Birth Story

By 1657, the plague was largely spent and the Catholic Church was becoming a little choosier about its battles, especially given the spread of the Protestant Reformation.

In Italy, the Renaissance was winding down. Science had become so intrinsic to intellectual life that Leopoldo De' Medici, who was both a prince and, later, a Catholic cardinal, opened his private chambers in the Pitti Palace in Florence to a new scientific academy, the  Accademia del Cimento. ("Cimento" means "trial.")

Leopoldo and his brother, Grand Duke Ferdinando II of Tuscany, founded, and funded, the academy, which would meet for just 10 years. Its influence would last much longer.

Ferdinando had supported Galileo's experiments and had tried unsuccessfully to nudge the Church toward accepting them in the spirit of exploration. In the 1640s, he opened the Boboli Garden, the grounds of the Pitti Palace, his official residence, to experiments with thermometers, poultry incubators and other instruments.

Galileo's spirit hovered over the academy. Its motto was "provando e riprovando" — "testing and re-testing." Founding members included Galileo's students, like Vincenzo Viviani, who with fellow academy member Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, worked on experiments to pin down the speed of sound waves.

Another member was the physician Francesco Redi, who performed what is considered the first scientific experiment.

Distractions to the patrons, and quarrels among the members, doomed the academy. Its last act was the publication of a compilation of members' work, Examples of Natural Experiments, which in its Latin translation influenced the European scientific community profoundly, becoming essentially the science textbook for at least 100 years.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Well, this is discouraging. Two recent studies indicate that, after a decade-long, nationwide campaign to make hospitals safer for patients, essentially no progress has been made.

A patient checking into a hospital today appears to face at least a one-in-four chance of coming to some degree of harm there.

A study published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine looked at the records of 2,341 patients discharged from 10 randomly selected hospitals in North Carolina, which was chosen because of that state's "high level of engagement in efforts to improve patient safety."

The study took place between January 2002 and December 2007. What it found was, in short, that "harm to patients resulting from medical care was common in North Carolina, and the rate of harm did not appear to decrease significantly during a 6-year period ending in December 2007, despite substantial national attention and allocation of resources to improve the safety of care," the report stated.

A total of 588 patients were injured — 25.1 percent of study subjects. Harm was caused by, in declining numbers, procedures, drugs, hospital-based infections, other therapies, tests, falls and other causes, the study found. Sixty-three percent of these injuries were deemed to have been preventable. Nine preventable errors resulted in death, and 13 in permanent damage.

In addition, a report from the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services released earlier this month documented the experiences of 780 randomly selected Medicare patients discharged from various hospitals in October of 2008.

About one in seven of these patients experienced "adverse events" — serious harm that comes to a patient as a result of medical care.

A second group of about the same size in the HHS study suffered "temporary harm," a transient injury like bedsores (here called "pressure ulcers") for example, or hypoglycemia. Twenty-seven percent of temporary harm events were caused by drugs.

Twenty-eight percent of patients who experienced more serious "adverse events" also suffered some temporary harm during the same hospital stay.

About 44 percent of all these events — adverse events and temporary harm — in the HHS study were deemed preventable — the result of errors, substandard care, or insufficient monitoring.

In 1999, the independent, not-for-profit Institute of Medicine published a report on hospital safety, "To Err is Human," which caused a sensation and produced a massive effort to improve protocols at hospitals across the country. The goal was to decrease errors by 50 percent over a five-year period.

"To Err is Human" asserted that as many as 98,000 patients die in hospitals each year because of medical error.

Commenting on the two discouraging new studies, the authors of the NEJM report on patient safety in North Carolina write, "All the findings about extent of harm should increase our commitment to prevent it."

Today is the American Thanksgiving, and I am counting my blessings, which are more numerous than these turkeys.

As always, I am grateful to be here for another Thanksgiving. Maeve and I could so easily have died during her birth — or we could have suffered horrific brain damage. I never forget that, and I think of the people who saved our lives nearly every day.

I lost my job this year, but that has given me more time to work on Birth Story. Yay!

Of course, the fact that my husband has a job helps my outlook a great deal. My prayers are with people who have not been as fortunate as we are.

Our family has shrunk with our daughter Nora's graduation and subsequent move to California. That's a tough one to celebrate, but she is following her bliss, and I believe she is grateful to be making her own way.

And we will have a nice Thanksgiving dinner, just the three of us, with a turkey breast for the first time instead of a big ol' turkey, but still with all the trimmings. We'll be grateful for pumpkin pie, I know that.

And I'm glad I'm not a turkey.

What are you grateful for? I would love to hear from you. Happy Thanksgiving!

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Science was all the rage among progressive young aristocrats in the 17th century. In 1603, in Rome, Federico Cesi and other science-mad young men founded the Accademia dei Lincei, which has endured, in a decidedly broken line, down into our time as Italy's national science academy.

The society, which took its name from the lynx pictured on the title page of Giambattista della Porta's book, Natural Magic, represented an ambitious bid to decipher the mysteries of the natural world. The lynx was admired for its keen eyesight which, metaphorically, the Academy's members hoped to apply to their scientific investigations.

Accademia dei Lincei

While European intellectuals had begun sharing their thoughts in the 16th century, this new academy was the first really seminal scientific body, inspiring imitators all over Europe and introducing the notion that the free flow of information among men of science would push forward the communal body of knowledge.

Early members included Della Porta himself, as well as the celebrated Galileo Gallilei, who was so thrilled with the honor that he included a reference to the society on the title pages of all his subsequent books.

Science made officials of church and state nervous enough that one of the charter members of the Academy, Johannes Eck, a Dutchman, was banished for a time. While he traveled around Europe, Eck spread the word about the society's work.

The Academy published Galileo's Letters on Sunspots in 1613 and The Assayer in 1623. When the authorities of the Catholic Church turned against Galileo and his radical new ideas, which included the Copernican assertion that the earth revolves around the sun, rather than vice versa, which is how the Bible sets things out, the Academy supported him.

Galileo later recanted his heliocentrism, which didn't keep him from spending his last days under house arrest. This was a gentler fate than the church was used to handing out to heretics, like Giordano Bruno (who did not recant). Bruno was executed.

The support of academies like the Lincei began to make the world less lonely, and perhaps even a safer place, for these early scientists to assert the truth as they saw it.

In time, the microscope made the existence of a whole tiny world irrefutable. This amazing device was invented in the 1590s, probably either by Hans Janssen, working with his son, Zachariah, or by Hans Lippershey, all of whom were eyeglass makers in Middelburg, the Netherlands.

Robert Hooke's microscope

The microscope was possibly a byproduct of the invention of the telescope, and it definitely benefited from the fact that a great many people were wearing eyeglasses by the end of the 16th century.

The compound microscope, multiple lenses in a tube, like the device Robert Hooke used to make his famous study of cells, was invented before the simple, single-lens model like the one Anton van Leeuwenhoek used when he discovered microorganisms.

The Nobel Committee has awarded four prizes for microscopes, the most recent three for Physics:

• Richard Zsigmondy won in Chemistry in 1925 for his development in 1903 of the ultramicroscope, which allowed him to view objects that were below the wavelength of light.
• Frits Zernike won in 1953 for his invention in 1932 of the phase-contrast microscope, which makes colorless or transparent objects visible.
• Ernst Ruska won in 1986 for the electron microscope, a superior design for magnification that he developed in 1938.
• Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer won in 1986 for inventing the scanning tunneling microscope in 1981.  This amazing instrument makes the atoms in an object visible — in three dimensions!

Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

The first European society for scientific inquiry was probably the Academy of the Mysteries of Nature, which met in the home of Giambattista della Porta, in Naples, Italy, beginning in 1560. Membership was open to anyone who could produce an original discovery in the field of natural science.

Della Porta was the author of Natural Magic, a 20-volume encyclopedia of popular science, written in Latin and published first in 1558.

Della Porta had the idea that much of what had come down through the ages as magic actually represented early, and often unwitting, incursions into areas that science was only then beginning to explain.

He and his society undertook to test various magical cures and activities to see if they had any merit. The academy would endorse only practices it had vetted. In other words, its members were practicing a rudimentary form of the scientific method.

The Academy of the Mysteries of Nature was short-lived. It was ordered closed by the Catholic Church after the Inquisition charged that the academy was involved in sorcery.

Not only did della Porta comply with the order, but he also became a Jesuit brother before his death in 1615.

Anton van Leeuwenhoek was a linen merchant in Delft, the Netherlands, whose passion for science helped make him one of the most important figures in the history of microbiology.

Van Leeuwenhoek saw his first microscope, in use in the fabric trade, in 1653, and he soon bought one of his own. He read Robert Hooke's Micrographia, and it reportedly enthralled him.

Anton van Leeuwenhoek

By 1668, he was grinding lenses for his own simple microscopes and looking at every tiny thing he could find. Those two things — his boundless curiosity and the fact that he kept improving his lenses — were critical to his discoveries.

Van Leeuwenhoek was the first to identify microorganisms, notably protists and bacteria, and the first to describe red blood cells and sperm.

Van Leeuwenhoek's discoveries were documented in letters he wrote to Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society of London, between 1673 and Van Leeuwenhoek's death in 1723. The letters made him famous, and the Royal Society made him a fellow in 1680.

Over the course of his lifetime, van Leeuwenhoek made at least 500 microscopes. The few that survive are little more than powerful magnifying glasses. However, he developed his own technology for making them, and he never revealed the secrets of their power and brightness.

Portrait by Jan Verkolje from Wikimedia Commons

In 1665, the Englishman Robert Hooke published an amazing book called Micrographia that contained some of the first peeks at a world that was too small to see with the naked eye.

Micrographia, published when Hooke was 30, was the first publication of the Royal Society of London, and the first scientific best-seller. The diarist Samuel Pepys called it "the most ingenious book that I ever read in my life."

Hooke made the illustrations himself, based on what he had seen through a microscope he had built. Looking at a slice of cork, he saw divisions that reminded him of monks' cells in a monastery, and that is what he called them, "cells."

Robert Hooke's drawing of cork cells

Hooke was born on the Isle of Wight, home-schooled and then apprenticed as an artist. He went on to Oxford at a time of unprecedented scientific activity, and he impressed his teachers with his ability to design and execute experiments: He built the vacuum pumps for Robert Boyle, who would demonstrate that gases all act in more or less the same way.

Hooke himself described how springs work in a treatise that gave rise to "Hooke's law" of elasticity. He was also an architect, and worked to help rebuild London after the Great Fire of 1666.

Hooke would probably be more famous than he is had he not quarreled with Isaac Newton over some of their overlapping discoveries. When the scientific community took sides in the dispute, Hooke was shunted aside.

His writings on fossils showed amazing rigor and originality. In the face of a scientific community that considered fossils a "sport of nature," Hook argued correctly that they were the remains of extinct organisms.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Glass-making is an ancient art, originally developed in the Middle East. Its secrets have been lost, re-discovered at different times and in different processes, and eventually spread around the world. The magnifying properties of glass were obvious and often remarked upon.

Modern lenses evolved from reading stones — rock crystal, for example, that was shaped into magnifiers, the first step toward creating instruments that would make the minute world visible.

Reading stone

The scientist and mathematician Abu Ali Hasan Ibn Al-Haitham, also known as Alhazen, "the father of modern optics," working in 11th-century Spain, described many of the properties of light, including refraction and color, as well as the magnifying properties of  lenses.

In 1604, Johannes Kepler, the great German mathematician, astronomer and inventor, published Optics, an astonishing treatise that covered the nature and action of light, as well as the mechanics of sight. Optics became part of the bedrock of physics.

In 1611, Kepler improved on Galileo's telescope by replacing its concave eyepiece with a convex one. (Candidates abound for the honor of inventing the telescope, around 1600.)

Incidentally, Kepler's mother, Katharina, was accused of witchcraft in 1615, when she was about 70. He handled her defense himself, eventually winning her acquittal. Katharina Kepler reportedly had played a part in her son's lifelong love affair with the heavens: When he was six years old, she took him to "a high place" so he could see the spectacle of the Great Comet of 1577 in the night sky.

Image from Zeiss Optical Museum

President Franklin Roosevelt founded the forerunner of the March of Dimes, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, in 1938, to raise money for research to find a cure for poliomyelitis, and to care for victims of the disease.

Roosevelt himself was paralyzed after being stricken by "polio," also called infantile paralysis, in 1921. The NFIP itself was an expansion of Roosevelt's Warm Springs Foundation, which sponsored a rehabilitation center for polio victims in Warm Springs, Ga.

In 1938, during a radio fund-raising campaign for the NFIP, the entertainer Eddie Cantor coined the term "The March of Dimes" as he urged listeners to contribute their spare change to defeat polio. The term, as Cantor used it, was a play on the popular newsreel series "The March of Time."

The campaign against polio is one of the great medical success stories. The March of Dimes provided the money for the development of two effective vaccines, by Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin. Within little more than a decade, polio was reduced from one of the scourges of the 20th century to a footnote in the 21st.

A global effort to eradicate polio altogether by the year 2000 fell short; the latest target date for eradication, in parts of Africa and Asia, is 2013.

In 1958, with polio under control in the United States, the March of Dimes re-directed its efforts toward a new campaign, to eliminate birth defects. The following year, Dr. Virginia Apgar, who in 1953 had devised a scoring system for the well being of newborns, joined the organization that was then still headed by President Roosevelt's former law partner, Basil O'Connor.

For the past half-century, the March of Dimes has been involved in virtually every effort undertaken to improve the health of babies in this country and, more recently, around the world.

The March of Dimes supported research that showed that a pregnant woman's consumption of alcohol could cause birth defects, as well as the development of surfactant therapy for premature babies with respiratory distress, to name a couple.

Image from Wikimedia Commons