Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

The name given to the playing to crying babies of sounds comparable to those by which the unborn fetus is surrounded in the womb (uterus), such as the beating of the mother’s heart, the bowel sounds of the baby and the like. The claim is that the replaying of these brings back the ‘peaceful music…

Loss of blood from the uterus via the vagina occurring when the women’s level of oestrogen hormones (oestrogens), progesterone hormone or progestogen drugs falls quickly. The withdrawal bleeding that happens at the end of each month’s cycle of combined oral contraceptive pills imitates the woman’s menstrual period but is normally briefer and less in amount.…

A condition caused by norovirus, characterized by nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea and giddiness, which occurs in winter epidemics. Outbreaks usually involve whole families or may affect communities like schools. It may also occur in closed communities such as cruise ships. The incubation period is 24—48 hours, and attacks seldom persist for more than 72 hours. Humans…

Wilms’ Tumour, or nephroblastoma. This is the commonest kidney tumour in infancy. It is a malignant tumour, which occurs in around one per 10,000 live births. The survival rate with modern treatment (removal of the kidney followed by radiotherapy and chemotherapy) is now around 80 per cent. Wilms tumor, also known as nephroblastoma, is a…

A major operation done to remove cancer of the uterus or ovary. The ovaries, fallopian tubes, the uterus and its ligaments, the upper vagina, and the regional lymph nodes are all excised.  

It is more than a hundred years since the metric system was legalized in Britain, but it was not until 1969 that it became illegal to use any system of weights and measures other than the metric system for dispensing prescriptions.  

Charts relating height to age have been devised, and give an indication of the normal rate of growth, particularly in childhood. The wide variation in normal children is immediately apparent on studying such charts. Centile or percentile charts describe the distribution of a characteristic in a population. They are obtained by measuring a specific characteristic…

Webbed Fingers (or toes); properly called syndactyly, a deformity present at birth and which tends to run in families. The web may be quite a thin structure, or the fingers may be closely united by solid tissue. In any case, separation is a matter of considerable difficulty, because, if the web is simply divided, it…

The peculiarly sudden pulse that is associated with incompetence of the aortic valve of the heart.