60 - Santa's Salmonella

What does it mean when a computer can make better medical decisions than a human? The progress in large language models, and in particular the popularity of ChatGPT, has brought these questions to the forefront in 2023, but we've been discussing this for over 50 years. In this ep ...  Show more

What happens when a patient far from surgical care – say, at the bottom of the Pacific ocean on a submarine, or at a research base in Antarctica in the middle of the winter – develops a surgical abdomen? This dilemma was the impetus to build the first truly effective clinical dec ...  Show more

In 1907, George Soper located the cause of a typhoid outbreak in New York City: a cook named Mary Mallon. Mary didn’t know it, but each and every meal she cooked carried a small chance for her clients to come down with the disease. Finding out the truth could cost Mary her job…an ...  Show more

Two of the eponymous diseases in this episode are transmitted through incredibly casual exposure. The third requires more prolonged, direct contact with someone who is acutely ill, but can still spread really rapidly in certain conditions. 

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The pellagra epidemic of the early 20th century may have been the deadliest epidemic of a specific nutrient deficiency in U.S. history. Part one covers what it is, its appearance in 19th-century Italy, and the first reports of it in the U.S. 

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All over the world, for all of human history – and probably going back to our earliest hominid ancestors – people have found ways to try to keep themselves clean. But how did soap come about? 

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