The Sterile Eye is 6 months old, just learning to sit on its own and getting its first teeth. It’s also delightful to see that it has more than doubled it’s birth weight.

At this first milestone it is time to take a step back and review the past. Here are the posts that are my personal favorites of each of the six months this blog has existed.

November 2007: Different shades of red
About the problems involved in rendering our inside’s different shades of red on video. Read the post.

December 2007: Bright spot puncture
The little boy who was excitedly looking forward to a lumbar puncture.
Read the post.

January 2008: Makes a grown man writhe
Treating skin cancer with light can be heavy for some. Read the post.

February 2008: You’re not recording sound, are you?
What does it sound like in an OR, and why don’t I record these sounds?
Read the post.

March 2008: Paean to the pean
The story behind a common surgical instrument, and why I think it’s an artist’s tool. Read the post.

April 2008: Diagnosis and aspiration
Some thoughts on the “mystical knowledge” about people, possessed by healthcare workers. Read the post.

I’d like to dedicate this review to my better half. Thanks for reading (most of) my drafts. You’re the best editor!

Illustration created using Websites as Graphs

Using hilarious stories, based on actual facts, Richard Gordon shows that most of the monumental discoveries [in medicine] were originally accidents.

The Alarming History… is basically a history book of medicine written to inform, but primarily to entertain. In many ways it resembles Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. It focuses as much on the personalities behind different medical breakthroughs as the breakthroughs themselves. Like who really discovered penicillin and who got the honor for it.Writing about the history of medicine by theme and not chronologically, Gordon manages to get some good points across. Especially how religion, social hierarchy and politics has held back medical research and hindered the implementing of new discoveries.

But the most prominent theme in this book can be found in this line about James Lind (1716-94) and the discovery that lemon and lime juice cured scurvy:

He had found the specific remedy , with no notion how it worked, to a disease for which nobody remotely knew the reason.

Some of the greatest advances in medicine were discovered not knowing what caused the problem, and why the measure worked. Lister introduced antisepsis knowing nothing about bacteria.

I wouldn’t recommend The Alarming History… as a first book about medical history, but it’s a very entertaining and interesting supplement to other books, offering a critical and often sarcastic view on much celebrated discoveries and events in the history of medicine.

It will remind you, as Voltaire put it, that:

(…) doctors pour drugs of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, into human beings of which they know nothing.