Hospitals and Healthcare

You might think surgery is a fairly modern phenomenon, but in the Stone Age cavemen performed neurosurgery and their patients lived to tell the tale! Ancients Egyptians, Greeks and Romans picked up the mantle of surgery before it was thrust into the hands of barbers. It's since come leaps and bounds, but the development of robotics has placed surgery at another crossroads.

Centuries before coronavirus, plague, smallpox, yellow fever and other contagions killed hundreds of millions around the world.

I’ve become obsessed with Thomas Eakins’s “The Gross Clinic.” Let me show you why.

An innovative class at Yale School of Medicine teaches first-year students the fine art of observational skills. The goal is to improve diagnostic skills in future doctors by having them view and analyze very detailed works of art at the Yale Center for British Art.

Polio epidemics were a scourge in Australia until the vaccine arrived; a University of Melbourne expert looks back at how polio was treated, and feared.

Adults also need to get vaccinated to provide herd immunity for others, especially babies and older people.

Did you know a certain Australian township believed that the best cure for rheumatism was to insert themselves into a rotting whale carcass?

After surviving the bloody horrors of WWI in Europe, two Australian nurses return home only to be killed by a new, invisible enemy. Now their stories have been rescued from oblivion. 

Once a slave, Biddy Mason went on to a life of extraordinary accomplishments. The fact that she figures in W.P.A. murals in San Francisco may save them from destruction.

Half of those who underwent surgery in the 19th century didn't survive the experience.

Art can help physicians become more thoughtful and meticulous observers — a skill that lays the foundation for good medicine.

In 1952, a team of doctors from Harper Hospital and employees from General Motors engineered a mechanical pump that helped pave the way for modern open-heart surgery.