The Laws of Medicine Read Online Free PDF Page B

the exquisite accuracy of his measurements, and his model worked perfectly for nearly every measured orbit. The rules were beautiful, except for a pesky planet called Mars. Mars just would not fit. It was the outlier, the aberration, the grain of sand in the eye of Tychonian cosmology. If you carefully follow Mars on the horizon, it tracks a peculiar path—pitching forward at first and then tacking backward in space before resuming a forward motion again. This phenomena—called the retrograde motion of Mars—did not make sense in either Ptolemy’s or Brahe’s model. Fed up with Mars’s path across the evening sky, Brahe assigned the problem to an indigent, if exceptionally ambitious, young assistant named Johannes Kepler, a young mathematician from Germany with whom he had a stormy, on-again, off-again relationship. Brahe quite possibly threw Kepler the “Mars problem” to keep him distracted with an insolubleconundrum of little value. Perhaps Kepler, too, would be stuck cycling two steps forward and five steps back, leaving Brahe to ponder real questions of cosmological importance.
    Kepler, however, did not consider Mars peripheral: if a planetary model was real, it had to explain the movements of all the planets, not just the convenient ones. He studied the motion of Mars obsessively. He managed to retain some of Brahe’s astronomical charts even after Brahe’s death, fending off rapacious heirs for nearly a decade while he pored carefully through the borrowed data. He tried no less than forty different models to explain the retrograde motion of Mars. The drunken “doubling back” of the planet would not fit. Then the answer came to him in an inspired flash: the orbits of all the planets were not circles, but ellipses around the sun. All the planets, including Mars, orbit the sun in concentric ellipses. Seen from the earth, Mars moves “backward” in the same sense that one train appears to pitch backward when another train overtakes it on a parallel track. What Brahe had dismissed as an aberration was the most important piece of information needed to understand the organization of the cosmos. The exception to the rule, it turned out, was crucial to the formulation of Kepler’s Law.
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In 1908, when psychiatrists encountered children who were withdrawn, self-absorbed, emotionally uncommunicative, and often prone to repetitive behaviors, they classified the disease as a strange variant of schizophrenia. But the diagnosis of schizophrenia would not fit. As child psychiatrists studied these children over time, it became clear that this illness was quite distinct from schizophrenia, although certain features overlapped. Children with this disease seemed to be caught in a labyrinth of their own selves, unable to escape. In 1912, the Swiss psychiatrist Paul Eugen Bleuler coined a new word to describe the illness: autism —from the Greek word for “self.”
    For a few decades, psychiatrists studied families and children with autism, trying to make sense of the disease. They noted that the disease ran in families, often coursing through multiple generations, and that children with autism tended to have older parents, especially older fathers. But no systematic model for the illness yet existed. Some scientists argued that the disease was related to abnormal neural development. But in the 1960s, from the throes of psychoanalytical and behavioral thinking, a powerful new theory took root and held fast: autism was the result of parents who were emotionally cold to their children.
    Almost everything about the theory seemed to fit. Observed carefully, the parents of children with autism did seem remote and detached from their children. That children learn behaviors by mirroring the actions of their parents was well established—and it seemed perfectly plausible that they might imitate their emotional responses as well. Animals deprived of their parents in