How do you survive the vicissitudes of a pandemic as a doctor? Hemmed in from all sides- your patients at risk, the element of personal danger, the mortifying thought that you might pass it on to your family...things can get overwhelming.
Study helps. Updating your knowledge to keep up with the latest development is reassuring, and at least offers a semblance of control to circumstances that are largely outwith your training. However, information can sometimes overwhelm you. There's too much of it. Sorting the wheat from chaff is difficult and social media does not help.
At times like these- looking back through the ages, scouring the pages of Medical History, seeing how great men and women coped with pressure, excelled despite it, and made groundbreaking discoveries that saved millions of lives, offers comfort and peace. You feel part of a greater design. Perhaps the lives of us humble doctors has some purpose after all?
Here then is an article from 160 years ago, published on 1 March 1860 in the Boston Medical & Surgical Journal, later to be renamed The New England Journal of Medicine.
Particularly instructive is how Jenner observed that that milk maids were immune to Small Pox because of their exposure to Cow Pox- an observation that formed the basis of the first vaccine ever in 1770. However, it took him fully 25 years before he published his findings and there is an eerie parallel with Newton's consigning the discovery of differential Calculus to a drawer in his study for a quarter century, before Leibnitz made the same discovery and published it. It was still credited to Newton.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJM186003010620501?articleTools=true
Study helps. Updating your knowledge to keep up with the latest development is reassuring, and at least offers a semblance of control to circumstances that are largely outwith your training. However, information can sometimes overwhelm you. There's too much of it. Sorting the wheat from chaff is difficult and social media does not help.
At times like these- looking back through the ages, scouring the pages of Medical History, seeing how great men and women coped with pressure, excelled despite it, and made groundbreaking discoveries that saved millions of lives, offers comfort and peace. You feel part of a greater design. Perhaps the lives of us humble doctors has some purpose after all?
Here then is an article from 160 years ago, published on 1 March 1860 in the Boston Medical & Surgical Journal, later to be renamed The New England Journal of Medicine.
Particularly instructive is how Jenner observed that that milk maids were immune to Small Pox because of their exposure to Cow Pox- an observation that formed the basis of the first vaccine ever in 1770. However, it took him fully 25 years before he published his findings and there is an eerie parallel with Newton's consigning the discovery of differential Calculus to a drawer in his study for a quarter century, before Leibnitz made the same discovery and published it. It was still credited to Newton.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJM186003010620501?articleTools=true
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