This week I am in Las Vegas for the Blogworld convention.  I have not actually packed up the book of medicine with me.  It is 100 years old and very very large and does not travel well (it gets plane sick).

I am meeting a number of great bloggers and companies already.  I am looking for other medical and health bloggers.  The conference officially starts in about 3 hours, and I have met a couple already.

I'm getting ready to expand out the Book of Medicine as a site and part of that will be driven by the next chapter segments in the History of Medicine.  The book was comprehensive in its day covering all areas of health from surgery and bone setting to colds and herbs and even physical fitness.  Back then health insurance and life insurance did not exist (correction term insurance and whole life didn't exist, but you could get insurance from several companies, and if you paid you could get insurance on a person, but there was not a great deal of actuarial data behind it.  It was more like the health syrum's of the same time.  Lots of promises, but no real science nor results.)

So if you are a health, medicine, alternative medicine blogger and you are out here at blogworld feel free to drop me a comment.  I'd be happy to meet up with you and make some connections.

Additional Articles from the Book of Medicine:

• Walls of the Abdomen
  
  

  Walls of the Abdomen.  — The muscular walls of the abdomen are nicely arranged and beautifully adapted to the functions they perform.  On the left side we see the large oblique muscle, so named because of the direction it’s fibres run, and on the right side we observe the rectus muscle, transverse muscle and internal oblique muscle, all of which are strong, broad muscles, will split manner in which they are so scientifically arranged gives additional string to the abdominal walls, without deteriorating from its great mobility, and at the same time avoiding all pressure of the organs contained within this large cavity.  There are ninety-one muscles on each side of the trunk, or one hundred and eighty-two in all, ninety of which are pairs, and two are single.

  I noted a slight difference in spelling for the word “fibres” in the section.  I’m not certain if this is a medical spelling or if it’s just a difference in spelling that’s evolved over the last 90 years.  In addition the section also has a reference again to the beauty and perfection of design which doesn’t overdo it too much in this particular paragraph but given the history of the book so far seems to have more of a enthralled tone than you might expect.

• Body Sculpture Turns to Lipo Sculpture
  
  

  There was a time when people carved the human figure and marble or would grieve and dipped it in a precious metal like gold or bronze.  Michelangelo’s David might even be considered an example of man’s attempt to sculpt the perfect person.

  That was hundreds of years ago and today we are reaching a point where we can literally sculpt the perfect person while they are alive.  I’m not talking about anything macabre, I’m talking about the science of plastic surgery.

  Today people have the option of going to a surgeon to have imperfections in the body corrected.  They can seek los angeles cosmetic surgery experts to help them correct or crooked nose or improve a smile or he raise harder and wrinkles and provide a net or talk or boost.

  With the invention of the technique known as liposuction, and all of the advances that are made in this technique year after year and month after month, people can now scope their body to fit the mold and model in their minds eye.  People travel from many different places to have their figure or their body re-formed by the hands of a beverly hills liposculpture Doctor.

  Within a short amount of time in a short amount of recovery they can go back out of the world literally a new person.

  This type of concept would have been completely foreign to people hundred years ago.  Surgery in general was extremely risky a hundred years ago, and it would have been completely impractical and even dangerous back then to consider cosmetic surgery.  It’s amazing what a hundred years can do for this particular science.  Surgery is still very serious and dangerous, but science and medicine have improved so drastically that the mortality rate for general surgery is nowhere near what it used to be and now doctors can even perform smaller surgeries with techniques that are becoming less and less invasive every single year.

• The Spinal Column
  
  

  The Spinal Column.  — The spinal column, the lumbar portion of which is here seeing, consists of twenty-four bones, the which are placed pads of cartilage.  Such is the elasticity of these cushions of cartilage, that, though they become condensed to the day, making a shorter in the evening then in the morning, they resume their normal thickness while you’re lying in bed at night.  The perfection in the architecture of the spine surpasses belief; its various uses seem a bundle of contradictions.

  This section starts to sound more like the book we are familiar with.  There are several excessive uses of the coma and once again we start to encounter the authors love of the human body in a way that is less than scientific.  I suppose a hundred years ago there may have been a little bit more passion for science than there is today, or maybe my own perception in this regards as biased.  I seem to recall an anthropology professor back in college that was possibly as passionate about his topic is the author is about this topic.