In Clinic (In Paris medical school parody)

DJ Vapor, Sound Engineer: soundcloud.com/dj-vapor
Miles Mueller, Director of Photography: Vimeo.com/milesmueller

The seventh child to receive an experimental leukemia therapy at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia got good news last week: It worked. “Avrey Walker is cancer free!!!!

The therapy involves transferring genes into T cells - the soldiers of the immune system - to make them recognize and attack B cells, the blood component that turns malignant in certain leukemias and lymphomas. There is also evidence that some of the designer T cells develop immune “memory,” so they could reactivate and strike if cancer returns.

New York Times | Published: February 25, 1988

A mentally ill young man who shot himself in the head in a suicide attempt suffered a brain injury that apparently eliminated his phobia of germs and his obsession with washing his hands…

…The .22-caliber slug destroyed the section of the brain responsible for his disabling obsessive-compulsive behavior without causing any other brain damage…

Two years after the 16-hour mandate was established for doctors in training, studies on the outcomes are being published, and the results reveal one thing: Maybe we should have thought a little harder about the arithmetic.

Jason Bittel  | SLATE

Every year, the United States and Europe throw away more than 2,000 freezer-burned livers—a truly tragic statistic if you’re one of the 1,500 Americans who will die in 2013 while waiting for a liver transplant.   

Thankfully, a team of U.K. biomedical engineers and transplant surgeons seem to have finally developed a method superior to the snow cone. In the simplest terms, a liver is hooked up to a machine called the OrganOx® metra™ from which it receives three units of packed red blood cells. The machine heats everything up to body temperature, and the liver generally just does its thing, all without a human body. Researchers have even witnessed the overachieving organ producing bile—like a disembodied boss.

Alexandra Sifferlin | TIME

Actions, it seems, do speak louder than words when it comes to staying healthy. Researchers at the University of British Columbia and in Israel studied health records of 1,488 doctors and nearly 1.9 million patients who were part of Israel’s largest health maintenance organization, Clalit Health Services, which insures over 50% of Israel’s population.

Celine Gounder | The Atlantic

“At the hospital where I worked, I would have turned to a nurse for help — but here I was alone.”

…finishes procedure before seeking personal medical attention.

An Italian surgeon is recovering after completing a brain operation despite suffering an angina attack during the procedure, media reports say.

For his groundbreaking 1948 LIFE magazine photo essay, “Country Doctor” — seen here, in its entirety, followed by several unpublished photographs from the shoot — photographer W. Eugene Smith spent 23 days in Kremmling, Colorado, chronicling the day-to-day challenges faced by an indefatigable general practitioner named Dr. Ernest Ceriani.