Faculty Bibliography

A short story details an unmarried pregnant woman's experience of spending her ninth month of pregnancy and the birth itself with close women friends

A discussion of ambition and how it fuels success is presented. Sometimes people can have too much ambition, causing them to become one-sided and humorless. Several women who who achieved success later in life are presented

At Children's Hospital in Boston MA, the doctors, nurses and laboratory technicians work round-the-clock in order to save young lives. Case studies of children who were hospitalized there are presented

Perri Klass discusses the depiction of children and the tendency to make them angelic, or dying in the fiction of 19th-century authors

[Lois Wingerson], a science writer, does an excellent job of covering the many levels of this endeavor in ''Mapping Our Genes.'' The book, written for the nonspecialist, gives a taste of both the triumphs and the false starts of science. Despite the book's title, though, Ms. Wingerson does not focus primarily on the human genome project, the attempt to map the complete collection of human DNA. She is most successful in describing the victims of genetic diseases, the people for whom rare variants of DNA represent not a fascinating scientific problem, not a chance for professional glory, but an old-fashioned curse, pursuing their families across the generations. Ms. Wingerson conveys not only the enthusiasm and dedication of the scientists, but also the gap between how they see the disease (''We have found a gold mine,'' says one) and how their subjects see it. The advances that offer so much hope and promise to researchers often mean little to those waiting impatiently for an immediate cure. For example, Mrs. [Betty LeBlanc], who searched though piles of parish records to find her ancestors, is unmoved when researchers tell her they may have found a way to make prenatal diagnoses of Friedreich's ataxia. She is a Roman Catholic and has no use for a test that can lead to abortions. Her concern is for three of her six children, who are slowly but inexorably losing their mobility

A doctor writes as a defense and as an escape from the daily problems he encounters in his profession. The daily encounters he experiences with children at the hospital are discussed

Parents should not fly into a meningitis panic every time a child has a slight fever or a headache. On the other hand, meningitis is a very serious childhood illness - one that can lead to permanent brain damage or death - and it can strike out of the blue. Once the illness is detected, many treatments are now available that are significantly improved over what they once were. But in a small child the detection is not easy. The fundamental diagnostic approach remains much the same as it always has been. Look for the red flags. Parents and pediatricians alike need to watch for the specific signs and follow them up. For the pediatrician or the emergency room doctor, the specter of ''missing a meningitis'' is ever present. The term meningitis describes any inflammation of the meninges, membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord. If many white blood cells are found in the cerebrospinal fluid - which bathes the brain, spinal cord and meninges - this, by definition, means meningitis. The body's immune system has, in effect, sent in the marines, the white blood cells, to fight off the foreign agents that have infected the area and caused the potentially damaging inflammation. The enemy here can be any of a variety of bacteria or viruses (or, in rare cases, fungi, yeast or other infectious agents), though by far the most dangerous is bacteria. So we do the best we can with the physical examination, but if we're at all worried, we can't leave it at that. The conventional wisdom on spinal taps in children, passed on to generations of interns when they begin work in a pediatric emergency room, is this: if you think about doing a tap, do a tap. Spinal taps, though they seem frightening to many people, are in fact usually relatively quick and easy to do on small children, because of young bodies' suppleness and the nearness of the spinal column to the surface of the skin. They are hardest to do on the elderly. For a spinal tap, or lumbar puncture, the child lies on his side (or, more often with the young, is held on his side) in the fetal position. The doctor washes the lower back with antiseptic and alcohol, covers the child with sterile drapes and then finds the target, the space between either the third and fourth or the fourth and fifth lumbar vertebrae. This location is safe because the spinal cord ends significantly above it. A hollow needle is inserted, into the spinal column but not the cord, and a small amount of cerebrospinal fluid is taken out. In adults, local anesthesia is usually injected first; but in babies and small children, it is considered traumatic to use it. We tend to assume that for most children, a needle is a needle, and if they are going to be held down and stuck with needles, better once than twice.

As prenatal testing becomes more and more precise, parents and doctors are questioning how much we want to know about a child before it is born

Suggestions on how to make the right choice for a medical newsletter are presented