| dsaklad@zurich.csail.mit.edu 2005-05-31, 10:45 pm |
| By Berton Roueche
The Medical Detectives
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0452265886/
At about eight o'clock on Monday morning, September 25, 1944, a ragged
aimless old man of eighty-two collapsed on the sidewalk on Dey Street,
near the Hudson Terminal.
A Man Named Hoffman
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/co...029fr_archive02
Around ten o'clock on the morning of Wednesday, March 4, 1964, a man
name Donald Hoffman presented himself fo treatment at the Student
Health Clinic of Miam University, in Oxford, Ohio, some thirty miles
northwest of Cincinnati.
The Fog
http://smccd.net/accounts/case/biol101/thefogtext.html
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...01%2Fthefog.pdf
An online viewer for PDF http://view.samurajdata.se/
At about eight-thirty on Friday Morning, one of Donora's eight
physicians, Dr. Ralph W. Koehler, a tense, stocky man of forty-eight,
stepped to his bathroom window for a look at the weather. It was, at
best, unchanged. He could see nothing but a watery waste of rooftops,
islanded in fog. As he was turning away, a shimmer of movement in the
distance caught his eye. It was a freight train creeping along the
riverbank just south of town, and the sight of it shook him. He had
never seen anything quite like it before. "It was the smoke," he says.
"They were firing up for the grade and the smoke was belching out, but
it didn't rise. I mean it didn't go up at all. If just spilled out over
the lip of the stack, like ink or oil, and rolled down to the ground
and lay there. My God, it just lay there! I thought, Well, God damn-and
they talk about needing smoke control up in Pittsburgh! I've got a
heart condition, and I was so disgusted my heart began to act up a
little. I had to sit down on the edge of the tub and rest a minute."
By Didier Fassin
Suspicion and denial: towards a political anthropology of AIDS
In the Author search field, enter...
fassin
at
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/
An understandable defiance is thus an important element of what is
usually termed denial.21 In fact, denial -- a common response among
people facing an intolerable situation -- has two facets.22 One is a
denial of reality: a reaction that something can't be true, that it is
not possible. The other is a denial of the unacceptable: a reaction
that something is not normal, that although it exists it should not.
Both facets are involved in the denial of the reality of HIV/AIDS.
John S. James publisher
http://www.aids.org/atn/a-376-04.html
....back-and-forth debate format is not especially useful here, because
it tends to turn on technical points, asking readers to make their own
decisions on the scientific merits of the issue, which most people are
not prepared to do. A better format is to explain what the denialists
are saying, then show with two or three examples that their arguments
are not credible--that the assertions on which they ask others to base
life-and-death decisions usually leave out far more compelling
information than they include.
Most importantly, we need to explain what is really going on in
treatment and research--the human story as well as the
medical/scientific one, a reality more interesting than the
stick-figure ideologies of the denialists. Here we should avoid the
argumentative style of trying to score points against the other side.
Instead, follow the truth wherever it may lead; when there is truth in
the denialist case, by all means acknowledge it.
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