- Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen, I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW-Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight it's my pleasure to bring back to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab Walt Schalick. He's with the Department of Orthopedics and Rehabilitation. He was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, as was my mother-in-law.  [laughter]  He attended and graduated from Roger Ludlowe High School in Fairfield, Connecticut, then he came to the Midwest to go to Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied both English and physics. Then he went back to the east coast to go to Johns Hopkins University, where he got a PhD in the history of medicine and his MD degree. Then he did a residency in pediatrics and rehab at Harvard in Boston. Then he was on the faculty at Washington University for a while, and then in 2007, he came up here to UW-Madison. Tonight he gets to talk with us about "Drugs, Books, and Patients: Marketing Medieval Medicine." Please join me in welcoming Walt back to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.  [applause]  - All right, with that kind of a warm introduction, I can't start a talk tonight without mentioning the passing of two very influential figures for me. Stephen Hawking, who I think very creatively passed away on Pi Day in England even though it was March 13th here. My daughter and I have spent many hours talking about Hawking's work. And then T. Berry Brazelton, who was one of my teachers at Harvard and one of the extraordinary developmental pediatricians in the second half of the 20th century. Very influential to many people across the country and around the world, and the last 24 hours have been very saddening. We've all lost something. Both of them, though, were associated with universities and academia, and I think that played out with some of what Tom put into his email introduction. But the other marker for tonight is that it's Pi Day. And happy Pi Day. This is my favorite cartoon about Pi Day.  [laughter]  "Pi what squared? "Long John, you should be able to get this." This cartoon is really great also for International Pirates Day.  [laughter]  And the great answer is "Arrr."  [laughter]  My very creative 11-year-old daughter was wondering: if I'm talking about the Middle Ages and it's Pi Day, do they do anything with pi in the Middle Ages? So I scrambled to come up with something. Pi, of course, was known in the Middle Ages because it was a letter in the Greek alphabet. This is a manuscript from the 10th century with the letter pi that has nothing to do with the circumference and diameter of a circle, but it is from a manuscript talking about the distances and sizes of the sun and moon, both of which would be important with diameters and circumferences. However, there were scholars who concentrated on what we would consider pi, the ratio of the circumference and the diameter. Moses Maimonides, who may be known to a number of you, approximated pi as 22/7 in the 12th century. And Leonardo da Pisano, who is most well-known as Fibonacci for his series and a number of other equations in the 12th century, around 1220, estimated pi as about 3.1418. So pi was at least modestly popular in the Middle Ages. But we're not going to be talking about that tonight. I am a physician and a researcher in clinical research, so I always have to say that I have no financial disclosures. Most importantly for tonight, no medieval pharmacological company is paying me to push their products.  [laughter]  There are some leech purveyors who would like me to do a little work, but not right now.  [laughter]  When Tom and I had first talked about me giving a talk or more, I'd given him fifteen different topics, I think. He was very excited about the possibility of talking about plague. We're not talking about plagu