Should dying patients have the right to try drugs not yet approved by the government? In my Business Ethics course, we cover the classic Laetrile case (my one-hour video lecture with accompanying readings on the case), in which the arguments for government paternalism and market liberalism go head to head. Every few years brings another […]
Liberty and medical experimentation Read More »
The opening of my latest column at EveryJoe: “You might not think of yourself as wealthy. Let me prove that you are. “In 1836, the richest man in the world was Nathan Rothschild. He was 58 years old and, according to a medical check-up at the beginning of the year, in good condition for a
The Richest Man in the World’s Healthcare [new “The Good Life” column] Read More »
From Peter Gay’s brief biography, about the terrible brevity of life in Mozart’s time. Wolfgang Mozart “was born in Salzburg on January 27, 1756, the seventh and last child of Leopold and Anna Maria Mozart. Of his siblings, five died in infancy, and only one sister, four years his elder, survived … . This appalling
Appalling infant mortality numbers, then and now Read More »
Steven Johnson’s TED talk on the outbreak and John Snow’s wonderful persistence in discovering the cause of cholera.
The Ghost Map — Steven Johnson presentation Read More »
From Part 3 of Stephen Hicks’s Philosophy of Education course, in which he discusses Ignaz Semmelweis’s discovery of the cause of puerperal fever, with special focus on the cognitive methods Semmelweis used. Clips 1-3: Previous: Reason–a developmental story.Next: The “Juliet is the sun” metaphor.Return to the Philosophy of Education page.Return to the StephenHicks.org main page.
The Semmelweis case Read More »
[This is Section 16 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.] 16. Eugenics Nazi education and censorship attempted to control people’s minds. The Nazis also controlled the bodies of their citizens as much as possible. Milder controls involved new public-health measures such as an aggressive campaign against smoking: the Nazis banned smoking in certain public places, ran
Eugenics [Section 16 of Nietzsche and the Nazis] Read More »
Following up on The Knife Man and John Hunter, the great 18th-century anatomist and surgeon. In Hunter’s era surgery was brutal, in large part due to surgeons’ ignorance of anatomy, and in that earlier post I wondered why there was still such ignorance given that the 1700s were two centuries after Andreas Vesalius and a
Anatomy and philosophy Read More »
A follow up to my post on Why life is 255 times better now than in 1800. Some warm-up indicators: By 1900 the U.S. had recently become the wealthiest economy in the world, slightly surpassing Australia and Great Britain, and it had become twice as wealthy as France and Germany and four times as wealthy
Why life in America is 40 times better than in 1900 Read More »