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this research addressed the question: is musical memory preserved in dementia, specifically, dementia of the Alzheimer type (AD)? Six tests involving different aspects of melody and language processing were administered to each of five groups of participants: 50 younger adults, 100 older adults, and 50 AD older adults classified into three levels of AD severity—mild, moderate and severe. No test was immune to, but not all tests were equally sensitive to, the presence of dementia. Long-term familiarity for melody was preserved across levels of AD, even at the severe stage for a few individuals. Detecting pitch distortions in melodies was possible for mild and some of the moderate AD participants. The ability to sing a melody when prompted by its lyrics was retained at the mild stage and was retained by a few individuals through the severe stages of AD. Long-term familiarity with the lyrics of familiar melodies was also found across levels of AD. In contrast, detection of grammatical distortions in the lyrics of familiar melodies and the ability to complete familiar proverbs were affected even at the mild stage of AD. We conclude that musical semantic memory may be spared through the mild and moderate stages of AD and may be preserved even in some individuals at the severe stage.

For a decade, Canada and other countries have been wrestling with shortages of drugs, defined as situations in which an authorization holder for a drug is unable to meet demand. The causes are poorly understood, and so far, solutions have been aimed at mitigation rather than prevention. Here, Duffin examines whether drug shortages might be provoked by good doctors dutifully following clinical practice guidelines.

Next appears Vesalius' masterwork, the enormous Fabrica (1543). It presents human anatomy in seven books of multiple illustrations. The frontispiece proclaims the author's anatomic agenda. Vesalius performs his own dissection of a female cadaver. Displaced assistant dissectors squabble on the floor. The animals that once informed [Galen]'s work are thrust to the periphery. The artist - possibly the Flemish Jan Stephan van Calcar - shows himself sketching the scene amid a crowd of onlookers that includes professors and students. Suspended above the cadaver in the place of the professor's lectern is a skeleton: Galen is dead. Beyond its blend of art and science and its astonishing contributions to anatomy, the Fabrica is a triumph of the technologies of book printing, less than a century after Gutenberg's invention of movable type. The drawings were carved into woodblocks that were transported across the Alps for printing at the workshop of Johannes Oporinus (1507-1568) in Basel. Just as anatomic images were rare in the mid-16th century, European printed book illustration in general was still in its infancy. A favourite early example of the medium is Hartmann Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), a book that reuses identical images to depict different towns. A half century later, as distant landscapes were coming into sharper focus on printed pages, Vesalius turned an inquiring eye on the landscape of the human body, increasing the realist detail that viewers could expect from illustration. By insisting that the images be informative in themselves, Vesalius, his publisher and the artists and woodcutters who helped realize his visions were reimagining the possibilities of the new medium, even as they were deepening anatomic knowledge. A copy of this second edition, with its numerous marginalia, is the most exciting element of the exhibit. Its owner since 2007, Vancouver pathologist and bibliophile Dr. Gerard Vogrincic conducted a careful investigation that indicated the likely identity of the writer, but he could not decipher the comments.2 He involved Professor [Vivian Nutton], who confirmed that the notes are written in the hand of Vesalius himself and advised that Vogrincic deposit the book in the Fisher Library.3 The \"Toronto Vesalius,\" as Nutton calls it, contains over a thousand of Vesalius' annotations and instructions to his printer in preparation for a third edition. Given that the second edition had not yet sold out - to the great financial distress of its publisher - this third edition must have been entirely hypothetical. It was never published.

Laennec was a master of pathological anatomy and his invention of the stethoscope helped to ensure the relevance of this science to bedside medicine, but his scientific manuscripts reveal that he saw limitations to the anatomo-clinical method. He designed a classification of disease to compensate for the shortcomings in pathological anatomy. This classification was based on identifiable changes, or 'lesions', in what he considered to be the three components of the human organism: solids (organs), liquids and vital principle. He intended the diagnosis of disease to be made by objective identification of the associated 'lesion', regardless of its location in the organs, liquids or vital principle. Thus, in addition to pathological anatomy, diagnosis would require an application of contemporary experimental work in chemistry, physics and physiology to clinical medicine. Laennec thought that 'lesions' in body fluids and in the vital principle could be the detected and quantified by new developments in these sciences.