Andrew Blum

CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT R.V.P. engages in profit-sharing with the International Neuropsychological Society for Continuing Education proceeds from the Navigating Neuropsychology podcast. He also receives royalties from publication of the book, Becoming a Neuropsychologist: Advice and Guidance for Students and Trainees (Springer, 2021). A.B. is a medical director for United Diagnostics and receives royalties from Springer for The Clinical Neurophysiology Primer.

In September 1863, a local paper in Somerset, England, ran an article about a man and a woman from Taunton whose child had been stricken with scarlet fever. Depressingly common, a child suffering from the illness itself was not noteworthy—what made the news were the remedies proposed. Distraught, the parents had turned to a group of women for advice, and this “jury of matrons,” in the paper’s words, all agreed that there was no hope of survival.

Audio brought to you by Curio, a Lapham’s Quarterly partner Not so long ago, at the start of 2007, the world’s population lived with a vivid technological divide. Half had a mobile phone: three billion people. Not quite a quarter used the internet. The phones were for talking. The internet required a computer. Wheelers and dealers—lawyers, agents, politicos—had BlackBerrys for emails, which they pecked on Lilliputian keyboards. But otherwise being online was a physically static condition.