Death in Childbirth
I taught a course last year in global maternal mortality so I have some idea of what I ' m talking about here. Childbirth is dangerous for women because, for one thing, thanks to evolution giving us big brains, the baby ' s head is too big for the birth canal. However, there are other complications of pregnancy that can occur. In Europe in the 19th Century, as it became common for women to give birth in hospitals, infectious disease killed a lot of mothers, thanks to the doctors transferring pathogens on their unwashed hands and unsterile instruments. Many a family was bereaved by maternal death, but it has become rare in ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 17, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Reading the Entrails
I often come across arguments to the effect that humans aren ' t really unique or special, we ' re just one animal among all the others. I find this assertion, frankly, just silly. Every species is unique in some ways, of course, that ' s why we can classify them. But humans are highly unusual in very important ways. For example, the biomass of domesticated mammals exceeds that of all the other mammals on earth combined; and the biomass of domesticated poultry -- mostly chickens -- isthree times the biomass of all other birds on earth.This happened in part because of language, which is an absolutely unique human capacity t...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 16, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Hit the snooze button
Thank the Lord, we ' re almost through Chronicles. Just a few more chapters to go. Jotham is mentioned very briefly in the Book of Kings, so that is not the source referred to at the end here. What is odd, however, is that the Chronicler usually refers to what appear to be two separate books, the book of the Kings of Judah and the book of the Kings of Israel. Here he refers to a single book, but it can ' t be the canonical Book of Kings because that does not include any additional detail about Jotham.Of course we get the usual absurd amounts of tribute.27 Jotham was twenty-five years old when he became king, and he re...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 15, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Ruling out
People who, for ideological reasons, don ' t actually want to do what is necessary to solve the problem of excessive spending on health care often claim that the real problem is the cost of malpractice insurance. So they propose " tort reform " as the solution. The argument is that it isn ' t just the direct cost of insurance that ' s to blame, but also that physicians practice " defensive medicine, " ordering unnecessary tests and procedures, to avoid possible liability.First, let ' s just get the extent of the problem, if any, out of the way. The best estimate is that liability costs -- including both compone...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 13, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Do not mess with the guys who wrote this
The story of Uzziah, including his transgression and consequential leprosy, is told briefly in the Book of Kings, embedded in a much longer discussion of goings on in the northern kingdom at the time. The Chronicler as usual has no interest in the northern kingdom, but he has a great deal of interest in the prerogatives of the priesthood so he makes that the focus. There have been instances in the past when the priests have put kings in their place, although in the early part of the Deuteronomistic History kings sometimes made sacrifices and apparently it was okay. The Chronicler wants to be very clear that kings can...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 12, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
