Instruments · made to be taken apart
The Instruments.
Each one takes a single mechanism of the body and puts it in your hands. They are drawn in your browser, with their sources on the page, and none of them asks you for anything.
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Instrument I · the electrocardiogram
Lead II
The heart’s electrical loop in the frontal plane, and the six limb leads drawn from it as its shadows, instant by instant.
- Turn the loop and watch which leads rise, fall or flatten.
- Slide from loop to arrow and see what a single axis throws away.
- Check that I + III = II at every instant, as the beat runs.
From Waller (1887), Einthoven (1913), Wilson (1934) and Goldberger (1942).
Open Lead II → -
Instrument II · elimination
Half-Life
First-order elimination for three substances, from nine minutes to twenty-two days. Counted in half-lives, the three curves are one.
- Run the clock and watch every turn of the dial halve what is left.
- Put the three on one clock and see them come apart.
- Switch to a log scale and see the curve become a straight line.
From the US prescribing information of the three, an Irish summary of product characteristics, and Blanchard and Sawers (1983).
Open Half-Life →
Four rules, kept by every instrument.
- The source on the page. Every published value is named where it is used, from a label, a paper or a textbook, and a model says that it is a model.
- No field for anyone’s data. No dose, no weight, no tracing, no symptom. What moves is fixed choices and time.
- Mechanism, not outcome. They show how a thing works, never what it means for a person.
- Nothing is sent. The instruments draw in your browser and keep nothing: no account, no cookie, no beacon.
If you came with a question about your own case, or someone else’s, these pages can’t answer it. A doctor who can examine you can. What they can do is show how the mechanism works, for everyone.
Made by Vincenzo Lambiase, medical student. To hear when the next instrument is out, write to me.