Latest Medhist Podcast Episodes
74 - R2D2
Bedside Rounds - September 03, 2023 00:00 - 33 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsWhat does it mean when a computer can make better medical decisions than a human? The progress in large language models, and in particular the popularity of ChatGPT, has brought these questions to the forefront in 2023, but we’ve been discussing this for over 50 years. In this episode, Dr. Shani...
73 - Seadragon
Bedside Rounds - June 26, 2023 00:00 - 27 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsWhat happens when a patient far from surgical care – say, at the bottom of the Pacific ocean on a submarine, or at a research base in Antarctica in the middle of the winter – develops a surgical abdomen? This dilemma was the impetus to build the first truly effective clinical decision support sy...
72 - Problems
Bedside Rounds - March 20, 2023 03:00 - 52 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsAmerican doctors spend the majority of their time during the day on the computer, either writing or reading notes about their patients; only a small fraction is spent with the human beings in their care. Technology itself – especially the electronic medical record – has often been blamed for thi...
71 - A Doctor's Work, part 2
Bedside Rounds - January 16, 2023 01:00 - 37 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsIn the past episode, cultural and medical historians Lakshmi Krishnan and Mike Neuss discussed the history of the actual work of the doctor – Holmesian detective, data entry clerk, or something else altogether. In this episode, we conclude our discussion by talking about what type of metaphors a...
70 - A Doctor's Work
Bedside Rounds - December 19, 2022 01:00 - 49 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsWhat do doctors actually do? Are they Sherlockian detectives, hunting down obscure clues to solve intractable cases? Are they virtuosic experts, training for half a lifetime to bring the latest science to bear to cure disease? Or are they clerks, whose main job is to collect and enter data into ...
69 - The Database
Bedside Rounds - October 31, 2022 00:00 - 48 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsHow do doctors actually think? And if we can answer that, can we train a computer to do a better job? In the post-WW2 period, a group of iconoclastic physicians set about to redefine the nature and structure of clinical reasoning and tried to build a diagnostic machine. Though they would ultimat...
68 - The History
Bedside Rounds - July 25, 2022 00:00 - 39 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsInternal medicine physicians like to pride ourselves on our clinical reasoning – the ability to talk to any patient, pluck out seemingly random bits of information, and make a mystery diagnosis. But how does this actually work? In this episode, called The History, I’ll be joined by Gurpreet Dhal...
The Facemaker with Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris (#histmedconsultservice)
Bedside Rounds - June 07, 2022 00:00 - 51 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsModern plastic surgery was born out of the horrors of trench warfare in World War I. In this episode, Adam interviews historian Lindsey Fitzharris about her new book The Facemaker, about the life of surgeon Harold Gillies and his quest to rebuild his patients' faces.
67 - Fever on the Frontier
Bedside Rounds - March 21, 2022 00:00 - 48 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsIn the early 19th century, a strange new illness, seemingly unknown to medicine, ravaged settler communities in the American Middle West. As fierce debates about this new disease, now called milk sickness, raged – was it from toxic swamp gasses? arsenic in the soil? infectious microorganisms? fr...
66 - Burnout
Bedside Rounds - January 08, 2022 01:00 - 53 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsBurnout seems to stalk healthcare workers; between a third and a half of doctors and nurses had symptoms of burnout BEFORE the COVID-19 pandemic. Major medical associations have recognized burnout as a serious problem and the condition is being added to ICD-11 as an “occupational phenomenon.” Ho...
65 - The Last Breath
Bedside Rounds - November 05, 2021 00:00 - 40 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsHow can we medically tell whether or not someone is alive or dead? The answer is much more complicated than you'd think. In this episode, which is a live podcast I gave with Tony Breu at the Massachusetts Chapter of the American College of Physicians annual meeting on October 16, 2021, we track ...
64 - A Vicious Circle
Bedside Rounds - October 04, 2021 00:00 - 40 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsDuring World War II, the US Army launched a seemingly routine experiment to find the ideal way to screen soldiers for tuberculosis. Jacob Yerushalmy, the statistician in charge of this project, would succeed at this task -- and end up fundamentally changing our conception of medical diagnosis in...
63 - Signals
Bedside Rounds - August 23, 2021 00:00 - 40 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsWhat does it mean when different physicians disagree about a diagnosis? I am joined by Dr. Shani Herzig as we explore this issue in the second part of my series on the development of diagnosis. We’re going to discuss the advent of signal detection theory in the middle of the 20th century as new ...
62 - The Sisters Blackwell
Bedside Rounds - May 10, 2021 00:00 - 41 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsElizabeth Blackwell -- the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States -- and her sister Emily Blackwell are some of the most important physicians of the 19th century, firmly establishing the role of women as physicians, starting an infirmary and hospital for poor women and childre...
61 - Etymologies
Bedside Rounds - March 29, 2021 00:00 - 39 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsWords matter. At its best, etymology gives us insight not only into the origins of words, but why they remain so important today, especially in medicine, where we’ve been accruing jargon for millennia. In this episode, we’re delving into four specific words -- doctor, cerebrovascular accident, r...
60 - Santa's Salmonella
Bedside Rounds - December 24, 2020 01:00 - 38 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsFor a special holiday treat, we’re going to explore two tales of salmonella disease detectives -- the first about Mary Mallon (“Typhoid Mary”) and the birth of the genre; and the second about a mysterious salmonella outbreak at Massachusetts General Hospital solved with the assistance of a very ...
59 - Cry of the Suffering Organs
Bedside Rounds - November 30, 2020 01:00 - 43 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsDiagnosis is arguably the most important job of a physician. But what does it actually mean to make a diagnosis? In this episode, we’ll explore this question by tracking the development of the “classical” model of diagnosis and pathological anatomy and discussing three cases over three hundred y...
The House of Pod: How medical podcasting made me a better doctor and educator … and how it might change the future of medical education for everyone
Bedside Rounds - November 23, 2020 16:49 - 38 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsIn this episode, I talk about my podcasting journey -- how I started Bedside Rounds for inspiration during a low period in residency, how it changed me as a physician, and how it has changed my views about digital education and the future of medical education in general. This is a live recording...
58 - The Original (Antigenic) Sin
Bedside Rounds - October 26, 2020 00:00 - 55 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsThe COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the racial health disparities in the United States, with markedly increased mortality especially among Blacks and Native Americans. In this episode, Tony Breu and I discuss the conception of race, racism, and the social determinants of health through three histori...
57 - The Second Wave
Bedside Rounds - August 31, 2020 00:00 - 45 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsIn August of 1918, a horrific second wave of the Spanish Flu crashed across the world. In this episode, the third of a four-part series exploring hydroxychloroquine and COVID-19, I’ll explore this single moment in time, through the mysterious origins of the Spanish Flu and historiographical cont...
56 - La Grippe
Bedside Rounds - July 13, 2020 00:00 - 43 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsThe 1889 Russian Flu was the first influenza pandemic in an increasingly globalized world. In this episode, the second of a two-parter on how hydroxychloroquine became a great hope in COVID-19, we’ll talk about how quinine became the standard of care for influenza. Along the way, we’ll discuss t...
Introducing the Curious Clinicians!
Bedside Rounds - July 09, 2020 04:00 - 19 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsThis bonus episode introduces episode four of the Curious Clinicians, about Vincent Van Gogh and digitalis. The Curious Clinicians is a new medical podcast produced by Hannah Abrams, Avi Cooper, and Tony Breu; you can download them all at curiousclinicians.com.
55 - The Fever Tree
Bedside Rounds - June 08, 2020 00:00 - 43 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsWhere did cinchona, the first medication to cure malaria, come from? This episode explores the murky history of the bark of the fever tree and its derivative chloroquine with mysterious pre-Columbian Pacific crossings of the plasmodium parasite, Jesuit priests and Inca healers, a Chinese Emperor...
54 - 1918 (guest episode with Hannah Abrams and Gaby Mayer)
Bedside Rounds - May 18, 2020 00:00 - 39 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsThe 1918 influenza pandemic, or the Spanish Flu, is the obvious parallel to the COVID-19 pandemic -- a worldwide plague attacking a scientific and global society much like our own. In this guest episode by Hannah Abrams and Gaby Mayer, we chase these parallels wherever they take us, talking etio...
53 - The Antonine Plague (guest episode with Liam Conway-Pearson)
Bedside Rounds - April 27, 2020 00:10 - 31 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsPlagues have fascinated us since antiquity, but the Antonine Plague stands out because one of the most famous physicians in Western history was present to make detailed observations. In this episode, guest host Liam Conway-Pearson explores what we know -- and what we don't know -- about this pla...
A short message from Adam
Bedside Rounds - March 25, 2020 16:11 - 4 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsAs the COVID-19 pandemic increasingly spreads across the globe, Bedside Rounds is going on hiatus. This short message explains why and gives some historical context. Stay in touch on Twitter in the upcoming months @AdamRodmanMD.
52 - The Rebuff
Bedside Rounds - March 02, 2020 01:00 - 40 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsOver the past several centuries, the medical field has established a firm graph on the domain of the human body, with one very notable exception -- the teeth. In this episode, we’re going to explore this historic split between medicine and dentistry, and the moment in history where the two field...
Winter Shorts #4 - The Backlog
Bedside Rounds - February 04, 2020 01:00 - 30 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsDid Hippocrates call consults for chest pain? Were there specialists in black bile? Where does our poetic terminology for heart and lung sounds come from? Is there a historical parallel for #MedTwitter? I’ve fallen off the bus with #AdamAnswers, so in this month’s episode I’m playing catch up on...
51 - Hero Worship
Bedside Rounds - December 16, 2019 01:00 - 46 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsAt the end of 2019, William Osler’s legacy is stronger than ever; he has been called the “Father of Modern Medicine” and held up as the paragon of the modern physician. In this episode, I’m going to explore the historical Osler -- just who was William Osler in the context of rapidly changing sci...
50 - I Know Nothing
Bedside Rounds - October 28, 2019 00:00 - 43 minutes ★★★★★ - 410 ratingsWhat does it mean to know something in medicine? In this episode, we’ll explore this question by developing a historical framework of medical epistemologies in a journey that involves King Nebuchadnezzar, citrus fruit, leeches, water pumps, ICD-10, Socrates, skepticism, and 1970's computer progr...
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