topics: |  biology | essays

Many short essays covering a variety of topics, including:
Medusa and the Snail:
	A tiny jellyfish is mutually dependent on a sea-slug - throwing up
	the story of the vast net of interconnections that is life.
Notes on punctuation:
	Thomas is likes semicolons more than exclamation points! Now who would like
	the latter anyhow!
	   The things I like best in T. S. Eliot's poetry, especially in the
	   Four Quartets, are the semicolons. You cannot hear them, but they
	   are there, laying out the connections between the images and the
	   ideas. Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few
	   lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through
	   woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead,
	   a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your
	   breath.
Historical note on medical economics
	Harvard Mechanical School graduates did a review in 1937; those who
	graduated in 1907-1927 had a median salary between 5K-10K per year.
	1927 batch (ten years out) 43% made <5K, 7 made < 2.5K. Only one
	surgeon, 1917, made 20K.  These numbers were significantly higher
	than AMA figures for US physicians in general.

CONTENTS
  The Medusa and the Snail
  The Tucson Zoo
  The Youngest and Brightest Thing Around
  On Magic in Medicine
  The Wonderful Mistake
  Ponds
  To Err Is Human
  The Selves
  The Health-Care System
  On Cloning a Human Being
  On Etymons and Hybrids
  The Hazards of Science
  On Warts
  On Transcendental Metaworry (TMW)
  An Apology
  On Disease
  On Natural Death
  A Trip Abroad
  On Meddling
  On Committees
  The Scrambler in the Mind
  Notes on Punctuation
  The Deacon's Masterpiece
  How to Fix the Premedical Curriculum
  A Brief Historical Note on Medical Economics
  Why Montaigne Is Not a Bore
  On Thinking About Thinking
  On Embryology
  Medical Lessons from History