Harvard death
n.— «I thought about that bitter medical student joke, the “Harvard death,” in which all the lab results are perfect, all the electrolytes and body chemistry numbers “in the boxes”—as the patient dies.» —“In a Pile of Papers, the Ghost of a Once-Healthy Child” by Perri Klass New York Times Apr. 5, 2005. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Enthusiastic book recommendations! Martha’s savoring the biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century explorer, polymath, and naturalist who revolutionized our understanding of nature and predicted the effects of human activity on...