Louise S.Robbins wrote:
> Of course, two examples don't provide robust evidence, but a few years ago, a Johns Hopkins researcher used a therapy on a patient that proved fatal. The research existed that would have warned him not to use this therapy in this instance, but working without expert searching assistance, he did not find it. It made the news at the time. 
>
>   

The Johns Hopkins tragedy was a very, very big deal in medical library 
land -- slight correction, it was not a patient but a research subject 
who also happened to be a Hopkins employee. There were found to be 
numerous things wrong with the study, one of which was that the 
researcher did not realize PubMed would not (in 2001) give him articles 
from the 1950s. The Journal of Medical Ethics has a good summary article 
here:

http://jme.bmj.com/content/28/1/3.full.html

Hopkins maintained a website with very comprehensive documentation of 
the case and the subsequent reviews of the case and left it up for 5 
years. It's gone now, but the Wayback Machine has it:

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/researchvolunteerdeath.html

People interested in the librarian-and-library-aspects of the case 
should visit the Wayback Machine.

A quote from the Medical Ethics article:

"There is a problem with researchers not bothering to properly research 
the literature and assuming that everything will be available on the 
internet. According to Dr Frederick Wolff, a professor emeritus at the 
George Washington School of Medicine, it was “foolish” and “lazy” that 
the investigator and the Hopkins review board failed to look up the 
1950s medical journal articles warning of lung damage caused by inhaling 
hexamethonium. “Anyone trained in academic medicine knows how to do this 
research,” he said^."


^ <http://jme.bmj.com/content/28/1/3.full.html#ref-5>

-- 
Catherine Arnott Smith, PhD
Assistant Professor
School of Library and Information Studies
Room 4263 Helen C. White Hall
600 N. Park Street, Madison, WI 53706
Phone: (608) 890-1334
Fax: (608) 263-4849

My personal website: https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/casmith24/web/

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The machine does not isolate us from the great problems of nature but plunges us more deeply into them.(Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

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Music is neither old nor modern: it is either good or bad music, and the date at which it was written has no significance whatever. (Peter Warlock - The Sackbut - 1926)