Talk:What Do You Care What Other People Think?

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Tuberculosis

The claim in the last paragraph according to which Feynman diagnosed his first wife’s disease as tuberculosis and was laughed at by the doctors is inaccurate. Here is what the book actually says:

[...] I go down to the library at Princeton and look up lymphatic diseases, and find “Swelling of the Lymphatic Glands. (1) Tuberculosis of the lymphatic glands. This is very easy to diagnose...” – so I figure this isn’t what Arlene has, because the doctors are having trouble trying to figure it out.
I start reading about some other diseases: lymphodenema, lymphodenoma, Hodgkin’s disease, all kind of other things; they’re all cancers of one crazy form or another. [...]
At any rate, I read through all the lymphatic diseases and decided that the most likely possibility was that Arlene had an incurable disease.
[...]
When I got to her house, she showed me the report. It said, “Biopsy shows tuberculosis of the lymphatic gland.”
That really got me. I mean, that was the first goddamn thing on the list! I passed it by, because the book said it was easy to diagnose, and because the doctors were having so much trouble trying to figure out what it was. I assumed they had checked the obvious case. [...] Otherwise, I would have suggested it right off [...].

See pages 35-40 of the 2001, published by W. W. Norton & Company (ISBN 978-0393320923).

--AmbrosiaSnail (talk) 01:19, 11 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]