Plague, rats, and ships The realisation of the infection routes of plague.

Three plague pandemics plus several epidemics have ravaged the world. The three pandemics were characterised by the role shipping played in spreading of the plague. The third pandemic, which began in southern China in the 1850s, was carried out of Hong Kong in 1894 to all continents by steamships.

[Canaries, germs, and poison gas. The physiologist J.S. Haldane's contributions to public health and hygiene].

The Scottish physiologist John Scott Haldane (1860-1936) spent most of his professional career in Oxford after graduating from the medical school in Edinburgh. He was deeply involved in applying basic science on problems in society but also making these problems guide his choice of projects in his experimental work. Thus, he has demonstrated that the increased contents of carbon dioxide in dwellings, schools, and factories was of less importance than the high contents of bacteria and fungal spores, and that even the foul air in the sewers was less harmful than that in crowded dwellings.

The relationship between immediate relevant basic science knowledge and clinical knowledge: physiology knowledge and transthoracic echocardiography image interpretation.

Two major views on the relationship between basic science knowledge and clinical knowledge stand out; the Two-world view seeing basic science and clinical science as two separate knowledge bases and the encapsulated knowledge view stating that basic science knowledge plays an overt role being encapsulated in the clinical knowledge. However, resent research has implied that a more complex relationship between the two knowledge bases exists. In this study, we explore the relationship between immediate relevant basic science (physiology) and clinical knowledge within a specific domain of medicine (echocardiography).