Every Patient Tells a Story

The UNC Health Sciences Library and the Department of Social Medicine will be hosting Lisa Sanders, MD for a reading on October 7, 2009 from her new book Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis. Sanders is the NY Times Magazine "Diagnosis" columnist and technical adviser to the television show House, MD. The reading will be held from from noon-1pm in Room 2204 of the Medical Biomolecular Research Building (MBRB) on the UNC campus.

In addition to the reading, a series of small groups will meet to discuss the book during September and October in the library. These discussions will be facilitated by faculty in the Schools of Medicine and Nursing, and registration is required. Visit HSL's web site to sign up.

Bullitt Club Lecture on Jack London

The first joint meeting of 2009-10 for UNC's Bullitt History of Medicine Club and Duke's Trent History of Medicine Society will be Tuesday, September 15, 2009 at the UNC Health Sciences Library in the 5th Floor Conference Room (527). Please join us at 5:30pm for light refreshments followed by the lecture at 6pm. Meetings are free and open to the public.

Dr. Philip Klemmer, Professor of Medicine at UNC, will be presenting a lecture entitled, "Jack London's Mysterious Malady." The lecture will present an analysis of the possible cause of Jack London's death from uremia at age 40 based on his own writing and life events on the cruise of the Snark in the South Pacific.

Dr. Klemmer received his education at Gettysburg College (BA) and Temple University Medical School (MD). After residencies at UNC and an early stint on the faculty, Dr. Klemmer served 18 years in private practice before rejoining the UNC faculty, where he has been Professor of Medicine since 1988.

For further information about the Bullitt Club, please visit the organization's web site.

Jack London's Cause of Death

Jack London [1876-1916], the canonical American author of such well-known works as The Call of the Wild, The Sea Wolf, and many others, died on November 22, 1916. Only forty at the time of his demise, the cause of his death was officially ascribed to "uraemia following renal colic." Two physicians at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine explore this assessment in a recent article, Jack London's "Chronic Interstitial Nephritis": A Historical Differential Diagnosis, published in the UNC Medical Bulletin (Spring 2009, pp. 18-21).*

Drs. Andrew S. Bomback and Philip J. Klemmer draw on London's own writings and other historical sources to argue that mercury toxicity is likely to have been the real culprit. London documents in The Cruise of the Snark, the chronicle of his 1907-8 South Pacific voyage, that he treated himself with corrosive sublimate, or mercuric chloride, for a possible case of yaws. He had also treated himself earlier with mercury for gonorrhea, and Bomback and Klemmer conclude in a fascinating analysis that the long-term effects of these remedies best explain many of the symptoms that London experienced--and ultimately, the failure of his kidneys.

The cottage pictured above is located on a ranch near Glen Allen, California, where London lived for a number years, and died in 1916. It is now part of the Jack London State Historic Park.

* Recent (and some early) issues of the UNC Medical Bulletin are now available online.