Apologies
This week I have been frantically trying to get enough credit hours to renew my radiologic supervisor license; the great State of California imposed an new requirement of several hours' worth of educational credits without telling anybody. Ah, I love surprises. Fortunately one can obtain said credits online, but this has resulted in five hours' worth of staring at my computer and listening to lectures about imaging studies in low back pain, breast disease, etc. until my eyeballs are about to pop out of my head and roll across the room.
This explains the scanty blogging this week. (Thank God for Chuen-Yen.)
But I do have a story for you. One of my partners volunteers at her children's school every other Wednesday. Often she will put together a presentation with a medical theme for the kids: this week it's colonial medicine. She found
this book to be a great resource, and she plans to pass it around during the presentation, but she went further than that: she bought some leeches.
Yes, leeches. She's been on the phone trying to purchase them for a week. It turns out the leeches which are used for medical purposes are difficult to get and rather expensive, but she's been able to get another species of leech which is used for fish bait. She says the kids will be able to pass these around as this species has no teeth which will allow them to attach to humans (I immediately started calling them "declawed" leeches). She also has a smallpox poster, distributed courtesy of the
Center for Disease Control, which she will be exhibiting since smallpox was a real scourge in colonial America.
Incidentally, so was yellow fever.
Yellow fever is a viral disease carried by mosquitoes, rather like malaria, which causes liver damage and jaundice. It was eradicated from North America sometime during the nineteenth century, but for many years outbreaks in the summer killed a lot of people. The worst yellow fever epidemic in U.S. history was in
Philadelphia in 1793, when over 4000 people died. Washington Square, one of the five open spaces planned in the city by William Penn, served as a mass grave site (when I lived in Philadelphia, I thought of this every time I walked through the square).
But back to the talk. My friend was also trying to get some maggots (these were used to debride wounds), but I don't think she was successful. When I walked into her office yesterday she was on the phone with her nanny: the leeches had just been delivered. I told her she'd be voted Mother of the Year by the kids after the talk was over. What child could resist leeches and gross-out pictures?
posted by Dr. Alice at #
