Wednesday, January 11, 2012

The Most Famous Urology Lecture of All Time

Another piece that's not directly related to health policy, but what the heck -- I'm on vacation this week!

Laurence Klotz: "How (not) to communicate new scientific information: A memoir of the famous Brindley lecture" (BJU International Volume 96, Issue 7, pages 956–957, November 2005)

Here's the opening:
In 1983, at the Urodynamics Society meeting in Las Vegas, Professor G.S. Brindley first announced to the world his experiments on self-injection with papaverine to induce a penile erection. This was the first time that an effective medical therapy for erectile dysfunction (ED) was described, and was a historic development in the management of ED.

The way in which this information was first reported was completely unique and memorable, and provides an interesting context for the development of therapies for ED. I was present at this extraordinary lecture, and the details are worth sharing. Although this lecture was given more than 20 years ago, the details have remained fresh in my mind, for reasons which will become obvious...
(Read the full text of "How (not) to communicate new scientific information: A memoir of the famous Brindley lecture".)

My wife Diana was laughing throughout while reading the article.

One of my friends remarked on Twitter, "A colleague of mine, now a professor of urology at Stanford, was at this lecture as a young resident. His story was hilarious."