October/November 1984

While the Wright Brothers experimented at Kitty Hawk, a photographer named William Jennings believed he and his friends were making aviation history

Americans have never been so healthy, thanks to advances in medical technology and research. Now we have to learn to deal with the staggering costs.

How a favorite local charity of Boston’s Brahmins—parochial and elite—grew into one of our great democratic medical institutions

America has won more Nobel Prizes in medicine than any other nation: it’s easy when you have the money, the technology, and people from every other nation

Peter Marié, a bon vivant of the Gilded Age, asked hundreds of Society’s prettiest women to allow themselves to be painted for him alone

How our wartime experience conquered a wide range of problems from hemorrhagic shock to yellow fever

Here is how political cartoonists have sized up the candidates over a tumultuous half-century.

The Great Lakes hurricane of 1913 was a destructive freak. As far as lakers were concerned, it was …

A disease that no one understood laid waste a major American city. Five thousand died in two months, and Memphis was never the same again.

American medicine in a crucial era was at once surprisingly similar and shockingly different from what we know today. You could get aspirin at the drugstore, and anesthesia during surgery. But you could also buy opium over the counter, and the surgery would be more likely to be performed in your kitchen than in a hospital.