Al Capone: Crime Does Not Pay
The king of Chicago prostitution lost both his mind and his life to diseases caused by a lifetime of promiscuous sex. He was probably America's most famous killer, gangster, bootlegger, criminal and racketeer, but the United States government could convict him only for tax evasion and he was sentenced to only 11 years in prison.
Srinivasa Ramanujan, Math Prodigy
Perhaps the most amazing mathematician of all time was Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan (1887-1920). He worked out incredibly complicated problems and expanded our knowledge of elliptic functions, continued fractions and infinite series. During his 32 years of life, he wrote about nearly 4000 math problems and almost all of his solutions have proven to be...
Kim Kardashian’s Psoriasis
Kimberly Noel Kardashian, one of the most visible women in the United States today, suffers from psoriasis, a skin disease that causes raised red patches with silvery scales to form on her body. Three percent of North Americans or more than eight million people have this hereditary condition.
Kardashian is a fashion designer, model, and...
Rene Laennec, Founder of Modern Pulmonology
Which doctor do you consult when you are dying of a disease in which you are the world’s leading expert on the treatment of that disease?
René-Thééophile-Hyacinthe Laennec was born in France in 1781 and died at age 45. He was a famous French physician who invented the stethoscope and was the father of our...
Dick Cheney: Sometimes Doctors Lie
This week former U.S Vice President Dick Cheney and his doctor came out with a new book in which they describe his five heart attacks and his heart transplant at age 71. They should tell you how the American public was kept from knowing just how sick he was.
During the primaries before the 2000...
Michael E. DeBakey, Father of Modern Heart Surgery
“He was probably the greatest surgeon who ever lived” (The Journal of the American Medical Association, 2005).
Michael DeBakey personally performed more than 60,000 surgical procedures. He developed the surgical procedures to bypass blocked arteries in the neck, legs and heart. These surgeries have been performed on millions of patients. He developed artificial pumps for...
Peter Huttenlocher, World-Famous Neurologist
The August 27, 2013 issue of the New York Times contains the obituary of Peter Huttenlocher, who died at age 82 of pneumonia, the result of Parkinson’s disease preventing him from clearing particles from his lungs.
Huttenlocher was born in Germany on Feb. 23, 1931, to a chemist father and opera singer mother. They divorced...
Wilhelm Weichardt’s Treatment for Chronic Fatigue
When a person becomes extraordinarily tired to the point where he or she can’t get through the day, doctors do an extensive evaluation to find the cause. They check for an infection, a hidden cancer, poison, an autoimmune disease, lack of minerals and so forth. When they have tested for every known disease and...
Rose Knox: Profit from Brittle Nails
Rose Markward was born in Mansfield, Ohio in 1857. At the age of 26, she married a salesman named Charles B. Knox and moved to his hometown of Johnstown, New York, which had many tanneries and therefore also had many slaughterhouses. Slaughterhouse waste — hooves, tendons, intestines and bones — was very cheap, and...
Chris Klug, the Bravest Olympian
On February 15, 2002 in one of the most amazing feats of courage and athleticism, Chris Klug of the United States placed third in the Giant Slalom of Snowboarding at the Olympic Games in Salt Lake City — eighteen months after receiving someone else’s liver to replace his liver that was destroyed by a...
The Despicable Dr. Julius Reiter
One of the greatest tributes a physician can receive is to have a medical condition named after him. For example, I had the pleasure of knowing Dr. Mike Leventhal and remember how all the residents in training with me treated him with the greatest reverence because he was the Leventhal of Stein-Leventhal syndrome, also...
Antonio Vivaldi’s Asthma
Antonio Vivaldi was born in Venice on March 4th, 1678. He became a famous opera and classical music composer because he had asthma. He was known as the “Red Priest” because of his red hair that he inherited from his father.
His father was a barber and a professional violinist who taught Antonio to play...
Vera Caslavska: Marriage of Two Great Olympic Athletes
If you are envious of great athletes, read the true story of what happened when two Olympic athletes married. Vera Caslavska of Czechoslovakia (born May 3, 1942) won 35 medals, (including 22 gold) at the Olympic Games and at world and European championships. She was the dominant athlete of the 1968 Olympics when she...
Emily Dickinson, SAD Poet
Emily Dickinson was probably America’s greatest female poet, but during her lifetime she wrote only for herself. Because she felt that her work was of inferior quality, only seven of her 1768 poems were published during her lifetime.
I will give you clues that should lead you to tell what disease she had. She spent...
Mamo Wolde, Olympian
In the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, 36-year-old Mamo Wolde won the marathon and took second in the 10,000-meter run. He spent the last years of his life in prison for crimes that he probably did not commit.
MY CONTACT WITH MAMO WOLDE AND ABEBE BIKILA: In 1963, Olympic champion Abebe Bekila and his virtually...
Arthur Conan Doyle: The Power of Observation
Students in every medical school hear the same stories heard in every other medical school, but they usually believe that these stories happened to their own professors at their own school. Here is a story that I heard when I was in medical school in the 1950s.
DR HOFF’S STORY: Dr. Hebel Hoff was chairman...
Patrick Henry’s Wife
The next time you go to Richmond, Virginia, visit the Patrick Henry House in nearby Hanover County and you will see a first-floor room with bars over the windows and steel locks on the doors. The guide will tell you that Patrick Henry’s wife was crazy, and that Patrick Henry did not want to...
Who Killed President Garfield?
Who really killed the 20th President of the United States, James Abram Garfield? On July 21, 1881, 200 days after being elected president, Garfield was boarding a train in Washington DC when Charles Guiteau fired two bullets at him. One caused a superficial arm wound. The other entered in the right side of his...
Who Killed George Washington?
On December 12th, 1799, 67-year-old George Washington rode for five hours on horseback on the snowy fields of his farm. The next day, he complained of a severe sore throat and sounded hoarse. On day three, he had chills, could hardly speak and had difficulty breathing. He was unable to swallow a mixture of...
George Gershwin, Incorrectly Diagnosed with Depression
George Gershwin was arguably America’s greatest composer of Broadway musicals and movie film scores, and was always the bon vivant of every party he attended. He wrote the enormously successful “Swanee” at age nineteen. He was a playboy who rubbed shoulders with the rich and famous, and was also a natural athlete and a...
