My Blog

The famous American author Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) lived from 1835 to 1910. In spite of being a life-long serious cigar smoker, he was quite healthy until late in life, when he developed heart trouble. However, illness, particularly infectious diseases, changed...

I’ve always been curious about why famous writers became writers, and why they wrote what they wrote. Clearly, our life experiences shape what we write, and we as writers are always admonished to “write what you know”. As a doctor, I am fascinated by illness and...

Beauty Kills Imagine you are Spanish royalty in the 1600s. Spain is at the height of its international prowess and is a fabulously rich country. Untold wealth has been transferred from Central and South America in the form of gold and silver. Spain is, indeed, a...

The Mad Hatter We all remember the Mad Hatter, the character in Alice in Wonderland. Alice meets the Hatter having tea with the March hare and the Dormouse. He acts erratically, asking nonsense riddles, reciting ridiculous poetry, switching places at the table, biting...

Do you like your ice cream in a cone or a cup? If you were living in England in the 1880’s, your answer could be life-altering. Why? Ice cream was a popular summertime treat in England in the 1800s and was usually sold in a  “penny lick”, a short thick glass cup....

I started practicing as a pediatrician in 1982 and retired in 2021. So, Google, which became commonly used around 2000, has been with me about half of my practice lifetime. Those two halves were startlingly different. Before Google, I gave new parents and...

Usually, my posts contain original writing, but I'm making an exception this time. I was recently blown away by an article in Atlas Obscura about making art with bacteria. Apparently pioneered by Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, bacteria art is a thing!...

English is a funny language, an amalgam of many other languages, and always in evolution. Daily, we use words that make no sense, without even noticing it. Most of these misnomers made sense originally, and the words have hung on, even after our knowledge, or the...

Mark Twain said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. “ Let’s have a romp through some beliefs that have NO science to back them up. Burping babies- If you’ve ever been a parent or a babysitter,...