Article-linking websites online can help you find relevant articles from one article's DOI. Scroll through these slides to learn more about LitMaps, Citation Gecko, and Connected Papers.
Academic research is an ongoing conversation between authors. by Sadie Davenport
Title: What Patients Teach: The Everyday Ethics of Health Care.
By: Larry R. Churchill; Joseph B. Fanning; David Schenck. Oxford University Press. 2013.
Available in our Academic eBook Collection.
Description: "Being a patient is a unique interpersonal experience but it is also a universal human experience. The relationships formed when we are patients can also teach some of life's most important lessons, and these relationships provide a special window into ethics, especially the ethics of healthcare professionals. This book answers two basic questions: As patients see it, what things allow relationships with healthcare providers to become therapeutic? What can this teach us about healthcare ethics? This volume presents detailed descriptions and analyses of 50 interviews with 58 patients, representing a wide spectrum of illnesses and clinician specialties. The authors argue that the structure, rhythm, and horizon of routine patient care are ultimately grounded in patient vulnerability and clinician responsiveness. From the short interview segments, the longer vignettes and the full patient stories presented here emerge the neglected dimensions of healthcare and healthcare ethics. What becomes visible is an ethics of everyday interdependence, with mutual responsibilities that follow from this moral symbiosis. Both professional expressions of healthcare ethics and the field of bioethics need to be informed and reformed by this distinctive, more patient-centered, turn in how we understand both patient care as a whole and the ethics of care more specifically. The final chapters present revised codes of ethics for health professionals, as well as the implications for medical and health professions education."
Pictured below is the "Fly Room," a Drosophila (fruit fly) research lab at Columbia University, where in the early twentieth century, Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr. Thomas Hunt Morgan and "the Fly Boys" made important discoveries about modern genetics. While Mendel founded the field of genetics, the "gene" was still an abstraction. Morgan was able to confirm that the chromosome is a physical unit of genetic material, and that the pairing of chromosomes results in genetic variance. This work also contributed to scientists' understanding of evolution. Morgan's work offered natural selection as a scientific explanation for evolution.
Left: A luncheon held in "The Fly Room" in 1918. The Fly Room was reportedly small and cluttered.
Right: The National Cancer Institute's diagram on DNA forming genes and chromosomes.
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Today is neurologist Joseph Babinski's birthday! It's a good day to talk about the "Babinski sign," which he first described in 1899. Babinski studied neurology in the 19th century under Jean-Martin Charcot, who is often considered the "founder of modern neurology." This test was one which Babinski developed over time by observing patients with various neurological issues (nervous system damage, epilepsy, and mental health issues) that were difficult to distinguish at the time.
The Babinski sign is still used today: it tests the reflexes in a person's foot in order to determine if they have damage to or a disease involving their nervous system, spinal cord, or brain. The test is done by rubbing the sole of a person's foot with a blunt object, and analyzing the reflexes of their toes. View the image below to see that pointing the toes downward indicates normal nerve activity, while pointing the toes upward indicates nerve damage or disease.
Left image: This diagram is from the Wikipedia article on the Babinski sign.
Right image: Search results for "the Babinski Sign" on Access Medicine, one of our library databases. The diagrams in this results list demonstrate how this test can be applied to different patient situations (assessing the spinal cord, paralysis, rehabilitation, etc.).
Further reading:
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