The Blaisdell Blog: Celebrate Constitution Day With a Look at the Nort...

The Blaisdell Blog: Celebrate Constitution Day With a Look at the Nort...: If you live in Ohio , Indiana , Illinois , Michigan , Wisconsin or Minnesota , the date July 13, 1787 is very important to you. If you ar...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Honoring Our Fallen Dead on Memorial Day

  This column about Memorial Day was written when we had a real President in the Oval Office.   It assumed we had a President who knew how and when to make an executive decision and had advisors around him who could offer competent advice to temper that President’s decisions.   Unfortunately, Trump makes his best guess about how to structure his day while moving his bowels at 3:00 a.m.—hopefully upon his gold toilet.   [Note to self: do not EVER touch Trump’s iphone!] So, keeping in mind that all genuine and serious Presidential decisions must be put on hold for the next 4 years, I offer up my column to honor those who fought and died for a much better America than Trump envisions.            Memorial Day is the day we honor those who died while serving in our nation’s armed forces.   The numbers of those honorees are staggering.      Civil War:        ...
Read more

Lessons Learned From a Bassinet

The bassinet in which I placed my first child was the same one which my mother had used for me.   It was, in fact, the same bassinet that had held my mother and each of her sisters.     Every one of my cousins slept in that bassinet.   Eventually the bassinet was used for my grandchildren.   Not just my grandchildren, but my cousins’ grandchildren also used this same bassinet.   There have been five generations of babies who have used that sturdy, whicker basket.   The legs have been redone by skilled fathers.   The mattress and flowing draped cloth that formed the liner and skirt have been new with each family.   It has become the pride and honor of each of these mothers, whether members of this family by blood or marriage, to pass this bassinet to the next expectant member of my mother’s family.   The bassinet must have been built with incredible care, and it surely has been treated with equal reverence.   It has also been paint...
Read more

Some Facts and Personal History About the Polio Vaccine

  On April 26, 1954 the Salk polio vaccine field trials began.   It was the first time a “double blind” trial was used for a drug.   The now standard double blind study (where neither the patient nor the doctor know who is getting the real medicine as opposed to a placebo) involved almost 2 million children.   It began at Franklin Sherman Elementary School, an integrated school in McLean, Virginia.   The expanded study involved children from the United States, Canada and Finland.             I think the trials conducted in an integrated school reflect the largesse and truly humanitarian thinking of Dr. Jonas Salk himself.   The son of immigrant-Russian Ashkenazi Jews, Salk knew what mindless prejudice and institutionalized bias looked and felt like.   Salk was a risk taker.   He used a dead virus when common thinking assumed a live but weakened virus was better.   He tried the vacc...
Read more