S. Scott Graham

@sscottgraham

Rhetorician of science & medicine at UT-Austin. I write about health, ethics, conflicts of interest, AI & the history of anatomy museums (not all at the same time, obvs). Now mapping the world's medical museums → thecollectors.sscottgraham.com

426 Siguiendo812 Seguidores480 Publicaciones

Bluesky

¿Es tu perfil?Reclámalo y sscottgraham.dirty.social es tuyo.Reclamar perfil

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· 1d

Because (a) Texas got age-walled on BlueSky, and (b) my current research has gotten more visually oriented, I'm pivoting most of my scholarly updates to insta. Follow me there if you'd like updates on my anatomy and pathology museums journey.

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· 18d

There's a #MedRhet #RHM dissertation or three in Fauci's diary and its release commentary by Paul. www.cbsnews.com/news/anthony...

Mar. 10, 2020 – 116,588/4090. USA cases now 712. Deaths 29
Just signed off on a Level 3 State (“Reconsider Travel”) and a Level 3 CDC (“Avoid
non-essential travel) for the European Schengen Area This measn that all travelers from
this area are required to enact a 14 day voluntary quarantine after arriving to USA. Also
will consider an INA Section 212(f) Proclamation banning travel to USA bu any foreign
national, with limited exceptions, who has been physically present in Italy in the last 14
days
I push hard with Jerome Adams to expand community mitigation. One topic was
whether there should be campaign rallies. I insiste that we say all large crowds should
be avoided. Marc Short pushes back since the POTUS will be doing rallies. Jerome and
I continue to push. I will say that the degree of stopping depends on the area of the
country – Washingotn State (bad); Nebraska (probably OK).
Chris Liddell becoming a friend and encourages me to stick by my guns – good guy.
For better or worse, I am becoming an international celebrity. Calls from all over the
world.
Am concerned a bit about my health. Having total body pain and will again stop Crestor
Reports from Italy are really bad. Running out of equipment and just letting the elderly
and frail die without intervention.
Katie Miller defending my saying what is my opinion based on good public health
principles despite others in the VP’s staff wanting me to be a bit more politically
sensitive, particularly around campaign rallies. Katie wants to have me do ther “Fauci 5”
this coming Sunday.
Chatted with Govenor DeSantis (R-FL) who was concerned that I said at Press
conference today that Florida had community spread, when in fact Florida just had a big
cluster. He was correct, was nice on the phone call arranged by WH after he
complained. We came out with a statement correcting.
Spoke together with (Bob Redfield)with Nancy Pelosi at the request of VP to convince
her to pass a bill to indemnify companies who make the surgical m…

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· Jul 13

Nothing in my entire career as made me as nervous as submitting to a history journal. There's just so much to know! I'm trilled this will see the light of day. (Thx to amazing coauthors @maddiebrueggs.bsky.social & @carleeabaker.bsky.social) Looking forward to sharing more soon...

email text: Dear Dr Scott Graham,

Ref: Pathological and Anatomical Repository Training Networks (PART Net): A Database for the Study of Medical Museum History

Our reviewers have now considered your paper and have recommended publication in Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History. We are pleased to accept your paper in its current form which will now be forwarded to the publisher for copy editing and typesetting. The reviewer comments are included at the bottom of this letter.

You will receive proofs for checking, and instructions for transfer of copyright in due course.

The publisher also requests that proofs are checked through the publisher’s tracking system and returned within 48 hours of receipt.

Thank you for your contribution to Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History and we look forward to receiving further submissions from you.

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· Jul 7

Many thanks to Lisa DeTora for taking lead on this article! It's great to have something more overtly #TeamRhetoric in a venue like this.

Title page on chapter "Failures to Communicate: Rhetorical Problems in COI" Intro starts: Conflicting or competing interests, sometimes rendered as COI, are generally understood in terms of incompatibilities between ethical and fiduciary responsibilities or some other obligation, relationship, or motivation [1]. Columbia University’s Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics notes an “inherent” “potential for conflict of interest…in industry-medicine relationships” because the ethical motives of profit-driven enterprises focus on shareholder interests, while healthcare providers must protect patient welfare [2]. Bernard Lo and Marilyn Fields [3] observe that industry-medicine partnerships provide vital social benefits, especially for healthcare, suggesting that striking a balance between competing interests is worthwhile. Although conflict of interest statements are commonly made, and more commonly required, problems seemingly remain as inevitable as they were in 1998 when editor Richard Smith called for general transparency in financial relationships [4]. Despite many tools and guidelines intended to meet this aim [1, 5–10], researchers continue to comment on problems with disclosures [11–13].

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· Jul 7

@alundh.bsky.social and Asbjørn Hróbjartsson's "Addressing #COI in Clinical Trials"

image of title page with intro starting "In the PARADIGM-HF trial, 8442 patients with heart failure were randomised to either the new drug Entresto (a combination of valsartan and sacubitril) or standard treatment with enalapril [1]. The trial was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, and the results showed that Entresto reduced death from cardiovascular causes or hospitalisation for heart failure by 4.7%. The trial was sponsored by Novartis, the manufacturer of Entresto, and the company participated in trial design and collected, managed, and analysed the data. Four of the eleven trial
authors were Novartis employees, and the seven academic authors had financial relationships with Novartis.

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· Jul 7

"Medical Research and Individual Researcher Conflict of Interest: What Is Happening and What Is to Be Done" Joel Lexchin

title page for Lexchin's article. Intro starts as follows: "Clinical trials form the basis for market approval, reimbursement, and the evidence
used in the practice of medicine [1], and trials that fail to demonstrate efficacy or
that raise important safety concerns can dramatically affect regulatory approval decisions, the sale of products after approval, or even the market value of the company [2]. Witness what happened following the July 2002 publication of the results of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) trial, which found that the estrogen/progestin combination caused an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and breast cancer
in postmenopausal women [3]. By June 2003, prescriptions for Prempro, the most widely sold estrogen/progestin combination, had declined by 66% in the United States (US) [4]."

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· Jul 6

A surprising number of anatomy museums are part of one academic lineage that runs from Pieter Pauw's 1597 museum at Leiden to collections on six continents. From teacher to student for four centuries. Some students and I have been mapping the whole lineage. 🧵 → thecollectors.sscottgraham.com

World map of anatomical museums in classic atlas style. Museums marked in indigo diamonds on six continents with high density in Europe and North America.

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· May 19

What the duck?

Picture of a duck sitting on a tall branch of a heritage oak tree

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· May 13

Fellow NEH Terminees, don't get excited by the new email from Reach. It's just the required notification of the court's judgement with no new information.

Email from NEH announcing court decision.

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· May 1

There are no insects on this sign, but I promise not to eat any of the animals. #PedantInNature

Blue sign in the high desert. Image of scorpion and snake. Mountains in the back.

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· Apr 26

Nailed it???

CNN headline says expect to the unexpected at White House press correspondents dinner

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· Apr 13

@lastpositivist.bsky.social offers a thoughtful reply in a later post. I offer a hasty image critique of the original post. The rules invoked just don't match the game being played.

AI generated image of a baseball umpire trying to call a strike at a soccer match.

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· Mar 27

Great- now I'm afraid to read my annual performance review

Screen capture of email flagged as spam: "[UTEXAS: POSSIBLY MALICIOUS CONTENT] Faculty Annual Review 2024–5. WARNING! The University of Texas at Austin email defense system has identified the following message as possibly containing malicious content."

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· Mar 3

Of course, folks who've been around awhile are always lamenting that certain works are no longer in the mainstream conversation. Still, I wish more people interested in AI, agency, and personification would think with this Woolgar classic.

We cannot therefore unproblematically map sets of predicates on to
types of entity, precisely because predicates can be used to 'bring
out' or 'suggest' or 'speak metaphorically about' the animate qualities of inanimate entities, and vice versa. For example, record players, cars and computers can be said to be temperamental. Space shuttles, at least until Challenger, can be said to be 'behaving perfectly', and so on. On the other side of the coin, animate (human) miscreants are sometimes said to have just behaved mechanically, or to have reacted automatically, without thinking, and so on. Obviously, our accounts of action and behaviour are constrained by assumptions about the acting entity. But this formulation can be misleading if it is taken to suggest that 'assumptions' pre-exist, or are antecedent to, descriptions of action and behaviour. For there is a reflexive tie between the practical description of action and the 'assumptions' which this description exhibits. Our discourse on entities thus both presupposes and exemplifies assumptions about the nature of the entity.

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· Feb 24

🚨The new Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry (POROI) special issue on Method/ologies is now live at pubs.lib.uiowa.edu/poroi/. Check it out!

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· Nov 18

🚨new pub - Noninferiority and Efficiency/Revenue Facilitation (NERF) Endpoints: @jadeshiva.bsky.social, @kimberharrison.bsky.social & I explore how NERF endpoints prioritize financial incentives over patient outcomes in health AI research & accelerate culture of financialized health. rdcu.be/eQzJe

picture of journal article:: title: Noninferiority and Efficiency/Revenue Facilitation (NERF) Endpoints Shifting Grounds of Argument in Health AI Interventional Studies; abstract: This article investigates ethical hazards associated with argumentative shifts following the emergence of combined non-inferiority and effi-ciency/revenue facilitation (NERF) endpoints, with particular attention to research on artificial intel-ligence (AI) in health and medicine. The study pre-sented here adopts a Toulmin argumentative analysis approach to investigate the dominant persuasive log-ics of twenty-three health AI trials evaluating NERF endpoints. In so doing, the article demonstrates how the argumentative logics of NERF trial reports shifts away from health outcomes as the putative evidence base for adopting novel interventions toward an argu-mentative model that prioritizes economic benefits over patient benefits. Ultimately, the article argues that new logic of NERF endpoints is consistent with and risks accelerating the harms to patient care that arise from increased financialization of the healthcare sector. If the use of NERF endpoints and attendant logics continue to grow unchecked, they could result in significant harms to patient health and well-being.

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· Nov 18

Why is the assumption always lower standards? The grades got better amidst more centers for teaching and learning; more teacher training for STEM grad students; more uni-wide professional development. Unis should respond to grade inflation with "where's the evidence our faculty didn't get better?"

If the culture of grading has eroded, it has done so over years and decades. Not all of the reasons are bad. Lower standards help first-generation college students and others who might arrive on campus with less traditional academic preparation. They also accommodate more modern forms of teaching, such as the “creative assignments and group projects” mentioned in the Harvard report. In total, the change has been so slow and steady that even faculty can barely feel it. We’ve simply been adjusting the expectations of our students, year after year.

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· Oct 16

I had to google the term, but damn, it's hard to imagine a more apt description than this...

picture of text with highlighted passages represented in brackets in alt text:
About this book: This book is an original and innovative study of how Gothic nostalgia and toxic memory are used to underpin and promote the ongoing culture wars and populist politics in contemporary popular culture. The essays collected here cover topics from the spectral to the ecological, deep fakes to toxic ableism, Mary Poppins to John Wick to reveal how the use of an imaginary past to shape the present, creates truly Gothic times that we can never escape. These ‘hungry ghosts’ from the past find resonance with the Gothic which speaks equally of a past that often not only haunts the present but will not let it escape its grasp. This collection will look at [the confluence between various kinds of toxic nostalgia and popular culture to suggest the ways in which contemporary populism has resurrected ideological monsters from the grave to gorge on the present and any possibility of change that the future might represent.]

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· Oct 8

I love this story with my entire heart and soul. www.bbc.com/news/article...

US scientist Dr Fred Ramsdell was on the last day of a three-week hike with his wife Laura O'Neill and their two dogs, deep in Montana's grizzly bear country, when Ms O'Neill suddenly started screaming.

But it was not a predator that had disturbed the quiet of their off-grid holiday: it was a flurry of text messages bearing the news that Dr Ramsdell had won the Nobel Prize for medicine.

Dr Ramsdell, whose phone had been on airplane mode when the Nobel committee tried to call him, told the BBC's Newshour Programme that his first response when his wife said, "You've won the Nobel prize" was: "I did not."

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· Aug 28

Um... seems a little fast for a parking lot

Grey sedan with collapsed front end, smashed up against light pole, in strip mall parking lot.

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· Aug 24

Doing a little background research on the Pathological Anatomy Museum in Vienna and I am reminded sometimes Wikipedia will provide important bits of information not typically available in the scholarly literature.

Picture of text: In popular culture. The main character in the film series Mad Max, Max Rockatansky, is named after Carl von Rokitansky. The reason for this bizarre connection is the fact that the director of this film series, George Miller, studied medicine and also made a living as doctor at the time when he was raising funds for his first movie - Mad Max.[53]

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· Aug 22

My uni has 2-3 email addresses for every member of the campus community. You'll never guess how they've decided to fix this problem!

Stick drawn comic strip. Title: How Standards Proliferate: (see A/c chargers, character encodings, instant messaging etc). Panel 1: Situation: There are 15 Competing Standards. Panel 2: Two stick figures talking complaining about the need for one true standard. Panel 3: Soon: Situation: there are 15 competing standards.

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· Aug 5

I’m getting a huge kick out of Empire the Dude

Image of Lee Pace from the TV show Foundation he has a long hair and beard and an open furry robe.

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· Jul 20

Fun fact: Edinburgh law requires that there is always at least one bird shitting on Adam Smith’s head.

Statue of Adam Smith with bird shitting (rear view)

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· Jul 16

Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. The newish redesign does a great job with both the historical and anatomical displays. I really love the giant digital showcase of historical anatomical publications.

Digital display of the anatomical drawings of Sir Charles Bell (1774-1842). Blood vessels in the background link his portrait, his placard, a digital replica of his book, and a excerpted page of a torso with colored vasculature.

White marble statue of John Hunter, sitting with hand on chin in thoughtful pose.

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· Jul 14

This is not a person who has opinions I need to know about.

Four Emma Beddigton headlines about not liking dogs or pets.

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· Jul 8

I'd love to hear metascientists reflect more on what they could learn from all of hist sci. IMO Daston & Galison have a much more compelling account of scientific criticism and the relationship with aesthetic criticism than it's "about aspects of the real world."

Picture of text. Highlighted passage: In this period, scientists came to see mechanical registration as a means of reining in their own temptation to impose systems, aesthetic norms, hypotheses, language, even anthropomorphic elements on pictorial representation. What began as policing of others (artists, printers, engravers, woodcutters) now broadened into a moral injunction for the investigator, directed reflexively at themselves.

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· Jul 1

Wasp Thanksgiving? (A bad day to be without my macro phone camera attachment)

Image of wasp dragging dead quarter-sized spider through dirt, fallen leaves, and much.

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· Jun 30

There was an unexplained noise, and now Haggis is concerned for your well being.

Reverse brindle French bulldog standing on wood floor looking earnestly at camera

S. Scott Graham@sscottgraham· Jun 16

Looks like oral exams after LLM use may not be the easy fix some are hoping for. arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872