Word: patient
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Warning. Whether the experiment would work in Italy was also uncertain; but like an untested drug on a moribund patient, it seemed no worse than the alternative. The election was another Italian standoff. The Christian Democrats, with 39% of the vote, did not emerge with sufficient strength to govern alone; the Communists, with 34%, fell short of what they needed to command a formal role in the government. The Christian Democrats were unwilling to share power formally with the Communists. They were also on warning not to by Western allies, who at an economic summit in Puerto Rico in June...
...matches broke out between husbands and wives in splendid evening clothes. Some of the crowd had brought old-fashioned trainmen's whistles, shrill enough to make a hound bay. Nonetheless, Chéreau came out to take curtain calls, wearing blue jeans, a shiny mod belt and a patient smile. Said he later: "I was very amused at the booing...
Purging, emetics and bloodletting were common remedies; surgery consisted of "cutting for stone" and amputations. With no anaesthesia, the best surgeons were the ones who could cut, hack and saw most rapidly, aided by the strongest assistants to hold the patient down. Herbs and plants were extensively used in treatment. Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay prescribed a paste of wood lice, while Cotton Mather-who together with Zabdiel Boylston brought inoculation to the colonies in 1721 to prevent serious cases of smallpox-condemned the use by Boston physicians of "Leaden Bullets," to be swallowed for "that miserable Distemper which...
With expanding knowledge and technology, an inevitable subdivision of labor occurred. The general practitioner faced extinction as medical students entered a wide variety of specialties. Specialization advanced to the point where what happened to the patient all too often depended on who saw him first. "Free market" medicine resulted in a gross geographic and functional maldistribution of doctors. There developed a severe oversupply of specialists in some areas (surgery, where work weeks declined as fees rose) and an undersupply in others (pediatric psychiatry and general practice). The g.p. declined from 64% of the total number of doctors...
...increasing use of medical technology, while markedly enhancing accuracy of diagnosis and success of treatment, was accompanied by less time spent with patients. Complaints about the dehumanizing of medical care were increasingly heard. Doctors moved their offices close to the hospital and its technology. By the 1950s the house call had virtually vanished as doctor and patient met in the emergency wards and clinics of urban teaching hospitals or in offices next door...