Don’t take medical advice from Anne of Green Gables

Plus: Robert Gallo on pandemic preparedness and other essays.

July 27, 2025 Check out STAT+

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By Torie Bosch First Opinion editor

When my toddler had croup recently (during the middle of our week at the beach, naturally), I thought of "Anne of Green Gables." In one of the book's pivotal scenes, our heroine saves her best friend's 3-year-old sister during a terrible bout of croup … by administering her ipecac. Luckily, I do not take advice from 117-year-old novels, because it turns out that that despite being hailed as a hero in the book, ipecac is not, in fact, a good treatment for croup. Anne basically poisoned her friend's sister. (There's some speculation that what's called croup in the book might have actually been diphtheria.) Recommendation of the week: The podcast "Liberty Lost," hosted T.J. Raphael, is the deeply upsetting and relevant story of a home for unmarried mothers on the campus of Liberty University. Like many, I read "The Girls Who Went Away" and thought that it was about a long-ago era, but "Liberty Lost" shows that forcing young mothers to place their babies for adoption is not in the distant past.

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