Survival Of The Sickest Chapter 1 Summary

The Doctors Plague depicts the story of the lifeline of Ignac Semmelweis, a physician in the First Division at the Allgemeine Krankenhaus hospital in Vienna and his discovery of childbed fever. Nuland opens the medical-scientific novel with a fictional story of a young nameless girl who is inching closer to her birth date. From her friend, she learns there are two obstetric divisions, one run by doctors and the other by midwives, advising the soon to be mom to stay clear of medical students. Already foreshadowing being attended by the medical students results in an uncomfortable situation, Nuland leaves the readers with curiosity and the answer to

I’m pretty sure that most of you at least once have heard about this disease, but probably not all of you are familiar to what it really is, how it’s caused and how it can damage human’s health.

Survival of the Sickest is an intriguing novel that explores why we need disease. Moalem asks and answers many questions throughout this book centering on the concept of evolution. His main objective in this book was to explain why natural selection designated certain diseases that are harmful to humans now. Throughout his questioning, he shows us that the reason so many diseases are still around today is because at some point in history, all of them helped our ancestors to survive and reproduce in their environment. Each chapter in his book focuses on a different aspect of his overall conclusion that modern diseases were beneficial in the past. Each topic gave an example and new understanding of evolution.

Many people do not realize how fortunate they are to have the medical advances and medical technology we easily have the right to use. People from many years ago did not have specialized doctors and medicine to cure their diseases that we easily have access to today. (Ramsey) Many civilizations used what they thought to be alleviating processes, but medical experts today know now were pointless and dangerous. Among these people were the Elizabethans. (Chamberline) The Elizabethan Era was a time of accusations. People believed certain procedures were curing people when in fact they were killing them. (Ramsey) They also blamed mysterious acts they could not explain on innocent people, creating a handful of superstitions we know and use today. Unexplainable events and hazardous medical customs sparked the era of the Elizabethan Age. (Elizabethan Superstitions)

Hispanic, thirty-eight year old, Anna Garcia expired due to a stroke. At one point in Anna Garcia's life she was diagnosed with type one diabetes. Due to the potential for high blood glucose levels, diabetes itself is a risk factor for stroke. Anna Garcia’s cardiologist had Anna complete cardiac testing. Anna underwent a treadmill stress test. Drastic increases in blood pressure occurred for the patients during the test. Also, a few premature ventricular contractions, which are heartbeats that start in one of the heart’s two lower chambers, were noted during the test. Ventricular tachycardia, a condition in which the lower chambers of the heart beat quickly, also occurred during the treadmill stress test, for Anna

Diabetes instantaneously made that phrase my reality.. I like to call this story, the worst day of my life. My nerves were already on edge because I had to get my wisdom teeth pulled. When I came home from the surgery, I felt horrible. Getting out of bed was an ordeal; my body felt lousy. Even though I could eat all the ice cream I wanted, I just asked for more and more water. Considering I’m an ice cream addict, my mom found this very odd. She also noticed some symptoms of Type 1 Diabetes, one of them being increased thirst. The next time she came in to check on me, she had my sister’s blood sugar test kit. My heart started pounding. “What are you trying to do with that!!!”I kept asking. My mom tried to calm me down by saying she just wanted to see something, but that did not calm me down as I continued to keep pulling my hand away. She pricked my finger, and I knew in three seconds my life would change drastically. “Beep!” my heart stopped for a second as I watched my mother’s face go from anxious to distraught. My blood sugar was at 245. A non-Diabetic average should be 70-130. I burst into tears, panicking, not knowing if I had diabetes or if this could be another disease. “I don 't want to die. I don 't want anything wrong with me,” I kept screaming, while sobbing into my father’s arms. My dad kept reassuring me that I would be okay. I just wanted to sleep at this point, but little did I know I

Additionally, the book modified my judgments of inheritance. Many research topics can stem out of these inherited defects with beneficial advantages for survival such as taking a part of the G6PD- deficiency gene to cure malaria. Furthermore, studying defects like hemochromatosis, diabetes, or favism may be crucial to taking a leap (and hopefully, landing) in the scientific and medical community. And we end on this quote from Dr. Sharon Moalem himself which very accurately sums up my comprehension of evolution from this book, “If you’ve come this far on our journey across the evolutionary landscape, you’ve probably gathered a good sense of the interconnectedness of — well, just about everything. Out genetic makeup has been adapting in response to where we live and what the weather’s like. The food we eat has evolved to cope with the organisms that eat it, and we’ve evolved to cope with that. We’ve looked at the way we’ve evolved to resist or manage the threat posed by specific infectious diseases, like malaria… At the end of the day, every living thing — bacteria, protozoa, lions, tigers, bears, and your baby brother- shares two hardwired imperatives: Survive.

One of the concluding sentences that Dr. Sharon Moalem directs toward her audience is, “[...] Our relationship with disease is often much more complex than we may have previously realized.” “Survival of the Sickest” delves into the theme of the way inheritance and genetic codes in our bloodlines allows fatal diseases to enter our body and the reasons for this happening. The author discusses various diseases and their origin, and includes facts as to how this disease is able to affect modern life. She suggests that said modern diseases played a necessary part in the survival and selection of those before us in our history.

Disease in the 1700s significantly contributed to the decline of the Native American population; after European contact exposed many to serval diseases. The most significant disease, however, was smallpox. By the end of the 1800s, Native Americans had suffered a series epidemics having a devastating effect and leaving some tribes destined for extinction. Historian Alex Alvarez perspective examines if the spreading of smallpox was a deliberate or unintentionally spread. In this analysis, he covers disease in Native America and the link between smallpox and genocide.

Between the years of 1800 and 1900, the North American social and political landscape changed by the presence of so many African people, who brought with them several centuries of civilization. Africanized America in terms of medicine. In this paper, I will be exploring the influence of Africans on the American traditions of medicine.

My problem with this book stems from the fact that Moalem is generalizing that all diseases exist because of this pattern and to those without any background in biology or genetics, it seems to be a very clear reasoning. However, those with a more extensive background can see that the evidence in Survival of the Sickest is rather cherry picked and only selecting disorders that fit (he could also discuss sickle cell and other hemoglobin disorders in this book and be accurate in his hypothesis); however, Moalem ignores that many diseases have no beneficial effect but rose in one founder and spread because of inbreeding, and they exist in the population still because they are autosomal recessive and are not strong enough to be selected against (i.e. Tay Sachs in Hasidic Jews). Moalem incorrectly uses and expands a theory that only explains a few

Charles Rosenberg argues that by 1866, moralistic concepts of disease had faded and “scientific values and habits of thought” (Rosenberg 232) gained prevalence. While this is true of the 1866 cholera epidemic, it does not accurately predict the future development of the conception of disease. Although scientific thought steadily increased in prominence, moral judgements rose once again with the advent of germ theory. This essay investigates the context surrounding Rosenberg’s statement, comparing it to Terence Powderly’s 1902 warning of “the menace to the nation’s health of the new immigrants” (Powderly, 1902). It first argues that the post-civil war environment facilitated the waning of religious and moral judgments as the basis for the

The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease offers an evolutionary commentary on human health, arguing that we have failed to prevent preventable diseases because we fail to identify human evolution as a major factor. By definition, evolution is "the process by which different kinds of living organisms are thought to have developed and diversified from earlier forms during the history of the earth" (Lieberman, 19). Lieberman argues that evaluating why we get sick is essential for preventing and treating diseases. He proposes the mismatch hypothesis which argues that "the answer to why so many humans are now getting sick to once rare illnesses is that many of our body 's features were adaptive in environments for which we evolved but

According to Everyday Health, in 1552 B.C. Hesy-Ra, an Egyptian physician, documented the first know symptoms of diabetes. He concluded that frequent urination was a leading symptom and people who had this disease would attract ants with the sweet urine. A few centuries later, a job was created where one would diagnose diabetes by tasting people’s urine and if it tasted sweet then that person had diabetes. This job was known as water tasters. In 1675 the word mellitus was added to the disease diabetes. Mellitus means honey. Around the 1800s, scientists finally came up with a chemical test to see if sugar was present in urine. Between 1700 and 1800 physicians started to learn more about the disease and figured out a few was to help

Before scientists discovered what caused diseases, people had no idea what caused these harmful diseases or how to properly treat them.