This week’s image is a plate, titled “Bones of the Head,” from Intermediate anatomy, physiology and hygiene. The book was written by Calvin Cutter and John Clarence Cutter and published in 1887. Intermediate anatomy is available as an eBook through Google Books. Coincidentally, the source book comes from Stanford University Libraries.

This is a chromolithograph from the book Topographisch-anatomischer Atlas : nach Durchschnitten an gefrornen Cadavern by Wilhelm Braune. According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), Braune was a professor at the University of Leipzig. The book, published in Leipzig in 1872, consists of 30 color lithographs of frozen cross sections of human anatomy. The NLM detail page offers a little more information about how the plates were made: “After sections were cut, thin paper was placed over them and tracings were made of the anatomical features.”

This is an anatomical study made by Pontormo (Jacopo Carucci) in 1550. The study was done in black chalk on paper and is kept at the (amazing) Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence. A larger version, as well as images of other works by Pontormo, is available at the Web Gallery of Art.

Via Scientific Illustration

In this recent talk from TED@Vancouver, Firdaus Dhabhar, PhD, director of research at the Stanford Center on Stress & Health, discusses the positive effects of stress on the body.

The video is also part of a talent search for TED 2013, so, if you’d like to see Dhabhar on the main stage next year, head over to the video page to share a comment or a rating.

Hot on the heels of reading about the tobacco industry’s connection to the Olympics, I’ve just come across a post on Hodinkee (a great watch blog) detailing a surprising relationship between Swiss watch manufacturer Uhrenmanufaktur Heuer AG (now TAG Heuer) and Brown & Williamson. According to Jeff Stein, the relationship arose out of a need to better position Viceroy cigarettes:

For years, Viceroy’s advertising theme had been balance-”not too strong, not too light, Viceroy’s got the taste that’s right.” A normal ad might depict a woman offering her companion one of her cigarettes, and he, surprisingly, enjoys the taste. The Viceroy was “less masculine than its key competition,” and the brand had a “feminine orientation,” according to internal documents. While the Viceroy couple shopped for flowers, the Marlboro man rode his horse straight into more market share.

The solution, Stein writes, was to make Viceroy the brand of the “auto racer.” To help shape that perception, Brown & Williamson partnered with Heuer to offer a discounted chronograph wristwatch ($88!) with the purchase of a carton of Viceroy cigarettes:

Brown & Williamson contacted Heuer in late 1971 with the idea of offering the Heuer Autavia in a Viceroy promotion. Throughout the 1960s, Heuer was a dominant presence at the racetrack. Its stopwatches, handheld chronographs, dashboard timers, and timing systems were the gold standards in their respective categories.

I don’t want to spoil the rest of the entry, so head over to Hodinkee if you’d like to see another example of how the tobacco industry has, in Jackler’s words, “affiliated its products with cherished and admired cultural icons.”

Previously: A discussion of the tobacco industry’s exploitation of “smoke-free” Olympic Games

Slate’s Carl Zimmer has a great piece today about replication failure in science and is implications when human health is at issue. He writes:

C. Glenn Begley, who spent a decade in charge of global cancer research at the biotech giant Amgen, recently dispatched 100 Amgen scientists to replicate 53 landmark experiments in cancer—the kind of experiments that lead pharmaceutical companies to sink millions of dollars to turn the results into a drug. In March Begley published the results: They failed to replicate 47 of them.

The solution, Zimmer suggests, may be to outsource the replication of experiments:

Here’s how it is supposed to work. Let’s say you have found a drug that shrinks tumors. You write up your results, which are sexy enough to get into Nature or some other big-name journal. You also send the Reproducibility Initiative the details of your experiment and request that someone reproduce it. A board of advisers matches you up with a company with the experience and technology to do the job. You pay them to do the job—Iorns estimates the bill for replication will be about 10 percent of the original research costs—and they report back whether they got the same results.

School of Medicine Professor John Ioannidis, MD, DSc, is on the Reproducibility Initiative’s advisory board.

Via @atulbutte

This is another unidentified image I came across while scanning the Stanford Medicine History Center Flickr photo stream. I like the composition - it feels a little like a biomedical Rodchenko to me.

If you know anything about the photo, our History Center would surely appreciate details in the comments.

Previously: Image of the Week: Preparing for the operating room
Photo courtesy Stanford Medical History Center

This fifth film from Stanford Medicine X features Roni Zeiger, MD, co-founder of Impatient Science. In the video, Zeiger, who is also the former chief health strategist at Google, discusses the importance of participatory medicine and how technology might be used to enable that model of care.

Zeiger will be a speaker at the Medicine X conference this Sept. 28-30. For more information or to register, visit the conference website.

More news about Stanford Medicine X is available in the Medicine X category.

This week’s image is a plate from Medical Bacteriology, published in 1917 by John Roddy, MD. The caption underneath the plate illustration offers more detail. A complete copy of the text is available for your reading pleasure from the Internet Archive.

Via Scientific Illustration

This morning Larry Chu, MD, and his team at the Stanford AIM Lab released its first eBook, which shares the stories of the 35 ePatient scholars attending the Stanford Medicine X conference this Sept. 28-30. Chu writes on the Medicine X blog:

The book includes contributing text from [Chu], Nick Dawson, Regina Holliday, Julia James and Amy Tenderich. It also features the artwork of… Holliday. A selection of e-patient profiles from the Stanford Medicine X Film series is also included in this enhanced eBook.

The eBook is free and available from Chu’s blog post. It’s available as an iBook or as a PDF.

More news about Stanford Medicine X is available in the Medicine X category.