Blog Offers Diagnosis for Harvard Law Prof’s Mysterious Illness
Doctors for Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain are taking a look at an obscure 1994 article from a Korean medical journal as a result of an online appeal for a diagnosis.
Zittrain, a digital freedom advocate, was hospitalized last Thursday with unexplained fevers, but doctors expecting to find an infection could not find one, Zittrain wrote Monday on his blog, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. A colleague asked a medical blog for help, producing some “some amazingly helpful comments” and references to the Korean publication.
“First things first,” Zittrain wrote at the beginning of his blog post. “Yes, I’m in the hospital, but I’m OK. (I’m blogging, right?).”
Zittrain doesn’t reveal the suspected diagnosis, although the Tech Dirt blog quotes the Korean medical journal’s focus on “heptatic mega-hemagionas and FUOs.” The medical blog identified Zittrain only as “Z,” but readers realized the the patient was Zittrain after another colleague, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, referenced the medical blog appeal for help and referred to his sick friend “JZ.”
The Los Angeles Times Technology blog noted Zittrain’s blog post. “As one observer pointed out,” the Times says, the case “produced what could be a fascinating episode of House by sourcing the wisdom of the online masses to crack a tricky case.”
