I now saw very distinctly that these were little eels or worms… Lying huddled together and wriggling, just as if you saw with your naked eye a whole tubful of very little eels and water, the eels moving about in swarms; and the whole water seemed to be alive with the multitudinous animalcules. For me…

The way I look at it, why take a religious belief if it does not tell anything about what is larger than ourselves and what’s left after we die? Religion is about the knowing there is something larger than yourself, greater than your own life,  more encompassing and coextensive in space and time, that was…

When it comes to learning new things, we adults are our own worst enemies. Watch a child learn. Little children have a sense of over excited anticipation. Kids are empirical learners. They tend to try things out without any encumbering anxiety of making mistakes. Adults, on the other hand, conceive of ways to make their…

In the 1960s my dad had ulcers causing painless profuse rectal bleeding and prostration. He hemorrhaged a number of times. Doctors admitted him to the hospital where he got 6 or 8 units of blood. His doctors thought bleeding ulcers were caused by aspirins which he used hardly at all. NSAIDs like ibuprofen, the first…

I have a favorite soft cushioned couch for an afternoon nap. I am on my back, neck tilted forward and open my eyes. I look through windows at the sky. I love to watch the clouds brushing against skyward straining branchlets of a red maple, denuded of its leaves. Branches are as tiny twigs stretching…

HIV drugs changed AIDs from a fatal illness to a smoldering disease. Like diabetes, HIV is rarely cured. One can never prove if your viral load is zero, that the viruses are totally gone. Once infected it’s possible infect someone else, particularly the case of pregnancy, or to reconvert to clinical disease. This was the…

I remember when I took tenth grade biology, our first discussion about what is alive. By that time I’d already had intense interest in biology. I had an internal premonition that I was destined to be a doctor since elementary school and considered medicine merely a part of biology devoted to humans. I was naive…

The great warrior Ashoka had conquered much of the Indian subcontinent for the Mauryan Dynasty about a quarter of a millennium BCE. He had won a great battle of Kalinga at the cost of one hundred thousand lives in the process creating an additional 150 thousand refugees and great suffering. We don’t begrudge our great…

Funny that as a longtime clarinetist I failed to notice the wooden-ness of the sound of the instrument until recently hearing a master clarinettist David Krakauer. I wondered, is the clarinet a woodwind by virtue of sound initiated by the vibration of a wooden reed? Probably not, as the flute and recorders have no reeds.…