Richard, the on-call nurse, had jotted down a sketchy story: Sylvia Turner, a fifty-seven-year-old woman being discharged from Memorial after treatment for a sinus infection. I looked up from the form at the duty nurse with whom I was rounding that morning. “Sinus infection?” I said. “Is that rea...
The first case of which any record survives was reported in a small-town daily in upstate New York. Tabitha Van Order, the brief item reads, age five, was brought into the county hospital’s emergency room with “strange markings” on her face and hands. “She was playing with the newspaper,” her...