Thalassaemia

In 1858 the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow described leukaemia as a disorder of white blood cell proliferation. Virchow and others observed that people with chronic leukaemia typically had enlarged spleens, and for the next 50 years or so patients with this sign might be diagnosed with “splenic anaemia”. In the early 20th century, though, this broad frame broke into several new diagnoses. One of them—thalassaemia—has been shaped by some of the most potent forces of the modern era: migration and shifting attitudes to race, molecular medicine and the pharmaceutical industry, the power of scientific medicine, and the limitations of treatment. 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 Type 2 diabetesIn the space of a few months in 1921, an acute and terminal disease—type 1 diabetes—became a manageable chronic condition. The discovery of insulin by Frederick Banting, Charles Best, and their colleagues captured a mood of therapeutic optimism, the hope that a new scientific medicine, rooted in the laboratory and working through the networks of industry and state health care, could find cures for all diseases. But insulin therapy, clinicians soon realised, was effective in only a minority of patients. Full-Text PDF