Systemic lupus erythematosus.

Abstract

Lupus comes from a Latin word that means wolf—an apt metaphor for the history of this savage and elusive condition. How did a painfully erosive rash, likened to cancer and then tuberculosis, become a chronic systemic disorder? Teasing out the details of this transformation shows how different ways of ordering medical knowledge and practice have framed a series of radically different disease entities under the same resonant name. The historian will see you now: introducing Case Histories“I hope that Lord Grey and you are well”, wrote the Regency wit and clergyman Sydney Smith to his confidante Lady Mary Grey in February, 1836, “no easy thing, seeing that there are about fifteen hundred diseases to which man is subject”. Last year the editors of the Lancet journals announced the launch of The Lancet Clinic, a major online initiative which draws together an overview Seminar with the best current research from across the Lancet journals on 135 of the most globally important diseases. Full-Text PDF Parkinson's diseaseHad James Parkinson never written An Essay on the Shaking Palsy, he might now be remembered as an adventurous activist in an age of turmoil. Born in London, in 1755, he belonged to a generation whose political consciousness was shaped by the French and American Revolutions and the writings of firebrand democrats like Thomas Paine. When some of his colleagues in the London Corresponding Society were charged with treason, Parkinson stood up for them in the witness box, and, in 1796, he was suspected of involvement in the Popgun Plot—an alleged conspiracy to assassinate George III with a poisoned dart from an airgun. Full-Text PDF Attention deficit hyperactivity disorderThink of all the names we have for children who cause trouble in classrooms: difficult, disruptive, naughty, attention-seeking, badly brought up, just plain bad. After the end of World War 2, American psychiatrists, pharmaceutical companies, and educationalists added a new term to this list, and a potent new frame for bad behaviour. Children who could not keep themselves in a chair or concentrate on a blackboard were not difficult or bad but hyperactive. They were suffering, so the new argument ran, from “a genetic, neurological glitch”, in the words of the historian Matthew Smith, and their condition could be managed with regular doses of stimulants. Full-Text PDF Ovarian cancerOn Christmas Day 1809, as the residents of Danville, Kentucky, sang carols in their churches, Jane Todd Crawford prepared for a terrible ordeal. 46 years old and the mother of four children, Crawford believed she was pregnant again with twins, but the full term had passed and her belly continued to swell. On Dec 13, 1809, she consulted the surgeon Ephraim McDowell, who diagnosed a massive ovarian tumour. Born in 1771, McDowell studied medicine in Virginia and Edinburgh, where he might have read John Hunter's discussion of surgery for ovarian cancer. Full-Text PDF