About Miranda-Med

Miranda by John William Waterhouse (1849 - 1017)

In 1885, when John Shaw Billings started the database which would, over time, morph into PubMed he recognized the hopelessness of trying to keep abreast of the literature.  In addition, he was cognizant of how trivial most of what passes for “the literature” is when he wrote:

There is a vast amount of effete and worthless material in the literature of medicine.  Our preparers of compilations and compendiums, big and little, acknowledged or not, are continually enlarging the collection, and for the most part with material that has been categorized as ‘superlatively middling, the quintessential extract of mediocrity.

        Over the past 132 years, the situation has only gotten worse.  Today, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) indexes over 3500 journals in MEDLINE (searchable via PubMed).  What physician could keep up with even those in his own specialty. even if all one did was pore over medical periodicals?

What we are proposing to form is a Virtual Journal Club for the medical humanities.  Each month, the members will post the one or two articles they deem most inspiring from their chosen journals.  The references will be stored on this web site (Miranda-Med) for retrieval and open-access whenever possible.

We will also include books that deal with humane aspects of health care.  There are some classics and each year a few new titles are added to the canon.

If you are interested, please consider joining our Miranda-Med Hui.

Suggested Journals

Annals of Internal Medicine

British Medical Journal

Journal of the American Medical Association

Lancet

New England Journal of Medicine

New York Times

The Miranda-Med Philosophy

As articulated by Robertson Davies, in The Cunning Man:

[We] don't decry research. Some fine things are done.

Not nearly enough for the amount of money spent. Too much machinery, too much administration, and not enough brains and intuition. Research harbors a lot of second- and third-rate people.

The huge labs are what monasteries were before Henry the VIII took the axe to them. More humanism and less science – that's what medicine needs. But humanism is hard work and a lot of science is just Tinkertoy®.