31.   But, unlike heart disease and cancer, strokes have defied the wizardry of modern medicine.

32.   Catheters are marvels of modern medicine, spaghetti-thin devices that doctors thread through blood vessels to open clogged arteries or to perform other repairs without surgery.

33.   Centuries-old, traditional Mexican folk medicine, or curanderismo, persists despite modern medicine.

34.   Compared with other problems of modern medicine, the teaching crunch is invisible to most people.

35.   Connectedness deficiency is not something modern medicine is equipped to treat, however.

36.   Curing blindness, once the stuff of faith healers and biblical miracles, now has a firm place in modern medicine.

37.   Despite this triumph of modern medicine, Washington and key allies now fear the scourge could strike anew sometime in the future, unleashed by war or terrorism.

38.   Diarrhea, polio, measles and other ancient maladies easily and inexpensively treated or prevented by modern medicine continue to cripple, debilitate or kill.

39.   Far away, another heart was beating only through the miracle of modern medicine, with no guarantees on how many more miles it would take its owner.

40.   Fearsome as this disease was in the past, it is no match for modern medicine, aggressively applied.