century. It is, of course, possible to pass memories from one brain to another, but after a few transmissions, the information tends to get garbled or lost. Thirdly and most importantly, the human brain has been adapted to store and process only particular types of information. In order to survive, ancient hunter-gatherers had to remember the shapes, qualities and behaviour patterns of thousands of plant and animal species. They had to remember that a wrinkled yellow mushroom growing in autumn under an elm tree is most probably poisonous, whereas a similar-looking mushroom growing in winter under an oak tree is a good stomach-ache remedy. Hunter-gatherers also had to bear in mind the opinions and relations of several dozen band members. If Lucy needed a band member’s help to get John to stop harassing her, it was important for her to remember that John had fallen out last week with Mary, who would thus be a likely and enthusiastic ally. Consequently, evolutionary pressures have adapted the human brain to store immense quantities of botanical, zoological, topographical and social information.

But when particularly complex societies began to appear in the wake of the Agricultural Revolution, a completely new type of information became vital–numbers. Foragers were never obliged to handle large amounts of mathematical data. No forager needed to remember, say, the number of fruit on each tree in the forest. So human brains did not adapt to storing and processing numbers. Yet in order to maintain a large kingdom, mathematical data was vital. It was never enough to legislate laws and tell stories about guardian gods. One also had to collect taxes. In order to tax hundreds of thousands of people, it was imperative to collect data about people’s incomes and possessions; data about payments made; data about arrears, debts and fines; data about discounts and exemptions. This added up to millions of data bits, which had to be stored and processed. Without this capacity, the state would never know what resources it had and what further resources it could tap. When confronted with the need to memorise, recall and handle all these numbers, most human brains overdosed or fell asleep. This mental limitation severely constrained the size and complexity of human collectives. When the amount of people and property in a particular society crossed a critical threshold, it became necessary to store and process large amounts of mathematical data. Since the human brain could not do it, the system collapsed.

For thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution, human social networks remained relatively small and simple. The first to overcome the problem were the ancient Sumerians, who lived in southern Mesopotamia. There, a scorching sun beating upon rich muddy plains produced plentiful harvests and prosperous towns. As the number of inhabitants grew, so did the amount of information required to coordinate their affairs.

Between the years 3500 BC and 3000 BC, some unknown Sumerian geniuses invented a system for storing and processing information outside their brains, one that was custom-built to handle large amounts of mathematical data. The Sumerians thereby released their social order from the limitations of the human brain, opening the way for the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires.

The data-processing system invented by the Sumerians is called

‘writing’.

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Greek

The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late ninth or early eighth century BC. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the first alphabetic script in history to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants.

In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many local variants, but, by the end of the fourth century BC, the Euclidean alphabet, with twenty-four letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version that is still used to write Greek today.

These twenty-four letters (each in uppercase and lowercase forms) are: Α α, Β β, Γ γ, Δ δ, Ε ε, Ζ ζ, Η η, Θ θ, Ι ι, Κ κ, Λ λ, Μ μ, Ν ν, Ξ ξ, Ο ο, Π π, Ρ ρ, Σ σ/ς, Τ τ, Υ υ, Φ φ, Χ χ, Ψ ψ, and Ω ω.

The Greek alphabet is the ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. Like Latin and Cyrillic, Greek originally had only a single form of each letter; it developed the letter case distinction between uppercase and lowercase in parallel with Latin during the modern era.

A to Z: The First Alphabet: How Writing Changed the World - NOVA 9/23/20 - PBS video - 54:02

A to Z: The First Alphabet: How Writing Changed the World - NOVA 9/23/20 - PBS video - 54:02

link for full-size map

website - extensive collection of visualizations

source - link to website

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… from Europe - a history

… from Europe - a history

book info

source

source

link to full article - Wikipedia

link to videos

link to video

link to article

calligraphy - website of Brody Neuenschwander

link to website

source

See: full article

excerpts:

Carbon dioxide is the waste product of cellular metabolism. As cells consume oxygen, carbon dioxide is produced, transferred to the circulation, and delivered to the lungs via venous return.

Cellular production of carbon dioxide is a metabolic by-product of the oxidative breakdown of metabolic fuels. The higher the metabolic rate, the higher the carbon dioxide production rate. Carbon dioxide dissolves rapidly in the cells and easily diffuses out of the cells and into the venous blood. Carbon dioxide is carried by the poorly oxygenated venous blood through the right heart and into the pulmonary arteries to reach the capillaries surrounding each pulmonary alveolus.

As ambient air is drawn into the alveolus during inspiration, the carbon dioxide in the blood diffuses through the capillary and alveolar walls into the alveolar air sac. Under normal conditions, one pass of the blood through the alveolar capillary drives the alveolar Pco2 nearly to match (usually within 5 mm Hg) the Paco2. As expiration begins, the gas containing carbon dioxide is expelled from the alveoli to displace and mix with the air in the bronchial tree. As this mixture of gases reaches the upper airways and the capnography monitor, the measured Pco2 rises sharply to a plateau and then slowly increases to a peak as the carbon dioxide level continues to increase. This peak Pco2 at the end of expiration is known as the end-tidal carbon dioxide; in healthy individuals, it is generally within 5 mm Hg of the Paco2.

…

Excretion of carbon dioxide is the final common pathway of metabolism, and it provides a useful global indication of patient status. Ventilation must be adequate to carry oxygen into the lungs. Oxygen is transferred into the erythrocytes and transported to the cells at the tissue level. Transport is a function of the cardiovascular system. The process of aerobic metabolism consumes the oxygen and produces carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide is transferred from the tissue into the red cells and is transported to the lungs for elimination. Hypoxemia, cerebral ischemia, and coronary ischemia are possible even in the presence of normal capnography waveforms and numerical values.

See: full article

source

excerpts:

The gold standard for monitoring oxygenation and ventilation is the measurement of arterial blood gases (ABGs)—specifically, by examining PaO2, SaO2 for oxygen levels and PaCO2 for adequacy of ventilation. However, ABGs are costly, require some minutes of time to access data, provide only a snapshot of the parameters at the time of the sampling, require an arterial catheter or arterial puncture.

In contrast, pulse oximetry and capnography can provide continuous monitoring by noninvasive means and the technology is improving to make these approaches even more accurate and more useful.

source

excerpt:

Capnography is performed using an infrared sensor to detect CO2 in the exhaled gas or using a pH sensitive material that changes color (colorimetric) in the presence of CO2. The infrared sensor can be either placed in the exhaled gas stream (mainstream) or use a sampling tube to pull a small portion of the exhaled gas into the sensor (sidestream). Mainstream capnography is used in intubated patients while sidestream monitoring can be use in both intubated and non-intubated patients. In nonintubated patients a nasal cannula is often used to provide the sample, and some cannulas have the capacity to provide supplemental oxygen through one side of the nasal prongs while obtaining the exhaled CO2 sample from the other side, using separate channels to connect to an oxygen source and a CO2 monitor.

Great is granite and the Yosemite is its prophet.

source

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granite

Ancient Landscapes of Western North America: A Geologic History with Paleogeographic Maps - 2018 - order info

Listed below are the first pages of all 63 essays on imagessays.com.

Each essay is 1,000 words or less ( ~ 2 pages ) … a PDF of the complete illustrated essay may be opened by clicking on the *** red title *** below the image … a link to the *webpage* which contains the essay is also provided.

*** seeing ***

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****seeing****

*** Apologia Scientiae et Fides in Deo ***

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**marrow**

*** Skin of the Earth ***

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*skin*

*** granite ***

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*granite*

*** titin ***

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*titin*

*** Flowers and Flight … Blossoms and Bees ***

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*flight*

*** Honeybee Heart ***

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*pump*

*** Cardiology Origins ***

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*pump*

*** History of Cardiology and Cardiovascular Surgery - Intersections in Alabama - ***

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*pump*

*** Honeybee Brain ***

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*brain*

*** photon ***

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*photon*

*** mitochondria ***

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*mitochondria*

*** breath ***

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*breath*

**** CQI for CPR - Providing Real-Time Performance Feedback During CPR **** … PDF slideshow presentation

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*cardiocerebral*

*** Mortality ***

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*mortality*

*** Survivor’s Tale ***

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*survivor*

*** Therapeutic Hypothermia: A 90 Turn Toward Recovery ***

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*cold*

*** Absolute Risk Reduction ***

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*absolute*

*** glomerulus ***

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*glomerulus*

*** pollen ***

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*pollen*

*** Beeswax ***

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*wax*

*** Honeybee: Imaginal Discs ***

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*hox*

*** comb ***

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*comb*

*** Trinity Swarm ***

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*swarm*

*** Starlight to Honey ***

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*starlight*

*** heat ***

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*heat*

*** Winter Cluster ***

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*winter*

*** Flight of the Honey Bee ***

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flight*

*** Flight Plan ***

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*direction*

*** drone ***

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*drone*

*** million dot project ***

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*million*

*** bear ***

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*bear*

*** Million Dot Project - Population ***

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*babies*

*** third surface ***

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*surface*

*** wax moths ***

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*lizard*

*** conversion ***

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*conversion*

*** CQI of EMR project ***

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*interoperability*

*** Seeking converts Top-bar, anyone? ***

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*conversion*

*** beenome ***

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*beenome*

*** Footprints ***

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*foot*

*** scent ***

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*scent*

*** Coumarin ***

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*coumarin*

*** Honey Bee Polyandry … or … What Kind of Family is This, Anyway? ***

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*queen*

*** wings ***

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*wings*

*** androgyny ***

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*androgyny*

*** Smoke ***

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*smoke*

*** release ***

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*release*

*** Cyanosis ***

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*cyan*

*** sugar ***

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*sugar*

*** Apo-Bee ***

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*apoBee*

*** homeotherm ***

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*homeotherm*

*** proton ***

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*proton*

*** recombination ***

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*recombination*

*** mRNA vaccines: How decades of basic science research delivered a vaccine quickly when it was urgently needed in 2020 ***

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*corona*

*** Public Health ***

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*vaccines*

*** membrane ***

.

*membrane*

*** Case Study: Iron Deficiency ***

.

*iron*

*** Calculus of Bees ***

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*calculus*

*** Hemoglobin ***

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*hemoglobin*

*** rbc ***

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*rbc*

*** Miguel de Cervantes to His Readers ***

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*quixote*

*** syrinx ***

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*syrinx*

*** tilt ***

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*tilt*

*** Here’s a bit of info on honeybees ***

.

*touch*

full text

full text

link to complete text

link to full text

link to article

excerpt: Lynn Margulis's great insight was that, in the early history of life on earth, some 3.5 billion years ago, when the only living forms were single-cell creatures without complex internal structures, evolutionary success could arise through increasing cellular complexity. This complexity could emerge through symbiosis between organisms of different species. The most effective form of symbiosis occurred when the two cell types merged, each contributing to the creation of a harmonious living whole, the eukaryotic cell.

book info - c. 2023

link to webpage

“We are studying the molecular basis and evolution of life-cycle transitions in the flagellated green soil alga, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. We have cloned genes in the mating-type (MT) locus and genes regulated by MT that control the transitions between vegetative growth, gametic differentiation, and zygote development. These include genes responsible for gametic differentiation, mate recognition, and uniparental inheritance of chloroplast DNA, allowing us to study their function and their evolution during speciation. Of particular current interest are the homeoproteins Gsm1 and Gsp1 that heterodimerize upon gametic cell fusion, migrate to the nucleus, and activate the early diploid genetic program. These proteins share genetic ancestry with the Knox and Bell homeoprotein families that play key roles in determining cell fate in the land plants.”

De Rerum Natura … c. 55 BC … On the Nature of Things … Lucretius

Ancient Atomism - Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius  ... indivisible particles and empty space

The Assayer - Galileo Galilei - 1623 - full text

… about Galileo - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

… from The Swerve:

“Faith must take first place among all the other laws of philosophy,” declared a Jesuit spokesman in 1624, “so that what, by established authority, is the word of God may not be exposed to falsity.”

The words were a clear warning to curb unacceptable speculation: “The only thing necessary to the Philosopher, in order to know the truth, which is one and simple, is to oppose whatever is contrary to Faith and to accept that which is contained in Faith.”

The Jesuit did not specify a specific target of this warning, but contemporaries would have easily understood that his words were particularly directed at the writer of a recently published scientific work called The Assayer. That writer was Galileo Galilei.

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems - Galileo Galilei - 1632 - full text

… from The Swerve:

On August 1, 1632, the Society of Jesus strictly prohibited and condemned the doctrine of atoms. That prohibition in itself could not have precipitated a move against Galileo, since The Assayer had been cleared eight years earlier for publication.

But Galileo’s publication, also in 1632, of the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems gave his enemies the opportunity that they had been looking for: they promptly denounced him to the Congregation of the Holy Office, as the Inquisition was called.

On June 22, 1633, the Inquisition delivered its verdict: “We say, sentence, and declare that you, Galileo, by reason of the evidence arrived at in the trial, and by you confessed as above, have rendered yourself in the judgment of this Holy Office vehemently suspected of heresy.”

link to Leeuwenhoek website

How We Know the Earth is Ancient - PBS Space Time - 14 min. video - 4/19/20

marrow of Basilosaurus vertebral body

Apologia Scientiae et Fides in Deo

full text

Le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point. On le sent en mille choses. C’est le cœur qui sent Dieu, et non la raison. Voilà ce que c’est que la foi parfaite, Dieu sensible au cœur.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. We know this in a thousand ways. It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.

book info

excerpt:

Something happened in the Renaissance, something that surged up against the constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world, the claims of the body. The cultural shift is notoriously difficult to define, and its significance has been fiercely contested. But it can be intuited easily enough when you look in Siena at Duccio’s painting of the enthroned Virgin, the Maestà, and then in Florence at Botticelli’s Primavera, a painting that, not coincidentally, was influenced by On the Nature of Things. In the principal panel of Duccio’s magnificent altarpiece (ca. 1310), the adoration of the angels, saints, and martyrs is focused on a serene center, the heavily robed Mother of God and her child absorbed in solemn contemplation. In the Primavera (ca. 1482), the ancient gods of the spring appear together in a verdant wood, all intently engaged in the complex, rhythmic choreography of renewed natural fecundity evoked in Lucretius’ poem; “Spring comes and Venus, preceded by Venus’ winged harbinger, and mother Flora, following hard on the heels of Zephyr, prepares the way for them, strewing all their path with a profusion of exquisite hues and scents.” The key to the shift lies not only in the intense, deeply informed revival of interest in the pagan deities and the rich meanings that once attached to them. It lies also in the whole vision of a world in motion, a world not rendered insignificant but made more beautiful by its transience, its erotic energy, and its ceaseless change.

Though most evident in works of art, the change from one way of perceiving and living in the world to another was not restricted to aesthetics: it helps to account for the intellectual daring of Copernicus and Vesalius, Giordano Bruno and William Harvey, Hobbes and Spinoza. The transformation was not sudden or once-for-all, but it became increasingly possible to turn away from a preoccupation with angels and demons and immaterial causes and to focus instead on things in this world; to understand that humans are made of the same stuff as everything else and are part of the natural order; to conduct experiments without fearing that one is infringing on God’s jealously guarded secrets; to question authorities and challenge received doctrines; to legitimate the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain; to imagine that there are other worlds beside the one that we inhabit; to entertain the thought that the sun is only one star in an infinite universe; to live an ethical life without reference to postmortem rewards and punishments; to contemplate without trembling the death of the soul. In short, it became possible—never easy, but possible—in the poet Auden’s phrase to find the mortal world enough.

De Rerum Natura - Lucretius - 50 BC - [full text - Latin]

De Rerum Natura  - On the Nature of Things  -  Lucretius  -  50 BC   [full text - English]

The Swerve - Greenblatt - The New Yorker - 2011 book review

excerpt:

“On August 24, 79 ce, the massive eruption of Mount Vesuvius completely destroyed not only Pompeii but also the small seaside resort of Herculaneum on the Bay of Naples.

…

“Many of the rolls in what became known as the Villa of the Papyri had been crushed by falling debris and the weight of the heavy mud; all had been carbonized by the volcanic lava, ash, and gas. But what had blackened these books had also preserved them from further decay.”

link to full text

excerpt:

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn—pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theo-criticism and geography and history and economics—why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough."

Buried by the Ash of Vesuvius, These Scrolls Are Being Read for the First Time in Millennia - Smithsonian Magazine - 2018

website

Extensive notes from courses taught at University of Washington in Seattle - mcgoodwin.net website

info

full article

“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”

Now let’s look at how Einstein articulated all of this in the famous paper that the Annalen der Physik received on June 30, 1905. For all its momentous import, it may be one of the most spunky and enjoyable papers in all of science.

Most of its insights are conveyed in words and vivid thought experiments, rather than in complex equations. There is some math involved, but it is mainly what a good high school senior could comprehend. “The whole paper is a testament to the power of simple language to convey deep and powerfully disturbing ideas.”

source

link to video

excerpt:

The earliest decades of the 20th century were exciting times for science. It was an age when many brilliant thinkers from around the world stepped up with some groundbreaking ideas and theories that would forever change our understanding of the world. Subsequently, there was also the need for conferences that would focus on and tackle certain pressing questions of science.

The world’s first conference on physics took place in 1911, initiated by Belgian industrialist Ernest Solvay. Known as the Conseil Solvay, this gathering followed an invite-only format, and more importantly, stimulated Solvay to establish the Solvay Institutes for Physics and Chemistry by 1912.

Of course, some editions were more special than others. Judged by group photos, the fifth edition of the conference in 1927, focusing on electrons and photons, seems to be the most significant. Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Marie Curie can all be spotted in the group photograph that year, and the rest of the 26 attendees were not the less brilliant at all.

Solvay not only set the Institute to work but also organized the first Solvay Conference that same year, which in the long run turned out to be a game-changer for the field of physics. Based in Brussels, the conference took the tradition of being conducted every third year and always focusing on some of the most complex issues that physicists tried to answer.

While quantum theory was freshly formulated by 1927, the Solvay conference set a turning point: this was the space for resolving a notable struggle ongoing between two distinct groups of scientists.

The first group, the so-called scientific realists, among whom Einstein was the most prominent, wanted to apply some rigid dictates of scientific methods, inspired by thinkers of the likes of Karl Popper and Charles Pierce. The second group, however, led by Bohr and designated as the “instrumentalists,” were more inclined to fewer rules and more evidence-based results within the employment of scientific methods.

As the debates concluded, the instrumentalists gained more favor, and ever since, their norm became the standard throughout the world of science. A not so happy Einstein, slightly disappointed with such an outcome, commented that “God does not play dice.” But Bohr would not fall short after replying, “Einstein, stop telling God what to do.”

Einstein and Bohr undoubtedly were two of the most famous of all 29 conference attendees, but it’s worthwhile to note that 17 out of the total became or already were Nobel Prize winners. Marie Curie was the only woman among the bunch of men, at that point was already distinguished for having won two Nobel Prizes. Her first one was in 1903 in the field of chemistry, and the second in 1911 for physics.

In 1922 Einstein claimed the prominent award for his contributions to theoretical physics and particularly for his breakthrough discovery concerning the law of the photoelectric effect.

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excerpt:

Second from the left on the front row sits Max Planck, one more brilliant theoretical physicist, German by nationality, who had claimed his Nobel Prize in 1919 after making the critical discovery of energy quanta. The Max Planck society which today runs a significant number of research institutions all over Germany, as well as the famed Planck space observatory, are both named after him.

Last but certainly not least, Erwin Schrodinger, in the middle of the back row on the photograph, came to prominence a few years after the 1927 conference. He is most famous for devising the Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment to illustrate the paradox of quantum superposition.

He and Einstein are known to have exchanged many letters discussing the interpretation of ideas in quantum mechanics, including whether a particular object can exist in two distinct states simultaneously.

source

Einstein’s Quantum Riddle - NOVA - 2019 - 60 min. video

… re: Quantum Entanglement

full text - 1935

full text - 1964

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The Secrets of Quantum Physics - Einstein’s Nightmare - Jim Al-Kahlili - 2014 - video

Albert Einstein

Certainly no one in 1879 in Ulm, Germany, could have guessed that one of their own born that year would someday receive global praise for his undisputed genius, meriting recently the coveted title “person of the century” (Time magazine). Likewise, international fame was probably not what Albert Einstein himself anticipated in 1895 when he failed the entrance exam for the Federal Polytechnical Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. Even as he worked and was being promoted at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, Switzerland (1902–08), Einstein was far from becoming a household name, let alone the most renowned

Nobel Prize winner in physics, which he received in 1921 not for his special theory of relativity (of E=MC2 fame) that inaugurated the atomic age in 1905, but for his discovery of the photoelectric effect (the hypothesis he proposed also in 1905 that electromagnetic radiation interacts with matter as if the radiation had a granular structure or particles).

Shortly thereafter, when Einstein’s reputation in academia waxed toward worldwide celebrity, no one could have presaged that in 1952 the newly established state of Israel would offer him the presidency, which he declined. That invitation, however, points out that he was not only perpetually engaged in the subtle mysteries of the universe but also as outspoken in the political arena as a Zionist who detested the Nazis’ rise to power, as a prophet who insisted that Jews make peace with Arabs, and as a pacifist, who, in his famous letter to President Roosevelt (1939), warned against the potential abuses of atomic energy, despite his support for the development of the A-bomb. Even days before his death on April 18, 1955, he wrote his last signed letter to the philosopher Bertrand Russell expressing his intention to sign a joint manifesto insisting that all nations renounce nuclear weapons. By then his brilliant mark on human history was as unquestionable as his unkempt hair was uniquely recognizable.

It is this larger-than-life Einstein who wrote the following essay on the proper relationship between science and religion, part one in 1939 and part two in 1941. It is also here in the latter part of the essay that we find his often quoted dictum, “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” He wrote “Science and Religion” as a contribution to a symposium held in New York in 1941 on what roles science, philosophy, and religion played in the cause of American democracy.

source

The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett - Scientific American - 2008

The Many-Worlds Theory, Explained - The MIT Press Reader -

5/20/20

The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics: psychological versus physical bases for the multiplicity of “worlds”. - Howard Barnum - Los Alamos - 2004 - [ Howard Barnum’s blog ]

full text - 2019

excerpts:

Quantum mechanics is one of the most successful physical theories to date.

Not only has it been confirmed through a wide range of observations and experiments, but it also has led to technological advances of a breathtaking scale. From electronics and optics to computing, the applications of quantum mechanics are ubiquitous in our lives.

As much as it has given rise to technological innovations, the meaning of quantum mechanics remains elusive.

Many curious features of quantum mechanics, such as entanglement, non-locality, and randomness, are taken to be prima facie challenges for a clear understanding of quantum mechanics. These puzzles are related to the wave function, the central object in quantum mechanics. Understanding the meaning of quantum mechanics seems to require a good understanding of the meaning of the wave function.

What does the wave function represent? That is the main concern of this survey article. The answer to that question is complicated by the fact that the wave function does not look like anything familiar. It is a function defined on a vastly high-dimensional space, with values in complex numbers, and unique only up to an “overall phase.”

There are three main views about the wave function [one is Realism] :

*** Realism ***: The wave function represents something objective and mind-independent. In this article, focus is on the realist interpretations of the wave function. They seem to be the most interesting and promising ways of understanding quantum mechanics.

…

A century after the discovery of quantum mechanics, although there is no consensus on what it means, we have made significant progress in constructing several realist interpretations. Almost every interpretation requires further developments, and it is too early to say which one is the best or the most fruitful.

It is also too early to think that those are exhaustive of all the options available to the realist. In all likelihood, there will be other ways to think about the wave function from the realist perspective that we have never considered.

full text - 2020

full text

book info

excerpt:

“There was a moment when the grammar of the world seemed clear: at the root of the variegated forms of reality, just particles of matter guided by a few forces. Humankind could think that it had raised the Veil of Maya, seen the basis of the real. It didn’t last. Many facts did not fit. Until, in the summer of 1925, a twenty-three-year-old German spent days of anxious solitude on a windswept island in the North Sea: Helgoland—in English also Heligoland—the Sacred Island. There, on the island, he found the idea that made it possible to account for all recalcitrant facts, to build the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics, “quantum theory.” Perhaps the most impressive scientific revolution of all time. The name of the young man was Werner Heisenberg, and the story told in this book begins with him.”

“On the island of Helgoland—barren, extreme, battered by the winds of the north—Werner Heisenberg lifted a veil. An abyss opened. The story that this book has to tell starts from the island where Heisenberg conceived the germ of his idea, and progressively widens to take in ever bigger questions opened by the discovery of the quantum structure of reality.”

website / Home page of Carlo Rovelli

link to video

full article - Scientific American - 2011 … interview with Leonard Susskind

excerpts:

Every physicist must have some sense that there are objective things in the world and that it’s our job to go and find out what those objective things are. I don’t think you could do that without having a sense that there is an objective reality.

That said, physicists almost never talk about reality. The problem is that what people tend to mean by ”reality” has more to do with biology and evolution and with our hardwiring and our neural architecture than it has to do with physics itself.

We’re prisoners of our own neural architecture. We can visualize some things. We can’t visualize other things.

Re: Leonard Susskind

link to 10 min. video

hubblesite.org - website

video - 50 min. - via CuriosityStream

video - 50 min. - via Amazon Prime

video - 50 min. - via topdocumentaryfims.com

click here to expand - full chart

click here to expand - full chart

full text - 2019

See: *audubon* page

full text

ΟΔΥΣΣΕΙΑ

link to audio with associated text as read

book info

Odyssey - Book 1 - English translation

book info

From the Introduction:

Greek literature begins with two works of poetic narrative that are both long and great. The Iliad and Odyssey describe events from the Trojan War fought by Greek armies against the city of Ilium or Troy on the coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and during the return home of the surviving Greek heroes and their forces. Many of the same characters appear in both epics. Both are composed in a style rooted in a tradition of performed oral poetry.

Many societies have bards who chant traditional stories about gods, kings, and heroes around a campfire or after dinner. They compose in verse that uses verbal formulas and type-scenes that follow the same scenarios to describe common events such as sacrificing, dining, arming, and fighting. The Old English epic Beowulf reflects such a performance. It can be recited in a few hours, with a pause in the middle to give its audience a break.'

The Iliad and Odyssey in many respects belong to this genre, but they pose a paradox. They are too long for normal performance. It has been estimated that it would take twenty-four hours to recite the Iliad and somewhat less for the Odyssey. Why would an author who belonged to a tradition of performance compose a work that was too long to perform? There are plausible theories as to how the Iliad and Odyssey were composed, but the question of why remains. We may never know why Homer created the Iliad. Once he did, however, its size and brilliance challenged future poets. The first poet to take up that challenge was the author of the Odyssey, who, tradition tells us, was Homer himself.

Experienced bards can improvise unscripted versions of traditional stories with the help of poetic formulas and conventional type-scenes, but it is hard to imagine how poems as long, complex, and subtle as the Iliad and Odyssey could be transmitted from generation to generation without the use of writing. The first written copies we know of were prepared at the command of the tyrant (dictator) of Athens, Peisistratus, for performance at a sixth -century B.C. festival, the Panathenaea, where the two epics were recited in order without skipping or omissions. There is good reason to think that this official Athenian text was the basis of the editorial work on the Homeric poems by literary scholars in Alexandria, Egypt, during the third and second centuries B.C. From about 150 B.C., there was a standard text of Homer that was studied and read throughout the ancient world, copied and studied in the Middle Ages, then printed, studied, read, and translated in the modern age.? As the Iliad and Odyssey became accepted as written texts, the mystery of their origins faded from the attention of scholars and ordinary readers. The power of their characters and their stories never faded, however, and their influence grew, spreading to Latin literature and all the cultures of modern Europe.

Of course, the world depicted in the Homeric epics was not a world of literacy and books. Most scholars date the creation of the Homeric epics to the end of the eighth century B.C., with the Iliad perhaps a generation or so earlier than the Odyssey-generations before the Athenian texts of the sixth century, and centuries before the text established by Alexandrian scholars. In the eighth century B.C., Greeks had just borrowed and modified the Phoenician alphabet of twenty-two consonants to create the Greek alphabet of twenty-four vowels and consonants. This new alphabet made it possible for scribes to record the Homeric poems. It could even have been Homer himself who first modified the Phoenician alphabet to allow the writing of his long epics.

The new alphabet may have been intended not so much to create literature as to preserve the memory of a past known from oral tradition. When Herodotus in the fifth century B.C. composed the first great surviving prose epic— which he called historie, thus giving a name to a genre and a field of study-he said that he was writing so that great deeds and achievements might not fade with time and lose their glory. Homer used the new technology of writing to preserve the stories Greeks told of their heroic past.

The earliest speakers of Greek entered the Greek peninsula in the early second millennium B.C. By about 1600 B.C., they were building cities with impressive fortifications (the walls of Mycenae and Tiryns are still standing), burying their leaders with gold ornaments and bronze armor, and keeping records of their possessions with a writing system we call Linear B. Around 1200 B.C., this urban culture came crashing down in a reflection of economic troubles and civilizational decline occurring all over the ancient Near East. The cities and citadels were deserted, and literacy disappeared.

It was hundreds of years before the Greek population began growing again. Then in the eighth century B.C., Greeks began resettling old cities on the mainland and sailing around the Mediterranean and Black Seas to found new cities, from Trebizond to Marseilles: the eighth-century Greek renaissance. Greeks remembered that they had a great past. They honored and worshipped their ancestors as "heroes," held religious celebrations at their tombs, and excavated and then reburied the bodies they found there-bodies bigger than their own. In the process, they discovered gold art and bronze armor and weapons, unlike their own, made of iron. They told stories about these ancestors, using traditional verse forms with formulas and type-scenes, based on traditional myth and saga, not the adventures of the contemporary Greeks who set sail from home to trade and found new cities. Greeks did not lose their taste for the ancient and the mythical. Performances at the festivals Peisistratus founded in the sixth century B.C.— Homeric epics at the Panathenaea and tragedies at the city Dionysia —took their plots from ancient myth. The past dominated Greek literature.

Yet the Homeric epics were also profoundly original. They were much too long to be recited after dinner like Beowulf. The Iliad's plot tells of an episode in the life of Achilles, but Homer interrupts and interpolates it with events from the entire story of the Trojan War. He includes the Catalogue of Ships, listing the vessels about to sail from Aulis, and describes Helen introducing Greek heroes to Priam as though he had never seen them before. He also inserts intimations and prophecies of the death of Achilles, the fall of Troy, and the fate of Hector's wife, Andromache, living in slavery after the war. By doing this, Homer turned his short Achilleid, or tale of Achilles, into a true Iliad, the story of the war around Ilium, epic in subject and length.

In addition, Homer expanded the simple short comparisons of the poetic tradition (fast as an arrow, hard as a rock) into similes of many lines, in order to structure the action and to give it emotional color and depth. The Iliad's similes compare war to animals, weather, and the daily life of eighth-century Greek farmers and craftsmen. Some highlight important scenes: the treacherous, bloody wounding of Menelaus in Book 4 that condemns the Trojan cause is compared to a woman staining ivory with purple dye. Others enliven and structure the many lengthy battle scenes. Still others characterize key figures (for instance, by comparing Paris to a stallion when he returns to battle at the end of Book 6). Achilles uses simile language in his speeches, invoking lambs and lions just before his final combat with Hector. The Shield of Achilles described at length in Book 18 juxtaposes the worlds of war and peace by using language and content from the similes.

See: Odyssey - Book 1 - Greek text .

See: Odyssey - Book 1 - English translation

full text

See: Ian Johnston website

Book One: Athena Visits Ithaca

Book Two: Telemachus Prepares for his Voyage

Book Three: Telemachus Visits Nestor in Pylos

Book Four: Telemachus Visits Menelaus in Sparta

Book Five: Odysseus Leaves Calypso's Island and Reaches Phaeacia

Book Six: Odysseus and Nausicaa

Book Seven: Odysseus at the Court of Alcinous in Phaeacia

Book Eight: Odysseus is Entertained in Phaeacia

Book Nine: Ismarus, the Lotus Eaters, and the Cyclops

Book Ten: Aeolus, the Laestrygonians, and Circe

Book Eleven: Odysseus Meets the Shades of the Dead

Book Twelve: The Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, The Cattle of the Sun

Book Thirteen: Odysseus Leaves Phaeacia and Reaches Ithaca

Book Fourteen: Odysseus Meets Eumaeus

Book Fifteen: Telemachus Returns to Ithaca

Book Sixteen: Odysseus Reveals Himself to Telemachus

Book Seventeen: Odysseus Goes to the Palace as a Beggar

Book Eighteen: Odysseus and Irus the Beggar

Book Nineteen: Eurycleia Recognizes Odysseus

Book Twenty: Odysseus Prepares for his Revenge

Book Twenty-One: The Contest With Odysseus' Bow

Book Twenty-Two: The Killing of the Suitors

Book Twenty-Three: Odysseus and Penelope

Book Twenty-Four: Zeus and Athena End the Fighting

link to website - full text / English translation

link to excellent 18-minute review

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source

Maps of Greece - over time

link to website

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link to 15 min. video

link to webpage

audio: 4:47 min. sample from 37:55 min. audio

by IOANNIS STRATAKIS

AncientGreek.eu website

ODYSSEUS - engineered for persistence

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oldest and youngest sons on Mt. Whitney summit

annotated index of pages referencing aspects of the honey bee

See: Guide no. 2

See: Guide no. 3

See: Guide no. 4

See: Guide no. 5

See: Guide no. 6

Andreas, age 3

Andreas Grüntzig was a war baby, born in 1939 in Dresden, Germany. His father, Wilmar Grüntzig, PhD, taught science, but the Luftwaffe weather unit drafted him, and he probably died during the final defense of Berlin. His body was never found, and, as Mr Monagan implies, “years passed” with Charlotta, Dr Grüntzig’s mother, making trips to the train station hoping to meet her husband there.

Andreas and his brother were “children of the rubble” after the war. Charlotta, a teacher, struggled to support her sons by clerical work and piano instruction. The family emi- grated to Argentina, where they spent 2 tense years before Charlotta’s homesickness and, perhaps, a prewar zest for the cultural past of Leipzig brought her back to the communist- ruled German Democratic Republic. However, Andreas’s teenage intelligence, languages, and other interests shone too brightly for the East German social engineers—they saw the fruit of class privilege gleaming from his high academic achievement at his school, the Thomas-Gymnasium. The East German regime had an official policy of placing children of working class parents in the universities, and sons and daughters of academics into manual work. So, like his elder brother, Johannes, Andreas would not receive the opportunity to attend a university. The authorities decided that the life’s work of the future king of coronary angioplasty should be trowelling cement for concrete block walls. In 1957, at the age of 18, the young Andreas decided to follow his brother, already in Heidelberg by this time, and cross to the West— something easy to do at that time; he simply had to go to Berlin, take the city train to the Western sector of the city, and not return. So many talented young people did this that in 1961 the German
Democratic Republic decided to build the infa- mous Berlin Wall to stop this exodus. When Andreas arrived in the West, the German Federal Republic welcomed him, as they did all the young people in his situation, and provided him with a scholarship.

- from: Circulation - 2007 - full article here

Andreas Gruentzig - September, 1985 - brief video … and a number of other videos regarding coronary angioplasty development

A Tribute to Andreas Gruentzig - brief video

“ We performed the first coronary angioplasty [at UAB] in 1982, and the technology raced ahead in the years to follow. Particularly important was the development of the stent, a tiny spring ‘like that in your ball-point pen, only a bit larger,’ positioned inside the artery to prop it open while it heals. Our Interventional Unit was one of a world-wide group instrumental in improving stent technology. [ Our Unit’s director and my boss, Gary Roubin, MD PhD, while working at Emory University in 1987, after years of preliminary research, made history by placing a stent in an actual patient’s coronary artery for the very first time. He has written an exciting history of the this technology development: The First Balloon Expandable Coronary Stent - here. ] ”

See: *bax* page.

source

click here for link to pdf slideshow

In the sixteenth century, anatomists began to describe the forms and structures of the human body with increasing precision.

The best-known anatomist of all was the Flemish scientist Andreas Vesalius, a professor at Padua University in Italy. The son of an apothecary, Vesalius arrived in Paris in 1533 to study and practice surgery. He found surgical anatomy in absolute disarray. There were few textbooks and no systematic map of the human body.

Most surgeons and their students depended, loosely, on the anatomical teachings of Galen, the Roman physician who lived between AD 129 and 216. Galen’s centuries-old treatises on human anatomy were based on animal studies, had become badly outdated, and, frankly, were often incorrect.

…

“The doctors did not even attempt cutting,” Vesalius wrote bitterly, “but those barbers, to whom the craft of surgery was delegated, were too unlearned to understand the writings of the professors of dissection…. They merely chop up the things which are to be shown on the instructions of the physician, who, having never put his hand to cutting, simply steers the boat from the commentary—and not without arrogance. And thus all things are taught wrongly, and days go by in silly disputations. Fewer facts are placed before the spectators in that tumult than a butcher could teach a doctor in his meat market.” He concluded, grimly: “Aside from the eight muscles of the abdomen, badly mangled and in the wrong order, no one had ever shown a muscle to me, nor any bone, much less the succession of nerves, veins, and arteries.”

Frustrated and confused, Vesalius decided to create his own map of the human body. He raided charnel houses near the hospital, sometimes twice a day, to haul specimens back to his laboratory. The graves at the Cemetery of the Innocents, often open to the air, with bodies ground to the bone, provided perfectly preserved specimens for skeletal drawings. And walking by Montfaucon, the massive, three-tiered gibbet of Paris, Vesalius spotted prisoners’ corpses hanging from the gallows. He would secretly make off with the freshly hung bodies, their muscles, viscera, and nerves intact enough for him to flay them open layer by layer and map the locations of the organs.

*** The intricate drawings that Vesalius produced over the next decade transformed human anatomy. Occasionally, he cut the brain into horizontal sections, like a melon sliced down from its tip, to create the kind of images that a modern computerized axial tomography (CAT) scan might produce. Other times he overlaid the blood vessels above the muscles or opened the muscles into flaps, like a series of anatomical windows that one could imagine passing through to reveal the surfaces and layers beneath them. ***

source: The Song of the Cell - Mukherjee - 2022

(published in 1543)

“ He might draw the human abdomen visualized from the bottom up, like the fifteenth-century Italian painter Andrea Mantegna’s perspective of Christ’s body in The Lamentation of Christ, and cut the picture into slices, in the way that a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan might visualize it. He collaborated with the painter and printmaker Jan van Kalkar to produce the most detailed and delicate drawings of human anatomy that existed. In 1543, he published his anatomical works in seven volumes entitled De Humani Corporis Fabrica (The Fabric of the Human Body).

“The word Fabric in the title was a clue to its textured purpose; this was the human body treated like physical material, Human material, not mystery; made of fabric, not spirit. It was part medical textbook, with nearly seven hundred illustrations, and part scientific treatise, with maps and diagrams that would lay the foundation for human anatomical studies for centuries to come.”

source

In his earth-shaking publication in 1628, De Motu Cordis, Harvey stated:

“It has been shown by reason and experiment that by the beat of the ventricles blood flows through the lungs and it is pumped to the whole body. There it passes through pores in the flesh into the veins through which it returns from the periphery...finally coming to the vena cava and right auricle... It must then be concluded that the blood in the animal body moves around in a circle continuously, and that the action or function of the heart is to accomplish this by pumping. This is the only reason for the motion and beat of the heart.”

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The Helical Heart - 40 min. video

re: Dr. Cecil Coghlan

video - 30 min.

The Helix and the Heart - Buckberg - 50 min. video

Gerald Buckberg (September 29, 1935 – September 20, 2018) was an American surgeon. His research initially centered in the area of myocardial protection and led to the introduction of blood cardioplegia, which is currently used by over 85% of surgeons in the United States and 75% of surgeons worldwide for adult and pediatric heart operations. He was a member of multiple surgical societies, including the American Association for Thoracic Surgery, American Surgical Association, and the Society of Thoracic Surgeons. He was Professor of Surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

Gerald D. Buckberg received his Cardiothoracic training at the UCLA Medical Center. He began his training at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he studied with Alfred Blalock, world renowned for developing a procedure to help children with Blue Baby Syndrome (where insufficient blood travels to the lungs due to congenital heart defects).

Buckberg went on to receive subsequent research training (following completion of his clinical heart surgery residency) at the Cardiovascular Institute at the University of California, San Francisco, where he worked with Julien Hoffman to discover a novel way to study blood supply in small regions of the heart and in other organs.

See: Paul Dudley White brief bio

See: My Life and Medicine - an autobiographical memoir - 1971

See: Take heart - the life and prescription for living of Dr. Paul Dudley White - biography 1986

Exercise more. Eat healthy.

Learn your family’s medical history.

These were the tenets Paul Dudley White brought with him when he started the first-of-its-kind cardiology unit at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1916.

source

(Re: Chicago Cubs reference: Cubs won the 2016 World Series.)

… from 1937 yearbook of New York Medical College, Fleuroscope

(letter from Walter B. Cannon … see *physiology*)

1903 - 1961 (58)

Dr. Joseph M. Donald practiced in Wilcox County, south of Birmingham. His father and grandfather were physicians and he was well known socially and medically. He attended the University of Alabama and received a Bachelor of Science degree (1921-1923), then Tulane Medical School (1923-
1925), and then he completed an internship at Charity Hospital in New Orleans (1925-
1926). He completed a surgical residency at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, in 1932.

Early in World War II, Dr. Joseph Donald volunteered and served with distinction in the European Theater of Operation as Lieutenant Colonel, Chief of Surgical Service of the 317th Station Hospital.

( See: WW2 Military Hospitals - European Theater of Operations. )

Dr. Burrett and Dr. Donald likely met stateside at Camp Atterbury, near Indianapolis, during their military training prior to overseas deployment. See here and here and here for pics of Camp Atterbury .

Camp Atterbury - wikipedia info

He was a professor of clinical surgery in the Medical College of Alabama at Birmingham, and was active in the affairs of the American Cancer Society, for which he served as Director. He was also a member of the Medical Reserve Corps in the US Army and was a regent of the American College of Surgeons from 1958 until his untimely death.

Both his father and grandfather and both of his sons were surgeons.

In 1960, Dr. Donald was elected as President of the Southern Surgical Association. He died unexpectedly of a myocardial infarction 3 months later and, sadly, could not enjoy his full year as president of the SSA.

source: Journal of the American College of Surgeons - 2015

memoir p1 , memoir p2 - Transactions of the Southern Surgical Association -1960

1897 - 1950 (53)

Roy Rachford Kracke (born 1897 in Hartselle, Morgan County; died June 27, 1950 in Sylacauga) was the first dean of the Medical College of Alabama, which eventually became the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Kracke began his education at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute, but left after a year to work as a pharmacy assistant in Guntersville and, later, in North Birmingham. During World War I he trained in the U.S. Navy Hospital Corps and served 18 months at U.S. Naval Base Hospital Number 1 in Brest, France.

After the war he worked as a lab instructor at the U.S. Naval Medical School in Washington D.C., and then as a lab assistant for William S. Krauss in Memphis, Tennessee. He enrolled as a student at the University of Alabama in 1920 while working as a part-time instructor in bacteriology. After marrying the former Virginia Minter, and patenting the "Kracke staining dish", a laboratory tool which earned him a small income in royalties, Kracke moved to Chicago to complete his training.

Kracke earned his doctor of medicine at the Rush Medical School of the University of Chicago. He resumed his medical and academic careers as a professor of pathology, bacteriology and laboratory diagnosis at Emory University in Atlanta. As an expert in blood diseases such as leukemia, Kracke authored the fundamental text Diseases of the Blood and Atlas of Hematology.

After turning down an offer to work alongside George Pack at his New York cancer research center, Kracke accepted an offer to return to Alabama to help found a new medical university in Birmingham. He moved into an office at Hillman Hospital in the summer of 1944 and began the process of negotiating its transfer from Jefferson County to the University of Alabama, developing a medical faculty, and lobbying for the development of a major medical center.

Kracke, the grandson of a Georgia native who enlisted with a Union company in the Civil War, quietly pursued improvement in Birmingham's racial divide. He helped to further the goals of local black physicians groups and even enrolled three African-American women into his nursing program in 1947.

Kracke suffered a heart attack in April 1950, and then was killed by a second attack on June 27 of the same year while visiting a patient in Sylacauga. He was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery.

After Dean Kracke's sudden death in June of 1950, University president John Gallalee persuaded Dr. Tinsley R. Harrison to become acting dean of the Medical College of Alabama. Dr. Harrison, an Alabama native, was the son of a physician and had received his education in the Birmingham, Alabama, public schools, Marion Military Institute, and the University of Michigan. He earned his medical degree from Johns Hopkins. Dr. Harrison had organized two other medical schools before accepting the position in Birmingham. In 1941 he went to North Carolina to help organize the new four-year Bowman Gray School of Medicine. Later, he moved to Dallas, Texas, and helped organize the Southwestern Medical School.

Dr. Harrison assumed the duties of acting dean of the Medical College of Alabama and chair of the Department of Medicine on August 1, 1950, less than two months after the death of Dean Kracke.

Born in Talladega, Alabama, on March 18, 1900, Tinsley was the son of Groce Harrison, a sixth-generation physician. The family moved to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1906, where a precocious Tinsley was able to advance three grades and graduate from high school at age 15. He attended Marion Military Institute for one year, 1915-1916 (ages 15 to 16), and then spent three years at the University of Michigan, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1919 at age 19. Harrison completed medical school at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and his internship and first-year residency at what are now Harvard University hospitals in Boston, Massachusetts.

Following additional study at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Harrison joined the new Vanderbilt Hospital and Medical School in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1925.

From 1941 to 1944, Dr. Harrison served as the founding chair of medicine at the new Bowman Gray School of Medicine at Wake Forest University. He left in 1944 to serve as dean of medicine and chair of medicine at Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, Texas, his third new medical school. In 1950, Dr. Harrison moved to his fourth new medical school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, staying until his retirement in 1970. His efforts at UAB led to the medical school’s national and international prominence.

UAB Internal Medicine Residency program named for education pioneer - UAB News - 2011

Dr. Glenn Cobbs Reflects on Tinsley Harrison, MD - UAB - Letters to Tinsley - Fall 2020

When Tinsley returned home to Birmingham for the Christmas holiday [1918], he had several long and serious conversations with his father. He was happy at Michigan; it was a good school. He was doing well, and it was certain that he would obtain an excellent medical education and career if he completed medical school there. Michigan had been a leader in medical education for nearly half a century and was still a leading school.

…

[Tinsley’s father] remained convinced that the clinical teaching methods introduced by Osler at Hopkins, on the foundation established by W. H. “Popsy” Welch, President Daniel Coit Gilman, and their colleagues, were not yet matched anywhere else, even though Osler was now at Oxford. To obtain the best medical education, Tinsley would have to leave Michigan and move to Hopkins to finish his M.D. degree.

…

On his application for admission to advanced standing at Hopkins there was an item, “State why you desire to enter this School.” To this Tinsley answered in his own handwriting, “My father believes Hopkins is the best place in the entire world to get a real medical education—a spirit of work.” On May 5, 1919, Tinsley completed and dated his application form for admission to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine at the second-year level.

…

The rest of the summer [1919], Tinsley worked in the Birmingham Health Laboratory. In late September he moved to Baltimore and took up residence in rooms near the medical school. The weather was warm and mild, so he took his tennis racquet and headed for the courts. As he walked onto the nearest unoccupied court, another young man about Tinsley’s age came along with a racquet and a couple of tennis balls. They agreed to a game or two, and after two games the young man approached Tinsley and spoke in a slow drawl and “with an accent so thick you could cut it with a knife.”

“Mah name is Alfred Blalock, and Ah’m from Jonesboro, Georgia.” He extended his hand. Tinsley shook it.

“My name is Tinsley Harrison, and I’m from Birmingham, Alabama.”

The two both loved tennis, so nearly every day after classes they played singles against each other—fairly evenly matched—for the rest of the fall until the daylight ran out. Al turned out to be in the same medical school class as Tinsley, and they enjoyed each other’s company. Within a week they decided to room together, which they did for the remainder of medical school.

source: Tinsley Harrison, M.D.: Teacher of Medicine - book info

When Tinsley Harrison entered Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1919 as a sophomore transfer student from the University of Michigan, one of the first people he met was a classmate, Alfred Blalock. They met on the tennis courts of Baltimore and immediately became fast friends and were roommates for the rest of medical school.

After medical school graduation in 1922 they were separated as Harrison began internal medicine residency at Peter Bent Brigham and Blalock stayed at Hopkins. In 1924 they were reunited at Hopkins for a third year of training. Harrison accepted the position as the first chief resident in internal medicine at the newly reopened Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Blalock decided to go to Harvard where he would continue his training under Harvey Cushing.

When he arrived in Boston in June 1925 he received a phone call from Harrison who had persuaded Barney Brooks, the chairman of surgery at Vanderbilt, to select Blalock as his first chief resident. Blalock quickly caught the next train to Nashville. Since the hospital had not opened they found time to visit the research lab and to win the city's doubles tennis championship. The Vanderbilt Medical Center finally opened in September 1925. Meanwhile, Harrison piqued the curiosity of Blalock and encouraged him to pursue research in shock.

They were appointed to the Vanderbilt faculty in 1926 and continued a close social and professional relationship until their departure in 1941. At this time, Blalock returned to Hopkins as chairman of surgery and Harrison became the first chairman of internal medicine at the new Bowman Gray School of Medicine. This separation was the first in 22 years with the exception of Harrison's two years in Boston and it led to many heartfelt letters.

In 1944, their letters pertained to Harrison exiting Winston-Salem and moving to the Southwestern Medical School in July.

Blalock proffered much heartfelt advice to Harrison regarding this move. Later in 1944, a tragedy occurred in that Harrison's oldest son, "Woody", a U.S. Navy pilot, was lost at sea in a flight over the Atlantic in November. Blalock's commiseration was exemplary.

Another series of letters was exchanged during the summer of 1950, when Harrison was considering moving back to Nashville. Fortunately, he was offered the chair of medicine at the Medical College of Alabama. Blalock's heartfelt advice was greatly appreciated by Harrison.

source

link to full text

continue reading - link to full text

full article

1st ed. 2017 - order info

full article here

link

Re: Joseph Lister (1827 - 1912) - British surgeon

“ The medical application of germ theory was transformative. In Glasgow, Scotland, in 1864, just a few years after Louis Pasteur had completed his experiments on putrefaction (and more than a decade before Robert Koch would prove conclusively that microbes caused disease in animal models), a young surgeon named Joseph Lister chanced upon Pasteur’s papers, Recherches sur la putréfaction. In an inspired leap, he made a connection between the putrefaction that Pasteur had witnessed in his swan-neck flask and the surgical infections that he saw in his wards. Even in ancient India and Egypt, physicians cleaned their instruments by boiling them. Yet in Lister’s time, surgeons paid little attention to the possibility of contamination by microbes. Surgery was an unfathomably unsanitary practice, as if designed intentionally to defy any historical knowledge of hygiene. For example, a pus-covered surgical probe removed from one patient’s wound would then be inserted, unsterilized, into another person’s body. In fact, surgeons used the phrase “laudable pus” because they thought that the presence of pus was part of the healing process. If a scalpel fell on a blood- and pus-smeared operating room floor, the surgeon would simply wipe it clean on his equally contaminated apron and sanguinely proceed to use the same tool on his next patient.

“ Lister decided to boil his tools in a solution that would kill the germs that he was convinced were causing the infection. But what solution? Carbolic acid, he knew, was used to remove the rancid stench from sewage and wastewater; if so, it was likely killing germs that created the miasmas surrounding sewage, he thought. And so, taking one inspired leap after another, he began boiling his surgical tools in carbolic acid. The rate of postsurgical infections plummeted. Wounds healed rapidly, and septic shock—the dreaded bane of every surgical procedure—was suddenly diminished in patients. At first, surgeons resisted Lister’s theory, but the data became more and more incontrovertible. Like Semmelweis, Lister had turned germ theory into medical practice.”

source: The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human - Siddhartha Mukherjee - 2022 - book info

Alabama Liberal: Lister Hill - The Knoxville Focus - 2018

LISTER HILL, LONGTIME SENATOR FROM ALABAMA

By Peter Kerr Dec. 22, 1984

Lister Hill, a United States Senator from Alabama for three decades who sponsored some of most important health and education legislation in the years after World War II, died of pneumonia Thursday at the Jackson Hospital in Montgomery, Ala. He was 89 years old.

Among the bills he directed in his 45 years in Congress were the Tennessee Valley Authority Act and the Hill-Burton Hospital Act.

His slow, persistent efforts in behalf of social legislation made Mr. Hill, as much as any legislator of his generation, a key figure in bringing modern medical care and adequate educational facilities to every region of the United States.

Senator Hill was considered a father of the National Institutes of Health, and as a sponsor of the Hill-Burton Hospital Act he helped bring hospitals to poor and rural areas and contribute funds to build more than 9,000 medical facilities around the country.

''Alabama has lost one of the greatest men who ever sat in the U.S. Senate,'' said Gov. George C. Wallace, who managed Senator Hill's re-election campaign in 1962. ''He was a longtime personal and political friend whom I remember from the first time I heard him speak in Elba, in 1934.''

Like many of the ''progressive'' Southern Democrats who came to Washington in the New Deal era, Senator Hill became an opponent to change as the civil rights movement swept the South in the early 1960's, and he opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

The son of Dr. Luther Leonidas Hill, one of the South's foremost surgeons, Lister Hill was born in Montgomery on Dec. 29, 1894. He was named for Sir Joseph Lister, the British medical scientist who originated antiseptic surgery.

Mr. Hill graduated from the University of Alabama with both liberal arts and law degrees and earned a law degree from Columbia University before he began practicing law in Montgomery in 1916. In World War I he served as a lieutenant in the Army infantry.

At the age of 22 he was elected president of the Montgomery Board of Education and at 28 began his first term in the House of Representatives. In 1938 he was elected to the Senate to finish the unexpired term of Hugo L. Black, who had been appointed to the United States Supreme Court by President Roosevelt.

Tall and blond, Senator Hill, who spoke in a slow, distinctive drawl, came to be regarded as an ever-present and effective force behind Democratic social legislation.

In addition to his authorship of the Tennessee Valley Authority legislation in 1933, which was aimed at controlling flooding, improving navigation and producing hydroelectric power, he helped sponsor the Rural Telephone Act, the Rural Housing Act and the G.I. Bill of Rights for veterans of World War II and the Korean War.

He was also a major supporter of Medicare and Social Security legislation.

His most memorable achievement, however, may have been the legislation he co-sponsored with Senator Harold H. Burton, Republican of Ohio, to bring new health facilities to localities that could not afford to build them.

In the Depression, hospital construction trickled to a near halt, and in 1944 the American Hospital Association found that the nation needednearly 200,000 hospital beds. It called for Federal action to bring facilities to poor, rural areas.

The Hospital and Health Center Construction Act of 1946, also known as the Hill-Burton Hospital Act, provided specific grants for the construction of voluntary and nonprofit health facilities. As a result, the number of people in the United States without access to a hospital declined to fewer than 2 million in 1966 from 15 million in 1945.

In 1955, Senator Hill became chairman of the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee and chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee in charge of financing what was then the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

He retired from the Senate in 1968. ''I was getting a little old,'' he later recalled. ''After all, 50 years in politics is long enough, don't you think?''

In an interview in 1977, Mr. Hill said he considered himself a progressive and was apologetic about his segregationist role. ''I had to do that to get elected,'' he said. ''We all did.''

Mr. Hill is survived by his wife, Henrietta, his son, Luther Lister Hill, and his daughter, Henrietta Hubbard, all of whom live in Montgomery.

Historical tangent: Dr. Luther Leonidas Terry, U.S. Surgeon General, 1961 - 1965

Luther Leonidas Terry, M.D., from Red Level, Alabama, was assistant director of the National Heart Institute and namesake of Dr. Luther Leonidas Hill, who was his godfather.

Dr. Luther Leonidas Hill, whose son was U.S. Senator Lister Hill, was a friend and partner in medical practice in Montgomery, Alabama, with Dr. James Edward Terry

Dr. James Terry’s son, Luther Terry, graduated from Tulane Medical School and interned at Hillman Hospital in Birmingham.

From 1943 to 1953, Terry was chief of the medical service at the Public Health Service Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, and from 1950-1958 was chief of the Clinic of General Medicine and Experimental Therapeutics at the National Heart Institute. During this time Terry also served in the cardiovascular study section of the National Institutes of Health.

Terry's accomplishments in these high profile positions earned him an appointment as the U.S. Surgeon General in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy.

As surgeon general, Terry quit smoking in late 1963 and decided to make it his mission to urge millions of smoking Americans to do the same.

On January 11, 1964, he delivered the first Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health, which conclusively determined that smoking was an unmitigated health hazard, causing cardiovascular disease, emphysema, and lung cancer, among other ills.

Based upon more than 7,000 peer-reviewed articles, Terry's report concluded that cigarette smoking was a sufficient enough health problem to warrant "appropriate remedial action." His work and campaigns by successive surgeons general yielded results, cutting the percent of Americans who were steady smokers in 1964 from 43% to 23% percent as of 2001.

Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health - 1964 - Dr. Luther Leonidas Terry

Another historical tangent (also from Alabama): Dr. Regina Benjamin, U.S. Surgeon General, 2009 - 2013 … and: here

Vivien T. Thomas, who was born in New Iberia, La., and raised in Nashville, Tenn., had hoped one day to become a surgeon. A bank failure during the early days of the Great Depression wiped away his medical-school savings and nearly his dream.The son of a contractor, Thomas was so impressed as a youth by his family's physician that he pledged to "be like him." He had scraped together the money for his medical education by working after school and as an orderly in a private infirmary.

In 1929, Thomas enrolled in a premedical course at the Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial College and, after losing his money in the stock market crash, went to work in 1930 for Dr. Alfred Blalock at Vanderbilt University, who eventually trained him to be his surgical assistant.

Vivien Thomas audio interview (1967) - mp4 audio - discussing work on HTN (in 1937-38): collaboration at Vanderbilt between Tinsley Harrison and Al Blalock

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source

Helen Brooke Taussig was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 24, 1898. On her father’s side she came from a distinguished St. Louis, Missouri, family. Taussig’s father, Frank William Taussig, held the Henry Lee chair in economics at Harvard University. Her mother, Edith Thomas Guild of Boston, had been a student at Radcliffe College and maintained an interest in zoology and other natural sciences. They had four children: William Guild, Mary Guild, Catherine Crombie, and Helen Brooke. Taussig’s mother died of tuberculosis when Taussig was eleven.

Suffering from lifelong dyslexia, Taussig was sometimes regarded by teachers as being retarded. Her father helped her learn to read, write, spell, and do numbers. Reading was never easy for Taussig, complicating any lengthy reviews of the literature for scientific articles. Taussig attended Radcliffe for two years before transferring to the University of California at Berkeley, where she graduated in 1921, Phi Beta Kappa. School policy prevented her from entering the then all-male Harvard Medical School. She was, however, allowed to study histology on a noncredit basis at Harvard, sitting in a remote corner of the hall during lectures and viewing slides in a separate room. It was at Boston University that Taussig became interested in the heart, having been encouraged to study the muscle bundles of the ox heart. In 1923, she matriculated at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, graduating in 1927 and maintaining her association with Hopkins for sixty years.

Following her graduation from medical school, she was appointed a fellow at the Heart Station at Hopkins and went on to develop the pediatric cardiology clinic there. At age thirty-one, she started to go deaf and by age thirty-five was using a hearing aid and an amplified stethoscope. She was able to compensate for the loss of her hearing through the use of her hands for palpation of patients’ chests. Otologic surgery in the 1960s substantially improved Taussig’s hearing.

One of Taussig’s greatest contributions to medical science lay in the development, with surgeon Alfred Blalock, of the Blalock-Taussig procedure, a surgical technique that corrects cyanosis in certain types of congenital cardiac abnormalities. This operation launched the modern era of pediatric cardiac surgery. In her 1947 textbook Congenital Malformations of the Heart, Taussig made clear the results of her extensive anatomical and clinical work and provided a classic text for the developing fields of pediatric cardiology and pediatric cardiac surgery. She was one of only six physicians chosen by the American Board of Pediatrics to head the Sub-Board of Pediatric Cardiology, the official certifying body for the new subspecialty.

In 1962, following reports of an outbreak of serious congenital deformities in Europe, Taussig traveled throughout West Germany to investigate the situation. Concluding, as had German physicians, that the sedative thalidomide was responsible, Taussig authored an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association describing her findings. Her testimony before Congress and her scientific articles persuaded the Food and Drug Administration to disallow the sale of thalidomide in the United States.

Numerous honors came her way. Like her father before her, she was honored as a chevalier in the French Legion of Honor (1947). President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964). Johns Hopkins, however, was not so generous. For the first sixteen years at Hopkins, she was an instructor; for the next thirteen, an associate professor. She held the rank of professor only for the four years preceding her 1963 retirement. She was, however, the first woman to hold a full professorship at the medical school.

Taussig never really retired. Of the more than one hundred scholarly articles she authored, she wrote approximately forty after retirement. At age sixty-seven, she became the first woman president of the American Heart Association. She remained active in her research until her death.

source

The incidence of Congenital Heart Disease (CHD) is slightly <1% of all live births. Since the first Blalock-Taussig-Thomas shunt was placed in 1944, ongoing advances now allow for >90% of those born with CHD to survive into adulthood.

link to film on HBOmax

source

full article

excerpt:

Cardiac development begins during early gastrulation when cells in the lateral precardiac mesoderm migrate to form the cardiac crescent. Initially, cardiac precursor cells form a thin walled, linear heart tube lying at the midline of the ventral aspect of the embryo at approximately day 20 of human gestation. Over the next day, the early heart will loop to the right to bring the arterial and venous poles together and the nascent chambers will become apparent as they “balloon” from the primary heart tube. During the next 5 days, the four chambers of the heart form and septate, the atrioventricular and semilunar valves develop to ensure unidirectional flow, the venous structures drain to their appropriate atria, and the single outflow tract divides into a pulmonary artery and aorta, which provide outflow for the right and left ventricles, respectively. By day 50 in the human embryo, the heart is almost completely formed from a structural standpoint, requiring only further remodeling of the valves and the myocardium and postnatal closure of the three shunts (the ductus venosus, the ductus arteriosus, and the foramen ovale) that allow effective delivery of oxygen in utero but that are not necessary after birth. Therefore, cardiac morphogenesis is essentially considered an embryonic phenomenon.

In contrast, cardiac myocyte differentiation extends into the postnatal period, and recent studies also demonstrate that cardiac stem cells continue to divide and differentiate even in the adult heart. After pre-cardiac meosdermal cells are specified, they begin the long process of differentiation, which ultimately generates the mature cardiac myocyte, with its highly organized and almost crystalline intracellular structure. Soon after differentiation begins, myocytes contract despite the fact that their intracellular contractile elements are very immature compared to the adult myocyte. Early myocytes contain few myofibrils, relative few mitochondria with immature ultrastructure, and no T-tubules or organized sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR). Over time, the contractile apparatus fills the myoplasm, and the myofibrillar structure becomes more mature, with increasing apposition of the SR, T-tubules, and mitochondria. However, even immediately after birth, the subcellular structure of the cardiac myocyte is still relatively immature in most species. Only after the first few days to weeks does the generally recognized structure of the mature myocyte develop.

“Be Careful, It’s My Heart” - video clip - Holiday Inn - 1942

A few years earlier, on November 29, 1944, the OR scene was similar:

“The patient, Eileen Saxon, a 2-year-old intensely cyanotic and frail child, was chosen as the first patient for trial of a new and untested treatment for a congenital anomaly called tetralogy of Fallot. Most members of the medical and surgical staff questioned the plan to operate on this pathetic child.

“Dr. Blalock took his position on the left side of the table, with Bill Longmire on the opposite side. Vivien stood behind Dr Blalock. Dr Taussig stood behind Harmel but was unable to witness the dissection. The incision was an anterolateral incision in the third interspace, and the second and third costal cartilages were divided. Exposure was limited by the incision, and I was unable to observe much. Because the aortic arch was on the left side, the subclavian artery was almost too short to pass over the arch into the left subclavian artery. Instruments were crude by today’s standards and consisted of several bulldog clamps, which were encircled with silk threads to permit traction.

“Some of these techniques had been developed by Vivien in the dog lab. Dissection in the highly vascular mediastinum to isolate the left pulmonary artery was skillfully done by Dr Blalock with instruments and his left index finger. When the final preparation for the anastomosis was made, the end of the shortened subclavian artery was connected with fine black silk sutures to the side of the pulmonary artery. Dr Blalock several times asked Vivien for advice on suturing.”

****

On November 29, 1944, Dr Blalock operated on a severely cyanotic infant with tetralogy of Fallot. According to William P. Long- mire, Blalock’s resident and assistant for this procedure, ‘‘It was quite amazing to see the professor gently but blindly insert a right angle clamp into the mediastinum and after dissecting over his index finger pull out the innominate artery.’’

Vivien Thomas stood behind Blalock during this first operation, and many more to follow, offering a number of helpful technical suggestions throughout the procedure. After all, Thomas developed the procedure in the laboratory and had performed the operation hundreds of times on dogs, whereas Blalock had performed it only once, as Thomas’ assistant. With this operation, which came to be known as the Blalock-Taussig shunt, the modern era of cardiac surgery was born. (source)

(source) … Denton Cooley writes:

“After graduation from Hopkins School of Medicine, I received a personal invitation to join the surgical house staff as an intern. Having graduated on August 18, 1944, I joined the staff immediately for a straight surgical internship. My first rotation then was to provide fluid, blood, and plasma to support procedures in the operating rooms. That included responsibility for the blood bank and crossmatching of blood. I worked with one technician who enjoyed permanent employment. On the date of November 29, I arrived in scrub suit at 6:00 AM in the operating room for the scheduled procedure. Vivien Thomas, who was Dr Blalock’s trusted technician from the Hunterian Laboratory (the dog lab), was there already. An air of tension was felt by all.”

(See more above.)

review of Partners of the Heart - National Endowment for the Humanities

Michael DeBakey - Leading Medicine - Methodist Hospital - 2003

“DeBakey continued doing surgery until he was 90, and estimated that during the course of his career, he had performed over 60,000 operations and trained several thousand surgeons. In 2006, he suffered a dissecting aneurysm, which was repaired by surgeons he had trained, using the techniques he had originated more than 50 years before. He made a good recovery and died two years later, on July 11, 2008, of natural causes. Once dubbed "the Texas Tornado" by cardiologist Paul Dudley White, DeBakey left an astonishing legacy of surgical innovation, medical education and research, and health care policy, as well as thousands of patients whose lives were saved by his skills.”

source

Michael Ellis DeBakey - Colonel, United States Army - Pioneering American Surgeon - Arlington National Cemetery website

Richard J. Bing (1909 - 2010) - Interview in June 1998 - Caltech oral history project - transcript pdf

^ from USC News - 2010 ^

“Dr. Bing, who earned his medical degree in Germany but emigrated soon after Hitler rose to power, did groundbreaking research on the physiology of the heart and kidneys for more than half a century. Dr. Bing first gained prominence at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he, the cardiac surgeon Alfred Blalock, and the cardiologist Helen B. Taussig established the first cardiac catheterization laboratory dedicated to congenital heart disease. Richard Bing was born on Oct. 12, 1909, in Nuremberg. His father was a hops merchant. He earned a medical degree from the University of Munich in 1934.

After he and the rest of his family, which was Jewish, left Germany, he earned a second medical degree from the University of Bern the following year. While on a fellowship at the Carlsberg Biological Institute in Copenhagen, he collaborated with the surgeon Alexis Carrel , a Nobel laureate for his work on organ transplants, and the aviator Charles Lindbergh.”

^ from NYT obit - 2010 ^

While a medical student in Munich, one of Richard Bing’s professors was Dr. Otto Frank ( physician / physiologist: Frank-Starling law of the heart ). Dr. Frank appears to have been a demanding teacher. Richard Bing recalled him as ' ... a holy terror, hating mediocrity, and many a student bit the dust in the examination in Physiology'. Dr. Frank continued to work in Munich until his enforced retirement in 1934 due to his opposition to the Nazi regime. (reference: here)

… from Cardiac Cath Labs - Their Origin and Their Future - CHEST - 2018:

“ Johns Hopkins in the 1940s was the center for the study and treatment of patients with congenital heart disease. Helen Taussig, a brilliant diagnostician despite being deaf, was director of the Children’s Cardiac Clinic. In 1940, Alfred Blalock was appointed chief of surgery at Hopkins. Working with Taussig, Blalock developed a systemic to pulmonary shunt to treat patients with tetralogy of Fallot. This procedure, later to be called the “blue baby operation” was successfully performed at Hopkins in 1944. The success of this first operation in patients with congenital heart disease sparked interest in congenital disease throughout the world. R.J. Bing, a German physician, came to the United States in 1936 to begin an apprenticeship at the Rockefeller Institute. During the next 10 years, he held a variety of positions. He spent several years as a resident in surgery at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and then three years as an instructor in physiology at Columbia. While at Columbia, he spent some time in Cournand’s laboratory. His next appointment was as an instructor in medicine at Johns Hopkins. At the outbreak of World War II, he joined the US Army Medical Corps. One day in 1944, while he was eating in the mess hall, he received a phone call that changed his life. Alfred Blalock called to ask him to come back to Hopkins and establish a cardiac cath lab in the department of surgery to study patients with congenital heart disease. At that time, there were only two diagnostic cath labs in the world: Grady hospital in Atlanta and Peter Bent Brigham in Boston. Bing, age 36, set up his catheterization laboratory in 1945; by 1947, he had published a series of papers describing how to diagnose congenital heart disease. Bing worked closely with Helen Taussig. Together they delineated the hemodynamic features of 20 different forms of congenital heart disease.”

“After establishing and directing the cardiac cath lab at Hopkins for seven years, Bing moved [in 1952] to The University of Alabama Medical School to work with Tinsley Harrison.”

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… from An Investigator’s Journey in Cardiology - by Richard Bing - JAMA - 1992:

“ It was difficult to pursue this work at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, because of the heavy diagnostic load of patients with congenital heart disease. Therefore, in 1951, when I was asked to join the University of Alabama School of Medicine in Birmingham as a professor of medicine, I eagerly accepted. The new position would give me ample opportunity to study cardiac metabolism in the human heart.

Cardiac Metabolism: Birmingham, Alabama

“The medical school in Birmingham was just starting to attain excellence; under Tinsley Harrison, MD, in medicine there was a spirit of scientific adventure at the medical school and, more important, the freedom to pursue scientific goals. This was to a large extent due to Harrison, who had always rebelled against stultifying medical traditions. He was a longstanding friend and mentor of Blalock, but preferred to work in an environment that he could build up from the ground, and the University of Alabama was the beneficiary. Everything he did was driven by enthusiasm; and his much read monograph Failure of the Circulation was a landmark. In our study of cardiac metabolism, we discovered that the human heart under certain conditions prefers free fatty acids as fuel and that their metabolism utilizes most of its oxygen. We also found that in myocardial failure, myocardial extraction of foodstuffs is not altered. This directed our attention to the contractile proteins of the failing heart. The 3 years I spent in Birmingham were not only scientifically productive, but also enjoyable for the whole family. I learned that good work flourishes in an environment that promotes freedom and respect for good work.”

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full article

full article

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Benjamin Champneys Lyons was born in Lancaster, Pa, on May 21, 1907, and would always be known as ‘‘Champ.’’ When he was 3, his parents divorced, and his mother remarried Joseph Henry Lyons of Mobile, AL, in 1911. The family moved to Mobile, where he grew up. His uncle on his stepfather’s side was Luther L. Hill, MD, the first American to suture a wound of the heart successfully.

Lyons attended the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and graduated with honors in the spring of 1927. He then entered Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, in the fall of 1927 and graduated in 1931. During medical school, he developed an interest in bacteriology and infection. He remained at Massachusetts General Hospital and received surgical training under the renowned Edward Church- ill, MD. During this time, he married Naomi Currier, a nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, on October 3, 1934. He remained on the faculty after completion of his surgical training and continued to generate new information regarding surgical infection and antibiot- ics. He was in charge of the first use of penicillin in mass casualties, taking care of victims of the infamous 1942 Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire in Boston.

With the outbreak of World War II, Lyons served initially in a consulting capacity as a wound surgeon and microbiologist. In April 1943, he was placed in charge of a pilot project studying the use of penicillin on all wound infections from the Pacific theater at Bushnell General Hospital in Brigham, UT. This was so successful that he repeated the performance at the Halloran Hospital in Staten Island, NY, for soldiers of the European theater later that same year.5 Following this, he was commissioned a major and entered service in August 1943 and served under Colonel Edward Churchill in the Mediterranean theater of operations. One of his new associates was Michael DeBakey. Lyons performed admirably and was awarded the Legion of Merit.

OCHSNER

In May 1945, Lyons contracted a severe case of infectious hepatitis and was treated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Washington, DC, receiving his military discharge there on June 21, 1945. He returned to Mobile to recuperate. Once recovered, his close military associate DeBakey arranged a meeting with Alton Ochsner, and Lyons was invited to join the Ochsner Clinic on October 1, 1945

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… meanwhile, a few months earlier, in Dresden - Andreas Gruentzig, child

… Kurt Vonnegut explains - NPR audio interview with author of Slaughterhouse Five - 2003

Kurt Vonnegut obit - ‘So it goes.’ - 4/14/07

link to full article

excerpts:

ON NOVEMBER 28, 1942, during a Thanksgiving weekend dinner party at a colleague’s home, a phone call abruptly summoned Champ Lyons, M.D. ’31, a surgeon who specialized in treating bacterial infections, to Massachusetts General Hospital. A horrific fire had destroyed Boston’s Cocoanut Grove nightclub; of the more than 1,000 patrons present, 490 eventually died. Years later, Lyons told his son that he found the hospital’s long brick hallways lined with dead partygoers still in their evening clothes. He began treating survivors immediately and did not return home for three days. His work with the burn victims would change his career forever, taking him to army hospitals across the country and then to the Mediterranean—all because of his use of the revolutionary new antibiotic, penicillin, to treat his patients.

…

Penicillin had been discovered in 1928, but was not used to treat humans until 1941. Although it showed great promise, particularly for treating anticipated wartime casualties, it was very difficult and expensive to produce in quantity. But the senior U.S. government official charged with evaluating its use by the armed forces knew of Lyons’s work in surgical bacteriology and saw the Cocoanut Grove disaster as an opportunity to test the drug’s efficacy.

…

This success prompted the U.S. Surgeon General to set up a pilot unit for penicillin therapy at a Utah military hospital, with Lyons in charge; after a disastrous Allied defeat in Tunisia in February 1943, many soldiers were sent there for care. Lyons used the new antibiotic in increasing doses, eventually treating 209 men with intramuscular penicillin; more than 80 percent showed immediate improvement. A second study unit was established, on Staten Island, again with Lyons in charge, and the U.S. Army began an all-out effort to increase the manufacture of penicillin, rightly convinced that it was vital to prosecution of the war. Thanks largely to this and other advances in medical care, only 3 percent of the wounded treated in front-line hospitals during World War II died of infections; between 12 and 15 percent had died in World War I.

____________

*** Re: Dr. Martin L. Dalton (author of above article) - see here

A native of Columbus, GA, he attended Auburn University and took his baccalaureate in 1953. He received his medical degree from the Medical College of Alabama (now the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine) in 1957, where Champ Lyons, as Chair of Surgery, influenced young Martin's decision to enter the field.

full article here

Champ Lyons: An Incomplete Life - Annals of Surgery - 2003

Champ Lyons - Brief life of an innovative surgeon: 1907-1965 - Harvard Magazine - 2016

Champ Lyons, MD - The Ochsner Years: 1945 - 1950 - The Ochsner Journal - 2009

Champ Lyons, Holt McDowell, and the Evolution of Vascular Surgery at the University of Alabama at Birmingham: A Personal Perspective - The American Surgeon - 2010

… excerpt:

In October 1950, Roy R. Kracke, Dean of the Medical College of Alabama, invited Lyons to consider becoming the first full-time Professor and Chairman of the Department of Surgery at the Medical College Alabama in Birmingham. He would be the first full-time faculty member since the medical school moved from Tuscaloosa in 1945. He accepted the offer, left New Orleans, and started in Birmingham in January 1950. The first Chairman of the Department of Surgery, James Monroe Mason, was a noted surgeon in his own regard. He had served with Lyons in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations and welcomed him warmly.

With Lyons in place, Dean Kracke, a native of Hartselle, AL, then set about finding a Chair of Internal Medicine. He secured Tinsley R. Harrison, a native of Talladega, AL, as the second full-time faculty member of the Medical College of Alabama in Birmingham. Harrison was an experienced academician, having served on the faculties of Vanderbilt, Bowman Gray (Wake Forest), and Southwestern Medical School (University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center). He arrived in June 1950. Unfortunately, Dean Kracke died of a heart attack that same month at age 52 but had brought to Birmingham two giants of American medicine who would remain for the duration of their careers.

Lyons had built a solid foundation for himself in academic surgery and now began to build the Department of Surgery. Not unexpectedly, he received further accolades on his appointment. One endorsement came from Alfred Blalock in a letter to Tinsley Harrison dated July 28, 1950, when he stated ‘‘Champ Lyons is a grand fellow and I would think that you and he would work very nicely together.’’ Lyons laid the foundation of the department based on exemplary patient care, teaching, and academic productivity. He and Harrison became allies and good friends.

link to download Heartpedia mobile app

John Gibbon at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia

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The Annals of Thoracic Surgery - 1982

John Gibbon performed the world’s first successful open-heart surgery using extracorporeal oxygenation on May 6, 1953 - at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. This event, the culmination of a 22-year effort, generated an explosion of technological progress in cardiac surgery that has changed the whole spectrum of our approach to heart disease. At the time Dr. Gibbon successfully performed the first open- heart procedure, it was not immediately recog- nized or heralded as the important event it grew to be. We now know that this work stands equal to anesthesia and antibiotics as a funda- mental advance in surgery and medicine.

The circumstances under which John Gibbon became inspired to begin his work on the heart-lung machine are curious and interesting but not entirely atypical of many innovations. In 1931, as an intern on Dr. Edward Churchill’s surgical service at Massachusetts General Hospital, Gibbon’s assigned duty was to carefully monitor the pulse and blood pressure of a 53- year-old woman who had had a cholecystec- tomy performed and 15 days later had incurred a massive pulmonary embolism. It was Dr. Churchill’s plan that if the patient deteriorated so badly that her death was imminent, he would step in and perform a pulmonary em- bolectomy, at the time a pioneering and dangerous operation. As Dr. Gibbon watched over this patient, monitoring every slight change in her vital signs, it occurred to him that what she really needed was a machine that could take the deoxygenated blood from her engorged veins, oxygenate it, and pump it back into the arterial system. The patient continued to deteriorate; emergency pulmonary embolectomy was performed, but the patient died. This event had a profound influence on John Gibbon’s future as well as the future of cardiac surgery.

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John Kirklin at Mayo Clinic - Mayo Clinic Proceedings - 2005

…excerpt:

John W. Kirklin anticipated the dawning era of open heart surgery. In 1952, he assembled a team of experts at the Mayo Clinic to develop a cardiac surgical program for the clinical application of a mechanical pump-oxygenator.

Supported by a multidisciplinary team of physicians and technicians at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn, he embarked on a planned series of clinical cases using a heart-lung machine to allow direct visualization of the inside of the opened human heart to repair otherwise fatal intracardiac defects. Of the initial 8 patients, 4 survived. This achievement was a breakthrough and showed the clinical feasibility of using a mechanical pump-oxygenator to support the circulation while working inside the heart. John W. Kirklin and his team had effectively made open heart surgery a therapy that could become widely available.

A surgical risk of 50% sounds prohibitive today, but before the advent of the heart-lung machine, most patients with congenital, valvular, or ischemic heart disease had a poorer prognosis than we appreciate today, often leading to early fatality. Even ventricular septal defects (VSDs) were fatal in most children before they reached the first grade.

full text

1955 heart lung machine (‘Mayo-Gibbon bypass machine’)

link to full article

link to article

source

^ 2009 ^

Heart to Heart - An Oral History - info

excerpt from Heart to Heart - interview with Dr. John Kirklin:

^ excerpt from Heart to Heart: interview with Dr. John Kirklin ^

^ upper left: I.M. Pei & John Kirklin - 2005 ^

John W. Kirklin - bio - Profiles in Cardiology

Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) - state of the art clinical treatment protocol - 1957 - full article ! nitroglycerin (NTG) !

First routine coronary bypass (CABG): 1967 / First coronary angioplasty (PTCA): 1977

full article

excerpt:

Dr. Reeves completed his residency training in internal medicine at Parkland in 1951 and served as a Chief Resident in Medicine under Donald Seldin. Dr Reeves received his fellowship training in cardiology at UASOM under the mentorship of Tinsley R. Harrison, who also served as the first Chair of Medicine there and had an indelible impact on Dr Reeves’ clinical training and practice of medicine that became profound and long lasting. They were coauthors of a groundbreaking text entitled Principles and Problems of Ischemic Heart Disease, which appeared in 1968 when coronary care units were in their infancy and coronary angiography in the setting of an acute myocardial infarction was a rarity.

When Dr. Tinsley Harrison suffered an acute myocardial infarction, it was none other than Joe Reeves who served as his mentor’s cardiologist.

Dr Reeves was a pioneering faculty member of the UASOM, quickly rising through the ranks as Assistant Professor in 1954 to Professor of Medicine in 1961. He was the founding director of a National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute–funded cardiovascular research and training center.

In 1969, Dr Reeves succeeded the late Walter B. Frommeyer, Jr, as the third Chair of Medicine, following in his mentor’s footsteps. Dr Reeves also was appointed Physician-in-Chief of the University of Alabama Hospital.

Modern approach to the patient with acute myocardial infarction - Charles E. Rackley, Richard O. Russell, et al. - UAB - Current Problems in Cardiology - 1977

1977

“Surgeon closing in on 25,000th operation” - The Seattle Times - 9/10/2000

Al Pacifico - CT surgeon @ UAB from 1967 - 2005: brief bio / interview with the surgeon

Novick Cardiac Alliance - website

full article

In 1993 Dr. William Novick created a foundation to care for children with heart disease in the developing world. He had seen the disparities in healthcare provision between children in the developed and developing world and had a vision that every child born with heart disease should have access to the care they needed to live a long and healthy life.

As a pioneer in this field, he realized early on that helping local teams build and sustain a pediatric heart surgery service would be the only way to provide real hope to these many children and their families.

In the ensuing 20 years Dr. Novick and his teams worked in 46 cities in 32 countries, providing 7411 children with operations and medical care. Most countries received a sustained repeated pattern of assistance including 2 to 4 visits per year for at least 3 years, with 90% of such programs now performing independent pediatric cardiac surgery.

Over the years Dr. Novick recruited a group of clinical experts in the field of pediatric cardiac care who shared his passion and vision to help eradicate the suffering caused by congenital heart disease in the developing world.

In October 2014 this group of dedicated professionals came together in support of their natural leader and formed the William Novick Global Cardiac Alliance. With a purpose and a vision consistent with Dr. Novick’s trajectory, the William Novick Global Cardiac Alliance will continue its work in any corner of the world where our services are needed.

source

link to 2012 interview with Dr. Navin Nanda

excerpt:

In 1982 or 1983, at a cardiology symposium in New York where I was an invited speaker, I ran into Dr. Gerald Pohost who had just been appointed Chief of Cardiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Around this time, I had gone to Taiwan for an international cardiology meeting and I was shown a color Doppler machine which was only a prototype and not yet fully developed. I was very much impressed and excited by this new development, which I thought would revolutionize echocardiography. Dr. Paul Yu told me he had no funds to buy what would be a very expensive echo machine.

When I subsequently met Dr. Pohost and Dr. John Kirklin, who was a very famous cardiac surgeon and pioneer, and was asked what it would take to make me move to Birmingham from Rochester, I immediately said 2 color Doppler machines, thinking they may agree for one. The answer was "no problem" and I had two color Doppler machines. That is how I moved to Birmingham. In my excitement, I forgot to ask my salary which upset Kanta we had three children to support) but it all worked out and the salary offered was much higher than Rochester.

When the color Doppler machines arrived, all the instructions were in Japanese and I did not know how to use them. Dr. Kasai, an engineer, and Dr. Ryozo Omoto were to arrive the following week from Japan, but meanwhile Dr. Kirklin had a very high ranking military officer from South America with a previous mechanical aortic valve replacement who had become symptomatic and had a loud murmur of mitral regurgitation. Since retrograde catheterization could not be done on this patient and he was not keen to perform an apical puncture, he called me to do a color Doppler study to confirm the presence of severe mitral incompetence. He said "we got you an expensive toy", Let us see how good it is.

We somehow turned on one of the machines and I remember printing sheets of paper colored blue, red and green but I had no clue what we were looking at. I took it all to him and before I could open my mouth, he exclaimed "that looks like severe regurgitation, thank you so much for doing this". I was dumbfounded and that night I am sure I slept worse than the General but severe regurgitation was found at surgery and the mitral valve replaced. We told the Japanese to take the next flight and they obliged and showed us how to work the machine. Several publications on color Doppler ensued with the help of Cardiology Fellows in Birmingham and also Fellows from India who came to learn this modality which was introduced in the USA for the first time in our Echo Lab. The technique spread very rapidly not only in the USA but throughout the world.

…

See: Navin Nanda bio

Heart Blockage – Explained With Pictures - from: MYHEART.NET website

Heart Blockage – Explained With Pictures - from: MYHEART.NET website

full text

Dr. René Favaloro's pioneering contributions to cardiovascular surgery will be an enduring legacy to his homeland of Argentina and to humanity. Born on 12 July 1923 in La Plata, capital of the province of Buenos Aires, Dr. Favaloro would devote much of life to his homeland, helping to improve the quality of health care there.

Despite his rewarding work in La Pampa, Dr. Favaloro's interest in thoracic surgery remained keen. In 1962, he went to the Cleveland Clinic, where he worked with Mason Sones, Willem Kolff, and Donald Effler. Favaloro studied the thousands of cineangiograms that Sones had performed.

On 9 May 1967, Favaloro performed the first documented saphenous aortocoronary bypass, in a 51-year-old woman with total occlusion of the proximal third of the right coronary artery. Eight days later, Sones would confirm by angiography that the bypass was patent; 20 days later, angiography showed total reconstruction of the artery. By 1968, Favaloro and his colleagues were combining the revascularization technique with valve replacement and ventricular aneurysmectomy, and performing the first bypasses for acute infarctions.

source

See: Dr. René Favaloro - excellent audiovisual bio - Google Arts and Culture

Born in Parsons, Kansas, Watkins was the third of the six children of a college professor who moved the family to Alabama to take a job with Alabama State University. The minister of the family’s church in Montgomery was the Rev. Dr. Ralph David Abernathy, an early civil rights leader. In high school, the younger Watkins joined the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who became a powerful mentor to him.

After graduating from Tennessee State University in 1966, Watkins became the first African-American to be admitted to and then graduate from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. After arriving at Johns Hopkins as a general surgery intern in 1970, he rose to become the first African-American resident in cardiac surgery. Following postdoctoral research at Harvard University between 1973 and 1975, he returned to Johns Hopkins as a cardiac surgery fellow and joined the faculty in 1978.

In 1980, Watkins gained renown for implanting the first automatic heart defibrillator in a patient suffering from repeated, life-threating episodes of ventricular fibrillation, or irregular heartbeats. Such a procedure now is commonplace, saving untold lives annually.

source

Celebrating the Life and Legacy of Dr. Levi Watkins Jr. - 6 min. video - Johns Hopkins Medicine

Dr. Selwyn Vickers - Dean, UAB School of Medicine - honors Dr. Levi Watkins - Johns Hopkins Medicine - 2 min. video

Dr. David McGiffin graduated from the University of Queensland Medical School and subsequently interned and trained in General Surgery at Princess Alexandra Hospital, Brisbane before going on to train in Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Prince Charles Hospital.

In 1982, Dr. McGiffin came to the United States as a Fulbright Scholar and undertook a Fellowship at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). He joined the faculty at UAB but returned to Australia in 1986 to The Prince Charles Hospital where he did adult and paediatric cardiac surgery and also set up the Queensland Heart Transplant Program.

In 1992, Dr. McGiffin returned to UAB where his clinic duties included the full range of adult cardiac surgery and heart and lung transplantation. He commenced a pulmonary endarterectomy program for chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension.

Dr. McGiffin returned to Australia in 2013 to take up a position as Director of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Alfred Hospital. His clinical practice includes adult cardiac surgery, heart and lung transplantation, ventricular assist devices and pulmonary endarterectomy. His major research work involves investigating mechanisms of driveline infection after implantation of ventricular assist devices and hypothermic perfusion to extend the ischemic time of donor hearts for transplantation.

Professor David McGiffin is Head of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Alfred Health.

The main areas of research for the department centre around improving outcomes in transplantation, particularly donor organ optimisation and preservation as well as innovations in cardiothoracic surgery, including sutureless valves, bidirectional ECMO cannulae and new generation VADs.

excellent video tribute by colleagues and collaborators

First angioplasty - 1977 - Zurich - see *balloon* page

*** "Grand Rounds with Andreas Gruentzig":  5 minute video - Dr. Gruentzig discussing the ideals of coronary angioplasty - filmed in his Emory U. office ***  -  September, 1985

First angioplasty @ UAB - 1982 - see *bax* page

source

1993

Dr. Gary Roubin shows US Senator Howell Heflin and his wife a sample of the Gianturco-Roubin stent used to stabilize the coronary artery dissection that had occurred following his RCA angioplasty at Walter Reed Army Medical Center (instead of proceeding with CABG at Walter Reed, patient elected transfer to UAB for coronary stent).

Gianturco-Roubin Stent: Development and Investigation

First FDA-approved coronary stent - 1987 news broadcast - Eyewitness News Channel 5 - Atlanta - brief video

See *stent* page

Pathogenesis of Hypertension - Annals of Internal Medicine - 2003

Pathogenesis of Hypertension - Annals of Internal Medicine - 2003

Impella heart pump - temporary mechanical support for left ventricular cardiac output - info and video

Robotic Cardiac Surgery: State of the Art in 2014 - part I - video

Robotic Cardiac Surgery: State of the Art in 2014 - part II - video

Scientists grow bullish on pig-to-human transplants - Science AAAS - 2017

UNITED THERAPEUTICS Corporation - pipeline -> manufacturing organs for transplantation

UAB awarded $19.5 million grant for new xenotransplantation program - UAB News - 2016

This CEO is trying to genetically modify pig organs for human transplant - CNBC - 6/27/19

UNITED THERAPEUTICS Corporation video - explains the company

MIT Technology Review - 11/1/19 - full article here

MIT Technology Review - 11/1/19 - full article here

Transplanting pig kidneys in humans, 3D organ printing and other futuristic innovations to solve the organ shortage - CNBC Health Tech Matters - 2019

MIT Technology Review - 11/1/19 - full article here

UNITED THERAPEUTICS Corporation - pipeline -> manufacturing organs for transplantation

1987 Atlanta TV news video explaining stent

The Gianturco-Roubin Flex-Stent and the Gianturco-Roubin (GR II) Coronary Stents (Cook Inc) were the first Food and Drug Administration–approved coronary artery stents in February 2002. The Palmaz-Schatz stent did not get approved until 1994, after the BENESTENT and STRESS randomized trials, comparing stents with balloon angioplasty. Within 4 years of Food and Drug Administration approval, the balloon-expandable stent was used in >80% of percutaneous coronary interventions, a virtually unparalleled success.

(source)

source

Dr. Gary Roubin shows US Senator Howell Heflin and his wife a sample of the Gianturco-Roubin stent used to stabilize the coronary artery dissection that had occurred following his RCA angioplasty at Walter Reed Army Medical Center (instead of proceeding with urgent CABG at Walter Reed, patient elected transfer to UAB for coronary stent).

1987 Atlanta TV news video explaining stent

Gianturco-Roubin Stent: Development and Investigation

source