Faculty Bibliography

Although clinicians without a sense of history may not be condemned to repeat the past, the historical record offers many informative lessons. For one thing, history demonstrates the changing nature of scientific knowledge; current understandings of health and disease may prove as ephemeral as earlier discarded theories. In addition, history reminds us that social and cultural factors influence how physicians diagnose and treat various medical conditions. When attempting to teach the history of medicine at academic medical centers, instructors should be innovative as opposed to comprehensive. Students and residents are likely to find recent historical issues to be more relevant, particularly when such material can be integrated into the existing curriculum. Provocative topics include depictions of medicine in old Hollywood films, the contributions made by famous physicians at one's own institution, and historical debates over controversial events, such as the Tuskegee syphilis study and the use of lobotomy in mental institutions in the 1950s.

Women who test positive for a genetic breast cancer marker may have more than a 50% chance of developing the disease. Although past screening technologies have sought to identify actual breast cancers, as opposed to predisposition, the history of screening may help predict the societal response to genetic testing. For decades, educational messages have encouraged women to find breast cancers as early as possible. Such messages have fostered the popular assumption that immediately discovered and treated breast cancers are necessarily more curable. Research, however, has shown that screening improves the prognosis of some--but not all--breast cancers, and also that it may lead to unnecessary interventions. The dichotomy between the advertised value of early detection and its actual utility has caused particular controversy in the United States, where the cultural climate emphasizes the importance of obtaining all possible medical information and acting on it. Early detection has probably helped to lower overall breast cancer mortality. But it has proven hard to praise aggressive screening without exaggerating its merits. Women considering genetic breast cancer testing should weight the benefits and limitations of early knowledge.

The resurgence of tuberculosis (TB) in the early 1990s, including multidrug-resistant strains, led health officials to recommend the use of involuntary detention for persistently nonadherent patients. Using a series of recently published articles on the subject, this paper offers some opinions on how detention programs have balanced protection of the public's health with patients' civil liberties. Detained persons are more likely than other TB patients to come from socially disadvantaged groups. Health departments have generally used coercion appropriately, detaining patients as a last resort and providing them with due process. Yet health officials still retain great authority to bypass "least restrictive alternatives" in certain cases and to detain noninfectious patients for months or years. Misbehavior within institutions may inappropriately be used as a marker of future nonadherence with medications. As rates of TB and attention to the disease again decline, forcible confinement of sick patients should be reserved for those persons who truly threaten the public's health.