A little boy is cured of cancer. A woman finds relief after months of pain. A man gets the new lung he needs to breathe easy and keep living. A baby goes home from the hospital—healthy after a frightening early birth and a stay in the newborn intensive care unit. With its cutting-edge technologies and lifesaving advances, the field of medicine is full of stories like these. This is apparent every day in health-care systems across the country and around the world.

The state of Missouri is ranked 44th in the United States for maternal mortality, according to America’s Health Rankings 2019. Missouri’s maternal mortality rate for black women is nearly three times higher than that for white women. And, according to the Missouri Foundation for Health, approximately 600 infants die every year in Missouri; 33% of those deaths occur in St. Louis and in the Bootheel, in the southeasternmost part of the state.

In January, members of the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) on the Washington University Medical Campus began paying attention to reports coming out of China regarding an outbreak of a novel coronavirus.

ILLUSTRATION BY ABIGAIL GOH

The patient in back lies in an isolation chamber. It’s just big enough for one person, and he’s completely enclosed inside it. An observer might conclude that he’s no ordinary patient, and this is no ordinary ambulance ride.

A shot rings out. A young man is hit.
He is rushed to the hospital, where doctors save his life.
Eventually, the gunshot wound heals. But he doesn’t.

One would be hard-pressed to find anyone in America who hasn’t at least heard about the opioid addiction crisis affecting families and cities across the country. Yet despite a general awareness, many questions still remain about the most effective methods to address this growing epidemic.

For thousands of years, bloodletting was a widely accepted and commonly used treatment for a variety of illnesses. The practice stemmed from the belief that disease was caused by an imbalance of the four bodily fluids, or “humors”: phlegm, black bile, yellow bile and blood. Doctors and their patients believed that restoring health required a rebalancing of those humors through the draining of “excess” blood from the body.