The lamp still shines

I'd read Cecil Woodham Smith's classic biography of Florence Nightingale years ago. Last year I read Mark Bostridge's book, Florence Nightingale : the making of an icon, so this article in the Guardian interested me:

"But when the Florence Nightingale museum in London reopens after a £1.4m rebuild on her birthday next month, an installation by artist Susan Stockwell will remind visitors that the pioneering nurse actually lived on for another half century until 1910 – and spent most of that time in her bed.

"For the sculpture, funded by the Guy's and St Thomas's hospital charity as a gift to the museum, Stockwell has taken a Victorian brass bed and made a ghostly mattress pressed down by the weight of an invisible figure out of thousands of furled pages from books.

"The pages convey the fact that though Nightingale was in bed, she was not inactive. She wrote more than 200 books, pamphlets and articles, including pioneering work on hospital planning, and her 1860 Notes on Nursing, regarded as the foundation of modern nursing."[...]

"There is a final joke hidden in the bed which may not have amused Nightingale, a woman of sharp wit but apparently without a frivolous bone in her body. Stockwell had hoped to make the mattress from old copies of Nightingale's books, but the idea proved too expensive. Instead, while the outer layers are from Notes on Nursing and Cecil Woodham Smith's classic biography, the core is made from 700 copies of Mills & Boon romances Stockwell bought on eBay, including hospital romances in which fragile nurses are eventually crushed against the manly chests of handsome doctors – as Nightingale certainly never was."

MICHAEL DEBAKEY, 1908-2008

I'VE blogged about Michael DeBakey here and here. Today's news from Houston is that Dr DeBakey died yesterday at Methodist Hospital, where he practised cardiovascular surgeon since 1949!

Medical statesman, chancellor emeritus of Baylor College of Medicine, and a surgeon at The Methodist Hospital since 1949, DeBakey trained thousands of surgeons over several generations, achieving legendary status decades before his death. During his career, he estimated he had performed more than 60,000 operations. His patients included the famous — Russian President Boris Yeltsin and movie actress Marlene Dietrich among them — and the uncelebrated.
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Debakey almost died in 2006, when he suffered an aortic aneurysm, a condition for which he pioneered the treatment. He is considered the oldest patient to have both undergone and survived surgery for it. He recovered well enough to go to Washington earlier this year to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, one of the nation's two highest civilian honors.

He remained vigorous and was a player in medicine well into his 90s, performing surgeries, traveling and publishing articles in scientific journals. His large hands were steady, his hearing sharp. His personal health regimen included taking the stairs at work and a single cup of coffee in the morning.

EVEN DOCTORS BELIEVE SOME HEALTH MYTHS

Well, whaddya know?

By Frank Greve McClatchy Newspapers 21 December 2007
Even doctors believe some health myths

WASHINGTON — Just because your doctor tells you to drink eight glasses of water daily doesn't mean you should, according to researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine.

Doctors often fall for the same health myths that their patients do, Drs. Rachel Vreeman and Aaron Carroll report in the Christmas-New Year's issue of the British Medical Journal. Among seven myths they cite is the eight-glasses-of-water one.

"There is no medical evidence to suggest that you need that much water," Vreeman concluded after their intensive review of medical research on the subject.

She and Carroll trace the misperception to a 1945 recommendation by the Nutrition Council that Americans consume the equivalent of eight glasses of fluids daily. Lost over the years, they concluded, was the council's note that the 64 ounces called for included water contained in coffee, soda, fruits and vegetables.

No wonder we're over-fluoridated. Doctors and dentists are also trapped by the fluoridation belief system, too, but more and more are realising the importance of the new science.

Continue reading 'Even doctors believe some health myths'....

MAKING UP IS SO HARD TO DO

I worked for nearly twenty years at Texas Heart Institute in Houston, so today's story in the Times' Science section about the end of the "feud" between two giants in cardiology medicine, Michael DeBakey and Denton Cooley, is, well, heartwarming! 'Bout time, I'd say! After all, Cooley is 87 and DeBakey is 99!!!