An Introduction and Overview

Hello and welcome!

This is my first entry of my first ever blog, so pardon my poor composition. My name is Timothy Carll. I am (currently) a 22 year old native of southern Wisconsin, and I am a first-year medical student at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. For more information about me, feel free to look at my Google+ page.

This blog is meant to serve a few different purposes. For a long time now I have been seeking avenues to express some of my thoughts or discoveries (I hesitate to say "experiences", since I have none) on a variety of subjects, most notably my medical education, which has taken a commanding position in my life and daily schedule. Facebook is far too informal and brief to facilitate much deep discussion, and I don't want to use the forums that I browse everyday, since I don't want to flood my friends with stuff they may not know much or care about. So, the first purpose of this blog is to allow me to vent my thoughts constructively, hopefully in a manner which a casual reader could find interesting. This is the second purpose: by writing this blog, I hope to improve my skills as an expository writer, a skill which I expect to have benefit in my career and in life in general. Hopefully with time I will develop a method of writing which is intrinsically interesting to read. Perhaps you will be the judge of that. I know my girlfriend, Deborah, will be, as she has just read the half paragraph above and deemed it boring. Yikes. The third purpose, and this one is a bit of a stretch, is to provide a sort of timeline or yardstick by which I can track my progression through medical school. It will definitely be interesting to read all of this when I graduate, so I hope that current or aspiring medical students will find this engaging. Still, I don't intend to make medicine the sole purpose of this blog. On that note...

Why did I name the blog "On Aliment or Nutriment"? Well, it represents the intersection of several of my areas of interest. It is the name of a work from the Hippocratic Corpus, an ancient group of manuscripts said to be written by Hippocrates, the grandfather of medicine. We now know that many of these works were not written by Hippocrates, but were rather ascribed to him by whoever to lend them more credibility. Still, you can see two major subjects which I will be discussing: medicine itself, as well as the history thereof. Stay tuned for interesting snippets from my lectures, and some commentary about some history, which is surprisingly more interesting than it sounds. Why a work regarding digestion, though? There are another couple of subjects I find interesting: Food, which I like as much as anyone else to cook and eat, but in addition the epidemic of obesity which is increasingly plaguing the world. I hope to talk at great length about obesity and its effects on the individual and population, as well as to discuss the science behind nutrition, diet and exercise. I also expect to talk about things like electronics, computers, and video gaming, as well as whatever other minutia I encounter in my day-to-day life. I hesitate to even define the scope of my writing now, because I know I will just write about whatever interests me.

I do not expect that this blog will become popular. I do this mostly for me, but if people find this interesting, great. I will do my best to make the content fascinating (or at least gross, I am in medicine after all). For now though, I have overshot the time I have given myself to write. There is a full day of classes tomorrow, and I need sleep. Stay tuned though, one of the first subjects I want to talk about will be a fun one: parasites.