Michael Underwood, MD (1737-1820): physician-accoucheur of London.
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Underwood was the first physician-accoucheur to be appointed to the Royal College of Physicians in London. The same year, 1784, he published a textbook which did much to establish paediatrics as an emerging discipline in its own right. The book contains several original descriptions of childhood diseases. (+info)
Disseminating drug prescribing information: the cox-2 inhibitors withdrawals.
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This case study examined the recent withdrawal of valdecoxib to determine the timeliness of updates in commonly used information sources used by healthcare professionals. The method included assembling a purposive sample of 15 drug reference and warning systems that were then systematically monitored for several months after the withdrawal of valdecoxib to determine the time to update this information. These information sources were classified and described qualitatively. A time to diffusion curve was plotted and the average number of days to report the drug withdrawal or update reference databases was calculated. Only 2 of 15 information systems reported the drug withdrawal on the actual date of the FDA announcement. Institutional electronic textbooks took an average of 109.8 days (+/-14 days) to report the withdrawal. In addition, one pharma-sponsored dissemination source (Peerview Press) had not updated their information as of this publication. (+info)
First illustrations of female "Neurosurgeons" in the fifteenth century by Serefeddin Sabuncuoglu.
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Males have dominated medicine for many centuries. Females could not appear in the medical history equally till the end of the 18th century; although they always have been in medicine as healers. It is worth mentioning that first illustrations indicating female surgeons were found in the book written in Turkish by Serefeddin Sabuncuoglu in the 15th century; while Europe was newly waking up from its dark ages and Middle East was under the influence of strict rules of Arabic and Islamic culture. Serefeddin Sabuncuoglu (1385-1470) was the author of the first illustrated surgical textbook Cerrahiyyetu'l-Haniyye (Imperial surgery) in Turkish Literature. Inside miniatures drawn by Serefeddin Sabuncuoglu indicated that the female surgeons, acknowledged "Tabibe", had been allowed to practice alone in Anatolia. Tabibes are illustrated in the miniatures practicing on the management of dead foetus with foetal hydrocephalus and macrocephalus which were the first clues by means of Turkish women in Neurosurgery. (+info)
A new impact assessment method to evaluate knowledge resources.
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RATIONALE: Methods to systematically measure the impact of knowledge resources on health professionals would enhance evaluation of these resources in the real world. OBJECTIVE: To propose a new impact assessment method. BACKGROUND: We demonstrated the feasibility of combining a 4-level scale with Computerized Ecological Momentary Assessment (CEMA) for efficiently measuring the impact of a knowledge resource. METHOD: We critically reviewed the world literature regarding the impact of clinical information-retrieval technology on trainees and doctors, and retained 26 papers for qualitative content analysis. FINDINGS: Of those, 21 use a nominal scale (yes/no), none systematically measures the impact of searches for information outside of a laboratory setting, and none uses an ordinal scale. The literature supports the proposed levels of impact, and suggests a fifth level. CONCLUSION: A new impact assessment method is proposed, which combines a 5-level revised scale and CEMA. (+info)
Medical textbook summarization and guided navigation using statistical sentence extraction.
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We present a method for automated medical textbook and encyclopedia summarization. Using statistical sentence extraction and semantic relationships, we extract sentences from text returned as part of an existing textbook search (similar to a book index). Our system guides users to the information they desire by summarizing the content of each relevant chapter or section returned in the search. The summary is tailored to contain sentences that specifically address the user's search terms. Our clustering method selects sentences that contain concepts specifically addressing the context of the query term in each of the returned sections. Our method examines conceptual relationships from the UMLS and selects clusters of concepts using Expectation Maximization (EM). Sentences associated with the concept clusters are shown to the user. We evaluated whether our extracted summary provides a suitable answer to the user's question. (+info)
Antimicrobe.org: an online reference for the practicing infectious diseases specialist.
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Antimicrobe.org (http://www.antimicrobe.org) is a World Wide Web-based version of the textbook Antimicrobial Therapy and Vaccines, volumes I and II. The Web site currently consists of 3 texts (Microbes, Antimicrobial Agents, and HIV Clinical Manual) and will soon include a fourth, Empiric. The Web site focuses on therapy for infectious diseases, and it covers, in comprehensive detail, a great majority of infections encountered today. The dynamic nature of a Web-based reference allows for information to be frequently updated and enhances a physician's searching capabilities to find answers to very specific clinical questions and the latest available evidence. A Smart Search engine allows users to ask specific questions and to find focused answers, either within the textbook or through PubMed via a guided PubMed references option. The Web site also provides clinical vignettes and minireviews on hot topics in infectious diseases and hyperlinks to other important articles or Web sites. Chapters are written by experts in their field who provide evidence-based information, as well as anecdotal reports about rare infections. Antimicrobe.org would be of great benefit to physicians who treat infections on a routine basis. (+info)
Paul Portal (1630-1703), man-midwife of Paris.
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Portal was the first doctor to give a good description of placenta praevia. His textbook contained interesting accounts of problem cases that he had encountered. (+info)
Global bioethics -- myth or reality?
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BACKGROUND: There has been debate on whether a global or unified field of bioethics exists. If bioethics is a unified global field, or at the very least a closely shared way of thinking, then we should expect bioethicists to behave the same way in their academic activities anywhere in the world. This paper investigates whether there is a 'global bioethics' in the sense of a unified academic community. METHODS: To address this question, we study the web-linking patterns of bioethics institutions, the citation patterns of bioethics papers and the buying patterns of bioethics books. RESULTS: All three analyses indicate that there are geographical and institutional differences in the academic behavior of bioethicists and bioethics institutions. CONCLUSION: These exploratory studies support the position that there is no unified global field of bioethics. This is a problem if the only reason is parochialism. But these regional differences are probably of less concern if one notices that bioethics comes in many not always mutually understandable dialects. (+info)