Hippocratic Fingers

Hippocrates continues to fascinate me. I wasn’t aware that he discovered the association between fingertip clubbing and lung disease. Here is a 2008 article about the actual mechanism behind the clinical sign:

Click to read Medics Solve an Ancient Riddle — and offer a new tool for diagnosis.

And in the latest issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, there is a picture of clubbing of the toes, but not of the fingers, in a patient with patent ductus arteriosus:

Click to read Differential Clubbing and Cyanosis.