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For decades, the way bad news was broken was, as one official British report put it, “deeply insensitive.” Now we do it better, thanks to the efforts of one American widow. “Common sense tells us that those facts are an emotional bomb waiting to go off. And medical thinking now recognizes this: receiving bad news, […]

In “The Hunger Games” Collins embraces her father’s impulse to educate young people about the realities of war. “If we wait too long, what kind of expectation can we have?” she said. “We think we’re sheltering them, but what we’re doing is putting them at a disadvantage.” But her medicine goes down easily, thanks to […]

With no monitor, the original version of Oregon Trail was played by answering prompts that printed out on a roll of paper. At 10 characters per second, the teletype spat out, “How much do you want to spend on your oxen team?” or, “Do you want to eat (1) poorly (2) moderately or (3) well?” […]

The connection between banks and nuclear reactors is not obvious to most bankers, nor banking regulators. But to the men and women who study industrial accidents such as Three Mile Island, Deepwater Horizon, Bhopal or the Challenger shuttle—engineers, psychologists and even sociologists—the connection is obvious. James Reason, a psychologist who studies human error in aviation, […]

Prescription drugs kill some 200,000 Americans every year. Will that number go up, now that most clinical trials are conducted overseas—on sick Russians, homeless Poles, and slum-dwelling Chinese—in places where regulation is virtually nonexistent, the F.D.A. doesn’t reach, and “mistakes” can end up in pauper’s graves? The authors investigate the globalization of the pharmaceutical industry, […]

The myth of scale is seductive because it is easier to spread technology than to effect extensive change in social attitudes and human capacity. In other words, it is much less painful to purchase a hundred thousand PCs than to provide a real education for a hundred thousand children; it is easier to run a […]

When I have asked them whether they have any hope that medicine will change, they have tended to say yes. When I have asked them whether anybody has already begun to succeed, they have tended to mention the same name: Brent James.

What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?

He focused on his studies, but as the years passed, he grew to 6-feet-nothing and then 6-foot-something. The sport of basketball had always been in the equation, but now that he was pushing 7 feet, now that he towered over most everyone in Barcelona, he would have a decision to make soon. He tried balancing […]

To be in the company of Chris Calhoun is to encounter breasts, and encounter the damn things anytime, anywhere—including over a plate of spaghetti in a bustling Manhattan restaurant.