I’ve always told my patients that my memory is like eleven men on a ten man bench. You try to remember something new, and something you know already, falls off the other end - you know, the memory stores are full up (and there’s plenty of new stuff to have to try and remember in the field of medicine - but that’s a whole other post).

Maybe there;s a solution to this too many people on the bench/CRS?  Read the rest of this post here »

 I guess I’m going to be cursed with bad luck.

Mrs.Gagg always claims that she’s cursed by Murphy (you know “anything that can go wrong will”) - and needs to kiss the Blarney stone to get cured (it’s on the itinerary). But I fear I am destined to the same for having failed to pass on an “Irish Luck” e-mail.

I didn’t realize it in my naivety, but it’s National Friendship Week, and some philanthropist somewhere sent me this opportunity to have a wish come true - within 3 hours if I send this to 20 other people. Together with some sound advice like “love like you’ve never been hurt” and “dance like nobody’s watching”.

But “you had better send it on” warns the anonymous presence. “If you delete this you will have one year of bad luck”.

This e-mail is a turgid, apocryphal story about how, as a boy, Alexander Fleming (the discoverer of penicillin) saved some other boy from a peat bog in Scotland. The boy he saved supposedly was Winston Churchill - and supposedly his farther (Lord Randolph Churchill) then paid for Fleming to go to medical school, so penicillin was invented - and then to cap the sentimentality, supposedly Winston’s life was saved by penicillin when he got pneumonia.

The problem  is that it is all pure bullshit. I just happen to be reading a detailed and  authoritative biography on Fleming (Penicillin Man by Kevin Brown). In reality, when Churchill got pneumonia after attending the conference in Tehran in 1943 to set up Operation Overlord, his physician, Lord Moran chickened out on using penicillin as it was not very well tried and tested at that stage. He was in fact saved by sulphonamides - but the newspapers, in their enthusiasm for penicillin mania “reported Churchill’s recovery, but claimed it was due to penicillin”

Those imaginative journalists also came up with the story of how Fleming had “twice saved the Prime Ministers’ life”, with “Fleming or his farther having saved Churchill from drowning as a boy”. “Neither story was true, but put together they made good copy, and like many good stories, live on as urban myth” notes Brown.

Mrs. Gagg, ever vigilant that I don’t put my foot in my mouth, tells me that the website ‘Snoops’ confirms that the story in the e-mail is not true.

The point of my comment is not to be a smart-ass about catching the error, but to ask who are the dorks sending out these hideously sentimental “Round Robin” e-mails that seem to arrive in my in box all too often - with their threats of misfortune if you den’t send them on?

Here’s a picture of a couple of fellowes who obviousely DID pass on the e-mail.

 The story of Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, having twice saved Winston Churchill’s life may be bit of hyperbole and over-enthusiasm on the part of the press in the past (see ‘Luck of the Irish’), but there’s some interesting features to the whole story of the development of penicillin.

I always thought the story was that a petri-dish growing Staphylococcus

Aureus was left out on the bench, and the lab assistant, and not Fleming, noted there was no growth where a mold had grown. But apparently that’s not true, according to the book ‘Penicillin Man’ by Kevin Brown.                                                                                                               Some Perks of the Drug Read the rest of this post here »