Florence Nightingale – widely known as the Lady with the Lamp – is internationally celebrated as the founder of modern nursing. Indeed, Nightingale instituted revolutionary hygienic reforms both during and after the calamitous Crimean War, in which more British troops died from infectious disease than from battle wounds. Far less appreciated is Nightingale’s pivotal role as an innovator in data visualization – a groundbreaking rhetorical system permitting data “to speak for themselves.” How Nightingale evolved from her privileged upbringing as the daughter of a wealthy landed family to a champion of progressive health care reform is an astonishing story – one involving a host of influential collaborators and acquaintances at the highest levels of mathematics and government. Nightingale’s passionate and persuasive powers proved highly successful in contrast to the clumsy efforts of another hygienic reformer, Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis. Nightingale’s success confirms Louis Pasteur’s quotation: “chance favors only the prepared mind.”

Assuming that all patients are created equal may lead many to suffer prolonged, frustrating, and expensive trial-and-error therapy, in which one treatment after another is attempted in an effort to remedy patients’ maladies. Critics of this traditional kind of care champion a new approach – personalized or precision medicine – in which genomic testing might help us understand and remedy the ravages of rare genetic illnesses as well as energize efforts to treat more common afflictions. After three decades of well-funded research, has personalized medicine measured up to the hype of its ushering in a fresh paradigm for delivering unsurpassed health care? Has it displaced trial-and-error treatment? Or is personalized medicine itself undergoing a trial-and-error process of development and testing? These and other questions must be answered if we are to best deploy limited resources to combat a wide variety of diseases – from individual genetic disorders to devastating pandemics.

As a theatrical art form, puppetry has existed for as long as 4,000 years and has been traced to Europe, Asia, and Africa. Even now, puppetry continues to evolve – from representational to abstract and from traditional to avant-garde. One of today’s leading puppeteers is Basil Twist, who excels in both traditional and avant-garde performance. Twist vaulted to fame in 1998 largely because of his breakthrough performance of Symphonie Fantastique. That work propelled his receipt of a 2015 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship – the so-called genius award. Twist’s Symphonie Fantastique is an amazing assemblage of water, feathers, fabric, classical music, and dramatic lighting. How did the piece come to be? Was it the result of meticulous and foresighted planning? Or was its origin more improvisational and experimental? The answers shed fresh light on the meaning of creative genius and on the nature of puppet art.

For millions of people, normal eating is impossible, including persons with chronic bowel disorders, individuals suffering from extensive burns, and patients recovering from major surgery. Not only adults but also newborns and young children are vulnerable. Stanley Dudrick was not the first surgeon to confront this grave reality, but he was the first to devise a highly effective method to feed those who would otherwise succumb from undernourishment. The method is known as Total Parenteral Nutrition. It involves injecting liquid food directly into the bloodstream by a tube connected to a vein, thus bypassing the stomach and small intestine. In the 1960s, medical professionals claimed that feeding a patient entirely by vein was impossible; even if possible, it would be impractical; and even if practical, it would be unaffordable. Through tenacious experimental research, Dudrick proved them wrong, in the process giving life and hope to many who would otherwise have perished.

Since its promotion in 1974, the Heimlich Maneuver has been an invaluable first-aid procedure, which is believed to have saved the lives of countless thousands of choking victims. Henry Heimlich’s life story is one motivated by saving people from unnecessary death and injury. His painstaking development of the abdominal thrust technique is an arresting tale in and of itself. But, so too were his determined efforts to popularize the method in order that ordinary citizens too could become lifesaving heroes. Nevertheless, suffocation by ingestion or inhalation remains the fourth most common cause of preventable death in the United States, requiring that the general public be simply and properly taught on a continuing basis how to administer this vital technique.