Notable articles from the course of
The New England Journal of Medicine history include: • In November 1846, the New England Journal of Medicine published a report by
Henry Jacob Bigelow on the first public demonstration of a generalized anesthetic. The agent was inhaled ether, the first modern anesthetic. This allowed patients to remain sedated during operations ranging from
dental extraction to
amputation. "A patient has been rendered completely insensible during an amputation of the thigh, regain consciousness after a short interval," Bigelow wrote. "Other severe operations have been performed without the knowledge of the patients." • In June 1906,
James Homer Wright published an article that described how he stained and studied
bone marrow with descriptions of what are now known as
megakaryocytes and
platelets. • In October 1872, a lecture by
Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard was published that proposed the then-revolutionary idea that one
cerebral hemisphere can influence both sides of the body. The neurologist would go on to describe what is now known as the
Brown-Séquard syndrome. • In June 1948,
Sidney Farber reported promising results in treatment of early childhood
leukemia. Based on anecdotal evidence that children with acute leukemia worsened if they were given
folic acid, he worked on blocking folic acid metabolism. His team gave 16 infants and children with
acute lymphoblastic leukemia a folic acid inhibitor,
aminopterin—10 showed improvement by clinical and hematologic parameters after three months. In his article, Farber advised receiving the results cautiously: "It is again emphasized that these remissions are temporary in character and that the substance is toxic and may be productive of even greater disturbances than have been encountered so far in our studies," he wrote. "No evidence has been mentioned in this report that would justify the suggestion of the term 'cure' of acute leukemia in children." • In November 1952, cardiologist
Paul Zoll published an early report on resuscitation of the heart. "The purpose of this report is to describe the successful use in 2 patients of a quick, simple, effective and safe method of arousing the heart from ventricular standstill by an artificial, external, electric pacemaker", he wrote. "For the first time it was possible to keep a patient alive during
ventricular asystole lasting for hours to days. This procedure may prove valuable in many clinical situations." • In February 1973,
NEJM published the first report of polyp removal using a
colonoscope and introduced a procedure during screening to reduce cancer risk. The authors reported on 218 patients, from whom they removed 303 polyps (at one or more procedures per patient). •
A letter published in the
NEJM in 1980 was later described by the journal as having been "heavily and uncritically cited" to claim that addiction due to use of opioids was rare, and its publication in such an authoritative journal was used by
pharmaceutical companies to push widespread use of
opioid drugs, leading to
an addiction crisis in the U.S. and other countries. • In December 1981, two landmark articles described the clinical course of four patients—first reported in the CDC's June 1981 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report—with the disease that would come to be known as
AIDS. • In April 2001,
Brian Druker et al. reported a targeted therapy for
chronic myelogenous leukemia. Based on the knowledge that BCR-ABL, a constitutively activated
tyrosine kinase, causes CML, the authors tested with success an inhibitor of this tyrosine kinase in patients who had failed first-line therapy. The finding helped begin the era of designing cancer drugs to target specific molecular abnormalities. • In October 2020, the journal published an editorial, signed by all 34 editors, in which they condemned the
Trump administration's handling of the
COVID-19 pandemic saying that "they are dangerously incompetent" and that "they have taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy." This is the first time
NEJM has ever supported or condemned a political candidate and only three other times in history has an editorial been signed by all the editors. • In April 2021,
Robin Carhart-Harris et al. demonstrated that in the pharmacological treatment of
major depressive disorder, there was no significant difference in
antidepressant effects between the
psychedelic drug psilocybin and the
SSRI escitalopram after six weeks. Significant doses of psilocybin were only administered twice in the six-week period, while escitalopram was taken daily. This was the first time psychedelics and SSRIs were compared in the treatment of depression. == Social media ==