‘A searing, deeply humane collection of essays about medical practice that has all the makings of a modern classic’

Notes on Sources
On Washing Hands
14
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s “Guideline for Hand
Hygiene in Health-Care Settings,” by J. M. Boyce and D. Pittet,
was published in the 
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report
, Oc-
tober 25, 2002, pp. 1–44. It can also be found at www.cdc.gov.
15
Sherwin Nuland tells the tale of Semmelweis in 
The Doctors’
Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Sem-
melweis
(New York: Norton, 2003).
24
The article that Jon Lloyd came across about the Sternins’ ap-
proach to reducing starvation in Vietnam was D. Dorsey’s
“Positive Deviant,” in 
Fast Company
, November 2000, p. 284.
More about positive deviance can be found at www
.positivedeviance.org.
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Notes on Sources
The Mop-Up
29
The definition of diligence is from the 
Random House
Unabridged Dictionary
(New York: Random House, 2006).
31
For an overview of WHO’s eradication efforts, see G.
Williams, “WHO: The Days of the Mass Campaigns,” 
World
Health Forum
9 (1988): 7–23.
32
A campaign against guinea worm disease, led by the Carter
Center and financed by the CDC, WHO, and the Gates Foun-
dation, is the only global eradication program now under way
besides the one against polio (see www.cartercenter.org). As
with the polio effort, there remains great hope. The parasitic
worm was once endemic in Africa and Asia and caused some
three to ten million infections per year. (The worms grow to
three feet in length in the abdomen and then emerge slowly
and painfully through the skin, incapacitating victims for two
months or longer.) The worm has now been confined to a
dozen African countries and only ten thousand infections oc-
curred in 2005. Success again has depended on incredible atten-
tion to surveillance and follow-through in prevention.
50
The Web site www.polioeradication.org has up-to-date infor-
mation on the current number of polio cases and maps with
the locations of outbreaks.
Casualties of War
51
The U.S. Department of Defense’s weekly update on American
military casualties can be found at http://www.defenselink
.mil/news/casualty.pdf.
52
The study that first examined the relationship between homi-
cide rates and medical care is A. R. Harris, S. H. Thomas, G. A.
Fisher, and D. J. Hirsch, “Murder and Medicine: The Lethality
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Notes on Sources     261
of Criminal Assault, 1960–1999,” 
Homicide Studies
6 (2002):
128–66.
52
The source for the historical casualty numbers is U.S. Depart-
ment of Defense, “Principal Wars in which the United States