Curiosity is More Important Than Doing Good

The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves some of the greatest men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigators. What animates a great pathologist? Is it the desire to cure disease, to save life? Surely not, save perhaps as an afterthought. He is too intelligent, deep down in h...

 The Eagerness of Medical Sciences are Detrimental

And it has been sarcastically said, that there is a wide difference between a good physician and a bad one, but a small difference between a good physician and no physician at all; by which it is meant to insinuate, that the mischievous officiousness of art does commonly more than counterbalance any benefit derivable from it.

 The Cultural Bias of the "Growth Curve"

A more flexible construct of normality also has practical applications. As all parents in Western culture know, there is a "normal growth curve" against which all infants are compared when they are brought in for visits to the pediatrician. This standard is used to evaluate babies' growth, and if die baby falls drastically below die curve, pediatricians recommend intervention. But pediatrician Glen Flores, who codirects the Pediatric Latino Clinic at the Boston University School of Medicine, ...

 Women Doctors in Egypt

Medicine was an established profession in Egypt prior to 3000 BC and educated women worked as doctors and surgeons. The medical schools at Sais and Heliopolis attracted women students and teachers from throughout the ancient world. At the Temple of Sais north of Memphis an inscription reads: 'I have come from the school of medicine at Heliopolis, and have studied at the woman's school at Sais where the divine mothers have taught me how to cure disease.'' Moses and his wife Zipporah probably s...