Helping to protect cancer nurses from exposure to hazardous drugs

Freelance medical writer Christine Clark ( [email protected] ) reports on an online meeting held in April 2021 on protecting nursing staff working in oncology from exposure to hazardous drugs

How can we protect cancer nurses from exposure to hazardous drugs?

Freelance medical writer Christine Clark ( [email protected] ) reports on an online meeting held in November 2020 on protecting nursing working in oncology from exposure to hazardous drugs

Regarding the Relationships of Surgeons, Colleagues, and Patients Prologue

Thank you, friends of Surgery, and the European Society of Medicine, for asking me to write in the Advances of Surgery. I am a cardiologist in the United States, so you might wonder, as do I, why I have been invited to write an essay in Advances in Surgery. I am a medical writer, but mostly of essays and poems. I do have a recent book published, Departure From the Darkness and Cold: the Hope of Renewal for the Soul of Medicine in Patient Care - 50 essays and poems describing interactions between patients and clinicians manifesting the soul of medicine - some of which are in this manuscript.

Stupor in John of Gaddesden’s Rosa Medicinae

Early medieval religious writers describe powerful and complex somatic and cognitive experiences as astonishment or stupor, drawing on medical discourse. The effects of stupor on the body’s faculties of sensation and movement are described in medical texts, such as English medical writer John of Gaddesden’s (fl. 1305–1348) Rosa medicinae or Rosa anglica (ca. 1313–20), where he reconciles Galen’s and Avicenna’s conflicting definitions of stupor. This note presents a case study of stupor in medieval medical discourse, especially according to Gaddesden, that informs our understanding of narratives about or by medieval anchorites, revealing more complex accounts of physical and spiritual experience.

An Author’s Editor Reads the “Instructions for Authors”

I’ve been a medical writer and author’s editor for 45 years. I have read the instructions for authors in dozens of medical journals. I know what authors (and author’s editors) think of these instructions, at least among those who know that journals actually have instructions for authors. For almost as long, I’ve been a member of four professional societies concerned with scientific publishing, and I know a lot of editors-in-chief of medical journals. I appreciate their desire to have authors follow the instructions when preparing manuscripts, at least among those editors who remember that their journals have such instructions and insist, at least occasionally, that they be followed.