Porphyria for Fun and Profit

In search of an interesting example, something with a bit of pizzazz, it occurred to me to look at a (rather rare) disease that has come to public attention recently via the film The Madness of King George. We can do the usual things: searching ANNIE, PAO, HOLLIS, the specialized databases (in this case MEDLINE is the obvious one), and there's no shortage of articles and books. In fact ANNIE yields only one:
 You searched for the KEYWORD: porphyria                  W&L CATALOG
 
 AUTHOR       Macalpine, Ida.
 TITLE        George III and the mad-business, by Ida Macalpine & Richard
                Hunter.
 EDITION      [1st American ed.]
 PUBLISHER    New York, Pantheon Books [1970, c1969]
 DESCRIPT     xv, 407 p. illus., facsims., geneal. tables, port. 25 cm.
 SUBJECT      George III, King of Great Britain, 1738-1820.
              Porphyria.

    LOCATION               CALL NO.                       
1 > Leyburn Library        DA506.A2 M28 1970
This book (written considerably before the biochemical niceties were worked out) concentrates on contemporary diagnoses, reports of the King's condition, and treatment regimes, but also includes genealogical tables and descriptions of early psychiatry.

PAO yields 13 articles, all from medical sources.

And MEDLINE offers 1777 articles.


Obviously we could learn a lot by looking at these sources, but what I really want to do is explore some other possibilities, some sources of information and data that are not essentially bibliographic, or in any case not only bibliographic.

Since we know that porphyria is somehow entangled with genetics, it's not a bad guess to figure that Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man will have useful things to say, and that does prove to be the case:

19 entries found, searching for "porphyria"


OMIM leads us to the research literature, but what other web possibilities are there? If we want to find documents on the web which mention porphyria, we probably want to use one (and probably more than one) of the indexes for the web, accessible via the Home Page menu item Help with Campus Computing Resources, Internet and WWW Tools, which offers "Searching the Web by Subject".
This array of searching tools changes as more powerful engines are added, and currently Alta Vista seems to be the tool of choice. Here's what I got when I searched for 'porphyria'.

And these are some of the choicest sites: