Chronography of Medicine and Health
Page last
modified 4 Ocotber 2023
See separate page for Covid-19 data
Smoking � see Morals and
Fashion
For advances in cloning, see
Science and
Technology.
See
also Biology, For
�oldest mother� see Biology
Bovine Spingiform
Encelopathy and CJD� see Farming
For
Hospitals see Medical-Hospitals
Dentistry, see Appendix 1
Heart and Blood Circulation,
see Appendix 2
Kidneys and bladder, see
Appendix 2a
Liver
� see Appendix 2b
Reproduction, STDs and
Childbirth � see Appendix 3
Thalidomide � see Appendix
3a
AIDS, see Appendix
Cancer,
see Appendix
Cholera, see Appendix
Diabetes and Insulin, see
Appendix
Ebola,
Influenza and other
respiratory inc. Covid-19, see Appendix
Malaria, see Appendix
Measles, see appendix
Mental illness, see Appendix
Polio, see Appendix
Smallpox, see Appendix
Syphilis,
see Appendix
Tuberculosis,
see Appendix
National Health Service
(UK), see Appendix a
Anaesthetics, see Appendix c
Famous
medical people
2 February 2016, The World Health Organisation declared Zika to be
a global emergency, on a par with Ebola, as Brazil mobilised 220,000
troops to fight the disease, spraying against mosquitoes and checking for
stagnant water where the mosquito might breed. However the Rio carnival went
ahead and Brazil said it would not cancel the Olympics. Cases of
microcephaly, which first appeared in Polynesia in 2014, rose in Brazil to
3,700 since October 2015, compared with fewer than 200 in 2014. An estimated
1.5 million Brazilians now carry the Zika virus, which usually causes very
little illness in adults, so they may be unaware of any risk to their unborn
baby.
27 January 2016 , Concerns grew about the Zika virus, which if
contracted by pregnant women could cause the baby to have microcephalus. The
virus is spread by mosquitoes and may affect all the Americas except Canada and
Chile, also much of Africa and southern Asia.
12 December 2005, Scientists announced they had created mice with small amounts of human brain
cells, to study neurological disorders.
30 November 2005, Surgeons in France carried out the first human
face transplant.
14 July 2005, Dame Cicely Saunders, founder of
the palliative care movement, died (born 22 June 1918)
31 March 2005, In the US, irreversibly
brain-damaged patient Terri Schiavo died after her feeding tube was
removed on 19 March 2005. The dispute between her parents and her husband on
whether to do this became a national Right-to-Die debate.
19 February 2003, James Hardy,
surgeon, died.
25 October 2000. Britain�s oldest
man, Bill Lee, died. He attributed
his longevity to a dram of whisky every night, and died peacefully in his sleep
aged 108. He was born on 13 January 1892
in Stoke on Trent. He was shot in the arm and blinded in one eye whilst serving
as a sapper in France during World War One, and was awarded the Cross of
the Legion of Honour by the French Government for his services in war. Afterwards,
Mr Lee returned home to manage a Milletts store in Hanley, Stoke, until he
retired at the age of 72. He spent is later years in a residential home. He
left a brother and sister, four grandchildren, ten great grandchildren, and two
great-great grandsons. He was recognised as Britain�s oldest man by the
Guinness Book of Records in August 2000.
26 June 2000. British and American scientists announced they had succeeded in decoding the 3 billion pairs
of human DNA.
13 August 1998, UK
authorities warned of a rat invasion,
saying there were 750,000 rat-infested homes in Britain.
2 July 1997. The British Medical Association announced
that drugs derived from cannabis
were to be made legally available for cancer patients and others suffering from
debilitating diseases.
24 March 1997, The Australian Federal Government overturned the Rights of the
Terminally Ill Act, allowing voluntary euthanasia, which had been passed by the
Northern Territory in 1996.
1 July 1996, The
Northern Territory in Australia legalised
voluntary euthanasia.
23 June 1995, Jonas
Salk, medical researcher, died.
1993,
US medical costs (public and private combined) amounted to 13.0% of national
income. This compared to 9.1% in 1980 and 7.3$ in 1970.
26 May 1993, US First :Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton made a
speech denouncing price gougers and profiteering in medicine.
8 May 1991. UK scientists discovered the gene that determines
sex.
22 March 1988, In Australia, doctors
turned off the life support system of a terminally ill female patient for
the first time.
30 September 1987, At the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, Susan Lazarchick had the first successful transplant of the body�s most
complex joint, the knee.
7 September 1987, The world�s first conference on artificial life began, at Los Alamos National
Laboratories, USA.
17 December 1986, Mrs Davina Thompson made medical history at
Papworth Hospital, Cambridge, UK, when she was given a new heart, lungs, and liver.
22 September 1986, At
Harefield Hospital, Middlesex, a 2 � month old baby became the youngest heart and lung transplant patient.
21 February 1986, Shigechiyo Izumi, the world�s oldest man, died
in Japan
aged 120.
11 July 1985, Dr H Harlan Stone announced he had devised a
self-adhesive zipper to be used instead of stitches where patients need to be
re-operated on.
7 March 1985, Dr Alec Jeffreys, at Leicester University,
discovered a method of creating �genetic
fingerprints� from DNA in blood, semen or saliva.
25 October 1984. The hepatitis
virus was identified.
3 July 1977, The first prototype Magnetic Resonance Imaging
(MRI) scan on a human was performed. The machine was built by Raymond
Damadian. See also Atomic Power and Electricity.
1976, Endorphins first
discovered.
4 August 1976, First recorded cases of Legionnaires Disease, at an American Legion convention in
Philadelphia, killed 29 people. Scientists isolated the previously unknown
bacteria that caused this disease on 18 January 1977.
25 January 1972, In London, the National Organ Matching And
Distribution Service (NOMDS) was established.
1971, The diamond-bladed scalpel
was invented by the Microsurgical Instrumentation Research Association. It
greatly improved eye surgery.
1 October 1971, The
first CT scan was performed, on a patient�s brain, at the Atkinson Morley
Hospital in Wimbledon, London,
25 July 1971. The first
heart and lung transplant was performed.
22 April 1971, The MMR vaccine (combined
mumps, measles, rubella) was licensed in the USA.
1970, In Germany,
the first successful nerve transplant took place.
June 1967, Gustave NJ Nossal proposed that antibodies
work by recognising the size and shape of the antigen.
25 July 1963, Ugo Cerletti, neurologist, died.
26 March 1963, Connie Culp, US crime victim
who, in 2008, became the first US recipient of a face transplant, was born
(died 2020)
18 April 1963, The first
human nerve transplant was carried out by Dr
James Campbell at New York University Medical Centre.
1962, English orthopaedic surgeon John
Charnley discovered a low-friction high-density polythene suitable
for artificial joints,
1962, Lasers were used in eye surgery for the first time.
7 June 1958, British physician Ian Donald published a paper on
the first use of ultrasound for diagnosis.
1957, Interferon was discovered
by Alick
Isaacs and Jean Lindemann.
11 March 1957, The World Health Information published the
first indications that radiation may
have genetic effects.
29 December 1952, The miniature hearing aid was invented by
Sonotone Corporation.
17 Decmeber 1952, Surgeons in Chicago carried out the first
operation to successfully separate conjoined twins.
1 December 1952, George Jorgensen Jr of the USA became the
first person to have gender reassignment
surgery, becoming Christine Jorgensen.
7 April 1948. The World Health Organisation was set up
with its headquarters in Geneva. Its aim was to attain the highest possible
level of health for all peoples.
3 April 1947. In the UK, the private medical company BUPA was founded.
Penicillin
31 December 1943, Penicillin was finally
in common usage in hospitals, its development having been delayed by the War.
Its first successful use had been on 13 February 1941. Another �wonder drug�,
sulphonamide, was also useful against infections.
3 May 1941,
The first successful treatment by penicillin. A patient was treated
for a 4 inch carbuncle, which was cleared and the patient was discharged on 15
May 1941.
13 February
1941, The �miracle drug� penicillin was used on a human for the
first time; a policeman from Oxford, UK. However he died on 15 March 1941
because not enough was available. It then took some 2,000 litres of mould
culture fluid to produce enough penicillin for a single case of infection.
However Florey subsequently discovered another species of mould
that produced 1,000 times as much penicillin. See 31 December 1943.
24 August 1940, The Lancet reported on
the first purification of penicillin by
professors Howard Florey and
Ernest Chain.
9 January 1929, Fleming treated his assistant Stuart Craddock for an infection by washing it out with a penicillin
solution; this cleared the infection.
15 September 1928. Alexander Fleming reported the discovery of penicillin.
12 January 1926. In Paris, the Pasteur
Institute announced the discovery of an anti-tetanus vaccine.
1940,
Herbert M
Evans used radioactive iodine to prove that iodine is used by the
thyroid gland.
1940,
Karl
Landsteiner and Alexander
S Weiner discovered a relationship between human and rhesus
monkey blood cells, and discovered the rhesus
(Rh) factor.
21 June 1939, Baseball player Lou Gehrig retired from the
game, forced to stop playing due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a wasting
disease that would later be named after him.
26 May 1939, Charles H Mayo, founder of the Mayo Clinic, died.
1938, Tom D Spies pioneered the
treatment of pellagra with niacin.
1938, Englis surgeon Philip Wiles
developed the first artificial hip replacement, using stainless steel.
1937, Pharmacologist Daniele Bovet
developed the first antihistamine.
7 December 1934, The first artificially-made hormone,
testosterone, was created by Us scientists.
1933, Pantothenic acid, one of
the vitamin
B complex, was isolated from liver.
1928, Dorothy Eustis,
from the US, set up a guide dog training centre at Vervey, Switzerland, after
habing heard of how a pet Alsatian dog looked after its owner who had been
blinded as a soldier in World War One. Following this the Guide Dogs
for the Blind Association was set up in Britain in 1934.
12 October 1928. The first iron
lung was used at the Boston Children�s Hospital, Massachusetts.
6 April 1928, In Italy, handshaking was banned as it was deemed
unhygienic.
1 March 1928, Vitamin F was discovered by US
scientist Dr
Herbert Evans.
1 June 1925, Danish hygienists Louis Fridericia
and Eiler
Holm show that vitamin A deficiency causes night blindness.
9 September 1923, Daniel Carleton Gajdusek was born in Yonkers,
New York, USA. In 1966 he succeeded in transferring kuru, a disease of the
central nervous system thought to be spread by cannibalism, to chimpanzees.
This was the first time a viral disease of the central nervous system had been
transferred from humans to another species.
17 July 1921, Alick Isaacs was born. In 1957, along with Jean Lindenmann,
he discovered interferons, chemicals produced by the human body to fight
viruses.
1919, In the UK, the Ministry of Health was established by
Act of Parliament.
22 June 1918, Dame Cicely Saunders, founder of the
palliative care movement, was born (died 14 July 2005)
22 February 1918. The
world�s tallest man, Robert Wadlow, was born, weighing 8 � lbs. He
grew to 8 foot 11 � inches in height
and weighed 31 stone 5 lbs, when he died in 1940.
1916, US psychologist Lewis M Terman
invented the term IQ for Intelligence Quotient; plastic surgery advanced as a
result of war inuries.
19 October 1916, Jean Dausset, immunologist, was born.
25 August 1916, Frederick C Robbins was born in Auburn,
Alabama. In 1948, along with John Franklin Enders (born 10 February 1897,
West Hartford, Connecticut) and Thomas Huckle Wells (born 15 June 1915, Ann
Arbor), he discovered how to grow the mumps virus in chick tissue using
penicillin to prevent bacterial contamination.
8 June 1916, Professor Sir Francis Crick, who along with J D Watson
discovered DNA, was born.
20 August 1915, Paul Erlich, bacteriologist, dies of a stroke
in Bad Homburg, Germany. Born in Strehlen, Silesia (now Poland) on 14 March 1854, he laid the
foundations for the use of chemotherapy in treating disease.
1912, Casimir Funck coined the term �vitamin(e)�.
28 February 1911, Denis Parsons Burkitt, surgeon, was born.
19 January 1911, In Philadelphia, Dr. Edward Martin performed the
first cordotomy on a human being for the relief of intractable pain, with the
assistance of neurologist Dr. William Spiller. The two published their
results the following year.
13 August 1910, Florence Nightingale died.
3 May 1910, Howard Taylor Ricketts, US pathologist, died
in Mexico City from the typhus he caught whilst researching the disease.
1909, W Johannsen in The Netherlands
introduced the term �gene�; P T Levene discovered RNA and DNA
16 March 1908. Florence
Nightingale, aged 87, was awarded the Freedom of the City of London. Born in 1820 to a middle class family in
Derbyshire, she became interested in hygienic care for the sick after visiting
a German religious hospital in 1850 which specialised in hygiene and care. In
1854 she was disturbed by terrible reports of the conditions in military
hospitals there. She took 37 nurses and arrived at the hospital at Scutari,
arriving on 4 November 1854. The military did not at first take her seriously,
but her determination won through and she reduced the hospital�s death rate
from 42% to just 2%. After the Crimean War she trained nurses in London and
worked to improve the care for the sick.
1907, Bubonic Plague killed 1.3 million people in
India.
1907, C Ross Harrison developed a
tissue culture technique; Ivan Pavlov in Russia published Conditioned Reflexes.
29 November 1907. Florence Nightingale, aged 87, the �Lady with
the Lamp�, was presented with the Order of Merit by Edward VII for her work during
the Crimean War, see 4 November 1854.
23 March 1907, Daniele Bovet was born in Neuch�tel,
Switzerland. In 1936 he discovered the effectiveness of sulphanilamide in
treating streptococci.
1906, The term �allergy� was
coined by Austrian
paediatrician Clemens
von Parquet.
4 December 1906, Robert Wallace Wilkins was born in
Chattanooga, Tennessee. In 1950 he developed the use of reserpine for the
treatment of high blood pressure.
19 September 1906, Ernst Chain was born in Berlin, Germany.
Along with Howard
Florey (born Adelaide, Australia, 24 September 1908) he developed,
in 1940, the use of penicillin as an antiobiotic.
1905, Zirm, in Austria, performed the
first cornea transplant.
30 October 1905. Aspirin went on sale in the UK for the first time.
17 February 1905, A typhus
outbreak occurred in London�s East End.
13 October 1904, Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud published his Interpretation of Dreams.
31 July 1903, Alexander
Graham Bell�s proposition that radium could be used to treat cancer
appeared in the US journal, Science.
14 April 1903, In New
York, the typhus vaccine was discovered by Dr
Harry Plotz.
1902, The UK
passed an Act providing for the training of midwives, and barring untrained
ones from practising. Infant mortality was a major concern at this time in
Britain.
1902, The hormone secretin, a digestive hormone,
was discovered by WM Bayliss and EH Starling.
10 January 1902, New Zealander Ellen
Dougherty became the world's first registered nurse
15 December 1901,
British physician Joseph Everett Dutton
identified sleeping sickness �worms� as trypanosomes.
15 November 1901. The
first practical hearing aid, the Acousticon, was patented by Miller Reese
Hutchinson of New York. Earlier devices such as the ear trumpet were
bulky and impractical. Reese;s idea was to have a battery powered device that could
be set to the wearer�s own preferences; it converted the desired sounds into
electrical impulses that were transmitted to a carbon speaker in the earpiece
that turned the electricity back into sound. Unwanted sounds could be filtered
out.
1900, Harley Street, London, had become a
centre for medical consultants. From 36 in 1873, it now housed almost 150.
3 September 1900, An
outbreak of Bubonic Plague in Glasgow.
6 March 1899,
The painkiller Aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) was patented by Felix Hoffman. The active ingredient is
derived from willow.
24 September 1898, Sir Howard Florey, British
pathologist and joint discoverer of penicillin with Sir Ernest Chain, was born in Adelaide, Australia.
2 June 1898, Paul Louis Simond, fighting bubonic plague in India,
theorised that fleas transmitted the disease from rats to humans.
7 January 1898, Ernest Hart, medical journalist, died (born 26
January 1835). He raised membership of the British Medical Association from
2,000 to 19,000, and saw the British Medical Journal expand from 20 to 64
pages.
10 October 1897, Felix Hoffman, German chemist, invented the
painkiller aspirin.
1896, The Sphymomanometer, to measure blood pressure, was invented in Italy
by Dr Scipio Riva-Rocci.
1896, The first hormone, adrenaline, was discovered by John Jacob, US biochemist. The term �hormone�, derived from the Greek horman, to urge on, to stir up, was
coined around 1905.
28 February 1896, Philip Showalter Hench was born in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania. In 1948 he discovered that cortisone can be used to treat
rheumatoid arthritis.
5 January 1896. The
German physicist Wilhelm
Roentgen
gave the first demonstration of X rays.
1895,
Heroin
was marketed by Bayer Pharmaceuticals as a cough medicine for children.
8 November 1895. Wilhelm Roentgen discovered X rays, during
an experiment at the University of Wurtzburg. He made the first radiograph, or X-ray,
of his wife�s hand, on 22 December 1895. In 1896 Emil Grubbe, having noticed the damage that
X-ray exposure did to his own skin, experimented with applying rays to
cancerous tissue; he
treated a woman with breast cancer, but did not publicise the results until
several years later.
18 September 1895, The first chiropractic adjustment was made by Daniel David Palmer, in Iowa, USA.
1893, Japanese scientist Shibasaburo
Kitasako proved that The Plague was a bacterial disease carried by
infected rat fleas.
29 June 1888, The first appendectomy was carried out in the UK,
at the London
Hospital by Professor
Frederick Treves.
4 June 1887, The Pasteur Institute was founded by Louis Pasteur
in Paris.
27 April 1887, The first
appendix operation, for removing an infected appendix, was carried out by George Thomas
Morton on a 26-year-old man with acute appendicitis, in
Philadelphia, USA.
6 July 1885, Louis Pasteur, 63, administered his first successful
treatment of rabies with anti rabies vaccine made from a weakened rabies virus.
25 November 1884, English surgeon Rickman Godlee undertook the
first operation to remove a brain tumour.
6 August 1881. Alexander Fleming,
Scottish bacteriologist who
discovered penicillin, was born in Scotland. Fleming specialised in
bacteriology at St Mary�s Hospital, London. The
enormous death toll amongst soldiers suffering from infected wounds left
Fleming seeking a chemical that could fight the infection. Whilst clearing up
Petri dishes in which he had been growing bacteria, Fleming stumbled on a
mouldy dish in which the bacteria had been killed. However it was not until the
Second World War that chemists really took an interest in the development of
penicillin. Fleming was knighted in 1944 and awarded the Nobel Prize in 1945.
5 May 1881, Louis Pasteur
tested his inoculation
against anthrax on an ox, cows and sheep.
1880, Louis Pasteur accidentally discovered the technique for inoculation, by
injection of a weakened pathogen. He went on holiday, leaving a solution of
chicken cholera bacteria, which he did not realise would grow weaker over time.
On return he injected chickens with these bacteria; to his surprise they became
ill but survived, and then were able to resist full strength bacteria also.
14 May 1878, Vaseline, a trademarked form of
petroleum jelly, was first sold.
26 October 1877, British
surgeon Joseph
Lister performed the first operation to repair a fractured kneecap.
24 June 1877, The St
John�s Ambulance brigade was formed, as the Ambulance Association, by the
Red Cross.
14 January 1875, Albert Schweitzer, physician, was born.
1874, Armauer Hansen,
a Norwegian doctor, discovered the
bacteria which causes leprosy. However drug s to treat the disease were only
developed in the 1940s.
17 June 1867. Joseph Lister performed a mastectomy on his
sister Isabella, using carbolic acid as an antiseptic. It was the first operation under antiseptic conditions.
15 June 1867, US physician John Stough Bobbs preformed the first
successful gallstone operation.
13 August 1865, Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis died in Vienna,
Austria, of childbed fever, a disease he had tried hard to eliminate.
12 August 1865, British surgeon Joseph Lister, 38, operating at
Glasgow Royal Infirmary, pioneered the
use of carbolic acid as a disinfectant, aiming to reduce the 50% mortality
rate amongst amputees.
20 April 1862, Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard
completed their first vaccination tests.
24 June 1860, The training of nurses in Britain started at St
Thomas Hospital, London.
15 June 1860, Florence Nightingale
started her School for Nurses at St Thomas�s Hospital, London.
1858, The first edition of the
essential medical textbook, Gray�s Anatomy, appeared.� It was written by Henry Gray (1827-61), lecturer
in anatomy at St George�s Hospital, London. Its 40th edition
appeared in 2008.
23 November 1858, The General
Medical Council held its first meeting in London. It was set up under the
Medical Act 1858 to maintain a register of qualified medical parctitioners in
the UK, and to regulate the standards of medical education and examinations.
2 August 1858, Under the Medical
Act, UK doctors were now required to be registered.
4 November 1854, Florence
Nightingale arrived at Scutari (Crimean War).
1849, Addison�s Disease, a degeneration of the endocrine glands, was
first recognised by physician Thomas Addison (1793-1860).
7 May 1847, The American Medical Association was founded.
26 March 1845, The sticking plaster was patented.
21 June 1843, The Royal
College of Surgeons was formed from the original Barber �Surgeon Company.
1840, Swiss chemist Charles J Choss
demonstrated the need for calcium for proper bone development.
1837, Leeches were heavily used in medicine.
At Bartholomews, London,
96,300 leeches were used during 1837, up from 52,000 in 1822 and 24,700 in
1821. Heavy bleeding was used to induce unconsciousness before an operation
such as an amputation, in the absence of anaesthetics.
1836, The first
nurses training school in the world was opened in Kaiserwerth, Germany by Pastor Theodore
Fiedner and his wife. The Quaker philanthropist Elizabeth Fry visited there and
was so impressed she opened the firest nurses training school ln England in London
in 1840. Florence
Nightingale was trained at the school in Kaiserwerth.
31 December 1833, During
the year 1833, doctors in France imported 41.5 million leeches, actually making it an endangered species.
1832, Britain passed the Anatomy Act. This was an attempt to
curb the activities of the �resurrection men�, who dug up freshly-buried
corpses for dissection in medical schools. The Act provided for the compulsory
requisition of the bodies of paupers who died in workhouses, for this purpose.
It contributed to the general fear of workhouses.
1832, The British Medical
Association was founded. Until 1856 it was known as the Provincial Medical
and Surgical Association. It publishes the British
Medical Journal.
1832, The water bed was
developed by Scottish surgeon Neil Arnott as a means of improving the
comfort of his patients.
10 January 1832, Thomas Hodgkin presented a paper to the London
Medical and Surgical Society entitled �Some Morbid Appearances of the Absorbent
Glands and Spleen�, documenting a rare lymphatic condition know known as
Hodgkins Disease.
1830, Physician Marchall Hall (born Basford,
England, 18 February 1790) denounced bloodletting as a treatment for disease.
1828, Estonian naturalist Karl Ernst von Baer founded the science of
embryology, when he discovered the mammalian ovum.
24 December 1828, The trial of bodysnatcher William Burke began in Edinburgh, see 31
October 1828. The other bodysnatcher, William Hare, had turned King�s Evidence and
was not brought to trial. Sentenced to death, Burke was hanged on 28 January 1829
in front of a large crowd.
31 October 1828, Edinburgh bodysnatchers Burke and Hare claimed their last victim, a
beggar woman named Docherty.
1827, William Herschel devised an
early contact lens, a glass capsule filled with animal jelly.
5 October 1823, The
British medical journal, The Lancet,
was first published. It was set up by English surgeon Thomas Wakley.
1821,
Charles Bell,
born Edinburgh 11/1744, gave the first descriotion of Bell�s Palsy, a facial paralysis.
20 December 1820, The Academie de Medicine
was established in Paris.
1818, Jean Baptiste Dumas, born Alais,
France, 14 July 1800, first treated goitre with iodine.
1815, In Britain, the Apothecaries Act now required all
apothecaries in England and Wales, excepting those already in practice, to be
examined and licenced by the Society of Apothecaries after 5 years
apprenticeship.
1815, Renne Lannec invented the
stethoscope (named after the Greek stethos,
meaning breast). It comprised a roll of paper, then a wooden cylinder, to
listen to the chest. It was intended to avoid the indignity of having to place
an ear next to a woman�s chest.
23 October 1814, At the
Duke of York Hospital, Chelsea, surgeon Joseph Constantine performed the
first �nose job�.� Using a flap of skin
from the patient�s forehead (a technique used in India in 800 BC) he
reconstructed the nose of a soldier disfigured by toxic mercury treatment.
1801, Thomas Young (born 13 July 1773
in Milverton, England)
discovered the cause of astigmatism.
1794, John Dalton gave the
earliest account of colour blindness, which he described as Daltonism, as he
also had the condition.
21 November 1785, William Beaumont, US Army surgeon, the foirst
person to observe and describe digestion as it occurred in the stomach, was
born in Lebanon Connecticut (died 1853)
15 September 1780, Giacobo Rodriguez Pereire, an inventor of
language for the deaf, died in Paris (born 11 April 1715 in Estrenadura, Spain)
1774, Lazzaro
Spallanzani discovered the digestive action of saliva.
1772, Italian
anatomist Antonio
Scarpa (born Motta, 13 June 1747) discovered the labyrinth of the
inner ear; the semicircular canals, vestibule and cochlea.
1761, Morgagni
published an anatomy textbook based on observations from over 600 dead bodies
in autopsies.
1748, John Fothergill, born in
England, 8 March 1712, gave the first description of diphtheria in his Account of the putrid sore throat.
1747, Thalassotherapy,bathing in sea water, was developed as a therapy by
English physician Richard Russell (1687 � 1759). He tested his
theories in Brighton. The idea was that beneficial elements found in seawater,
such as calcium, iodine, magnesium, potassium and sodium could be absorbed
through the skin. The therapy was intended to help with arthritis, depression,
eczema, psoriasis and rheumatism.
20 May 1747, British naval surgeon James Lind (born 4 October 1716
in Edinburgh, Scotland) began an investigation to determine the cause of scurvy.
He discovered that oranges and lemons were a good cure. In 1753 he published
his Treatise on scurvy.
1736, US physician William Douglass described scarlet fever.
1730,� George Martine performed the first tracheotomy
for the treatment of diphtheria.
9 August 1721, Prisoners in Newgate Gaol were offered
a pardon if they agreed to be inoculated to test Dr Charles
Maitland�s theories on the subject. Seven men
volunteered, and all survived to live in freedom.
11 April 1715, Giacobo Rodriguez Pereire, an inventor of
language for the deaf, was born in Estrenadura, Spain (died 15 September 1780
in Paris).
1691,� Clopton Havers published the first complete
textbook on the bones of the human body.
18 November 1686, King Louis XIV
of France
underwent a successful operation for haemorrhoids. The surgeon, Charles
Francois, had specially-designed tools for the operation, and had
practised on dozens of peasants and prisoners, some of whom died.
2 September 1666, The Great
Fire of London helped end the
Great Plague.
28 September 1665. London was in the grip of The Plague; 7,000 died in the last week alone.
In July 1665, deaths averaged 200 a week. People were fleeing the city; graveyards
were full, and corpses were thrown into Plague Pits.
7 June 1665, The Plague
was first reported in London. It was a very hot
day. 70,000 people would die of the Plague by October. Plague forced Parliament
to meet in Oxford.
16 September 1663, The Swedish Collegium Medicorum was
founded. This later became the Swedish National Board of Health.
1643, Physician Daniel Whistler,
born in England
1619, gave the first medical description of rickets in his thesis to the University of Leiden.
1546, The first Regius Professor
of Medicine was appointed at Cambridge.
1546, The first description of
typhus, and the nature of contagion, were made by Italian physician Girolamo
Fracastoro in his work, De contagion et
contagiosis morbis.
1543, At Basel, Switzerland, Vesalius
published his great work - De humani
corporis fabrica (The Structure of the Human Body). This contained the
first accurate anatomical drawings of the human body.
1540, The United Barber-Surgeon�s Company was established in Britain.
1528, The first manual of
surgery, Die Kliene Chirugia, was
produced by Paracelsus
(Theophrastus
von Hohenheim), a Swiss physician and alchemist.
1518, In England, �epidemic� diseases were made notifiable by
law.
23 September 1518, In London, King Henry VIII granted a
Charter to establish the Royal College of Physicians. Its President, Thomas Linacre,
could fine or even imprison, charlatans who passed themselves off as doctors.
1508, Leonardo da Vinci drew plans of
an early contact lens; a glass lens
filled with water, to magnify vision.
1505, The Royal College of Surgeons was founded in Edinburgh.
1500, The first Caesarian
section, in which both mother and baby survived, was carried out by Jacob Nufer,
Swiss sow-gelder, on his own wife.
The Black
Death
1407, An outbtreak of the Black Death
in London killed several thousand people.
1403, The Doge of Venice imposed
a �quarantine� period on visitors to
curb the Black
Death. The waiting time was standardised at 40 days in 1485.
1382, Recurrence of the Black
Death, generally less severe than before, although Ireland was badly affected this time.
By 1400 it had killed some 75 million people, completely depopulating some
areas.
1374, Venice was now checking ships before
entry bto the port, and excluding any found to be carrying the Black Death.
1371, A further recurrence of
the Black
Death in Englaqnd, again less severe than the last time.
1361, A recurrence of the Black Death
in England, also across Europe from France to Poland. It was less severe than
the last time, and mainly affected children.
1352, The Black Death reached Moscow, and
also spread back eastwards to India and China again.
1350, The Black Death reached Scotland and
Wales.
1350, Economically,
the Black
Death caused major price changes in England. Thed price of a good
horse fell from 40 shillings to 16 shillings. Cows, oxen and sheep also fell in
price, but the price of corn rose due to a shortage of field hands to harvest
it.
1349, The Black Death killed 30% to 50% of
the population of England and Wales. A truce was called in the war with
Scotland; Scottish soldiers invading England carried the pneumonic form, transmissible
from person to person without rats or fleas, home with them.
24 August 1349, The Black Death broke out in Elbing
(Poland).
31 May 1349, The mortality rate from the Black Death
in London finally began to ease.
1348, The Black Death reduced the
population of Locarno, Italy, from 4,800 to 700.
29 September 1348, The Black Death reached London.
24 June 1348, The Black Death outbreak hit Melcombe Regis
(Weymouth, Dorset in England).
4/1348, The Black Death reached Cyprus and Florence..
25 December 1347, First cases of the plague
recorded in the city of Split in Croatia.
1 November 1347, Black Death spreads to Aix-en-Provence
in France.
1 September 1347, The Black Death reached the French
city of Marseilles.
1347, 1348. The Black
Death reached Greece in September 1347, and also appeared in
Sicily
and southern
Italy. By January 1348 Pisa, Venice, Avignon, and Arles were stricken, and by
April 1348 Toulouse,
Spain, and Lyons
had the disease. June 1348 saw the Black Death
arrive in England,
and by 1349 Germany and Brittany were suffering.
1343, Tartars besieging the
Genoese merchants trading post at Caffa, Crimea, catapulted their dead bodies
into the besieged town before they withdrew. Some of these corpses carried the Black Death..
Some merchants died on the road home, but others carried the Black Death
to Constantinople,
Genoa,
Venice
and other ports.
1340, Travellers returning to
Europe from China brought the Black Death back with them, in the rats-borne
ticks and fleeas that travelled with them.
1333, The Black Death began in China,
as starvation and a drought made the population there vulnerable.
1315, Italian surgeon Mondino de
Luzzi held public dissections; he published the manual Anatomia.
1275, The book Chirugia, by William of Saliceto, contained
the earliest writer records of dissection, a practice discouraged by the Church
since 1163.
1235, The first dissections of a
human body since the time of Ptolemy, 2rd century BCE were held at the
School of Medicine, Salerno, an institution supported by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II.
1231, Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor,
decreed that doctor training schools must hold a dissection of a human body
once every five years.
1230, Leprosy was brought into Europe by the Crusaders.
1208, A school of medicine was
founded at Montpelier by students from Bologna.
1167, The Council of Tours
forbade the
clergy from practising surgery, so this skill was taken over by the
barber-surgeons.
18 June 1037, Persian philosopher and physician Avicenna
died. His writings were valued sources for European doctors.
594, The Plague ended in Europe. It had killed half the population.
542, The Plague hit Constantinople, imported by rats from Egypt. In
547 it reached Britain.
219, Death of the Chinese
physician Zhang (born 152),
who compiled a large compendium of all the medical knowledge in China.
210, Death of Greek physician Galen
(born ca. 130). He promoted bloodletting as a cure for many ailments. His
thoughts dominated Western medicine for the next 1500 years,until Renaissance
physicians such as Andreas Vesalius challenged his views.
265 BCE, Rome learnt of Greek
medical techniques, from Greek prisoners of war.
290 BCE, Eristratus investigated the
human nervous system. In the course of public human dissections, Eristratus
and Herophilus
noted the existence of the liver, spleen, retina, duodenum, overies, Fallopian
tubes and prostate gland. They deduced that the brain, not the heart, is the
seat of emotions.
430 � 432 BCE, The Plague in Athens.
1700 BCE, The Ebers Egyptian papyrus
(discovered in 1872 AD) records the incidence of tooth decay and ophthalmic
problems. At the same time, smallpox was recorded in China.
2595 BCE, The first Chinese medical
text, Nei Ching, was published. It detailed the use of a range of medicines,
including camphor, opium, and sodium sulphate.
2700 BCE, Acupuncture came into use in China.
2980 BCE, Imhotep,
physician and advisor to Egyptian Pharaoh Imhotep, began to research medical
as opposed to religious cures for illnesses.
3000 BCE, Autopsy techniques
developed from the Egyptian embalming and preservation methods.
3050 BCE, Date of earliest known
medical text, the Edwin Smith Papyrus.
Appendix 1 � Dentistry
1967, A 20-year study of
fluoridation of the water supply in Evanston, Illinois, showed that cavities
had been reduced by 58%.
17 November 1955. Anglesey became the first authority in
Britain to introduce fluoride into
the water supply.
1945, Fluorine began to be added to the
water supply in the US.
1908, Dr Frederick McKay, a dentist in
Colorado, USA,
noticed that some of his patient�s teeth had become mottled, and that these
teeth were not so prone to decay as un-mottled teeth. Guessing that something
in the drinking water was causing this, he discovered, after studying other
regions in the US, that fluorine in the water was the cause. This gave
rise to the concept of fluoridating the
water, enough to arrest decay without causing mottling.
15 January 1907, Gold
dental inlays were first described by William Taggart, who invented them.
22 July 1878, The UK
Parliament prohibited medically-untrained people from calling themselves
�dentists�.
26 January 1875, The
first battery electric powered dental drill
was used. Mains-powered dental drills were not used until 1908.
19 December 1846, The first dental extraction under anaesthetic was performed in Britain.
11 December 1844, Dr John M Riggs,
of Hartford Connecticut, successfully extracted a tooth painlessly from Dr Horace Wells
using nitrous oxide gas. He
performed 40 more such operations, but abandoned them after a patient nearly
died from an overdose of the gas; Dr Riggs was unaware that the nitrous oxide
should be mixed with oxygen.
1840, The Baltimore College of Dental
Surgery opened in Maryland, the first US dental school. The American Society of Dental Surgeons was
established. The American Journal of
Dental Science began publication.
1834,
Amalgam, or mercury
alloy, now used for fiulling teeth.
1800, Tooth drawers would scour recent battlefields in order to recover
teeth form dead soldiers, to use in making dentures. Barrels of such teeth were
shipped to Europe from the USA after the American Civil War.
1790,
The dental drill
was invented by John
Greenwood, dentist to George Washington.
1785, Porcelain false teeth first used in America; they were used in France
from 1788.
1771,
John Hunter
(born 13 February 1728) published The
natural history of the human teeth. This laid the foundations for the science
of dentistry
104, First mention of dentures, by the Roman poet Martial, who died in this year.
975 BCE, False teeth, for cosmetic
purposes, in use by the Etruscans.
2900 BCE, Tooth filling was
practised in Sumer.
Appendix 2 � Heart
and Blood Cirulation,
7 January 2022, David Bennett became the first
person to receive a pig heart transplant. The pig has been genetically modified
to reduce the human rejection factor.
2011, A
continuous-flow artificial heart was developed that made blood flow through the
body with no heartbeat or pulse.
6 February 2005, Jerrick
de Leon, born 13 weeks premature, became the youngest infant to
survive open-heart surgery.
2 September 2001, Death of heart transplant pioneer Dr Christiaan
Barnard.
2 July 2001, In the US, the first self-contained battery powered mechanical heart,
the Abiocor, was implanted in Robert Tools. He survived 5 months.
1995, In Britain, 30% of deaths were caused by coronary heart disease,
compared to just 1% of deaths in 1930. The increased prevalence of high fat foods,
previously only accessible to the very
wealthy, was blamed.
26 August 1994, In Britain, a man aged 62 received the world�s
frist battery-powered heart,
16 May 1989. The first successful hole-in-the �heart
operation on an adult was performed at the Brook Hospital, Greenwich, London.
The patient was 66-year-old Eileen Molyneaux.
2 November 1986, Britain�s
first artificial heart transplant
operation was performed at Papworth Hospital, Cambridge.
24 June 1985, Keith
Hardcastle, Britain�s longest surviving heart transplant patient,
died 6 years after his operation.
19 February 1985, William J
Schroeder became the first artificial heart recipient to leave
hospital.
26 October 1984, Baby Fae, 14 days old, received a transplanted
heart from a baboon., She survived a further 20 days.
2 December 1982, At the
University of Utah, 61 year old retired dentist Barney Clark became the first
person to receive a permanent artificial heart. He lived for 112 days with the
device.
15 July 1970. An experimental pacemaker was fitted to a 56 year old
woman at the National Heart Centre in London.
4 April 1969, Denton
Cooley implanted the first artificial heart.
3 May 1968. Britain�s
first heart transplant.
11 January 1968. The
world�s fifth heart transplant was performed in New York.
2 January 1968, Christiaan
Barnard performed a second
heart transplant; the recipient Philip Blaiberg survived 594 days, proving the technique was feasible.
3 December 1967. Professor
Christian Barnard, born 1923, performed the world�s first heart
transplant in Cape Town. The recipient, a 53-year old grocer called Waskansky,
who received the heart of a 25 year old
traffic casualty, died 18 days later of pneumonia. The drugs given to suppress rejection compromised Waskansky�s immune system. A second heart transplant patient (see 2 January 1968)
survived much longer.
1964, A baboon heart was transplanted
into Baby
Fae. She had a evere hgeart defect. She lived for 20 days with the
xenotransplant.
23 January 1964, Dr James Hardy, at the University of
Mississippi, USA, attempted the first animal to human heart transplant. He
implanted the heart of a chimpanzee named Bino into the chest of Boyd Rush,
aged 68. Rush
died 90 minutes later.
20 September 1963, The first pre-natal blood transfusion was
performed at the National Women�s hospital in Auckland, New Zealand, by Professor
George Green, on a child born
to Mrs E
McLeod.
1963, The first artificial
heart was patented.
22 July 1960, The
implantable pacemaker was patented by Wilson Greatbach, New York, USA, for Wilson
Greatbach Inc.
31 October 1958. Ake Senning,
Swedish doctor, in Stockholm implanted the first internal heart pacemaker.
4 December 1955, The
International Federation of Blood Donor Organizations was founded in
Luxembourg.
11 September 1952, US
surgeon Charles
Hufnagel implanted the first artificial heart valve.
2 September 1952, The heart by-pass machine made open heart
surgery possible. The
first open heart surgery was performed, in Minnesota, USA.
4 October 1952. The first external pacemaker was developed
by Dr
Paul Zoll of the Harvard
Medical School, and was fitted to David Schwartz. The first internal pacemaker was not developed until 1958.
8 March 1952. The first artificial heart was used on a
41-year old man. It kept him alive at the Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia,
for 80 minutes.
1 April 1950, Charles R Drew
(born 3 June 1904 in Washington DC) was
killed in a car accident in Burlington, North Carolina. He discovered that
blood plasma, unlike whole blood, could be stored for long periods without
spoiling; this facilitated the blood transfusion system. For this, Drew
became the first Black American man in
the US to be awarded a Doctor of Science Degree.
11 May 1946, Robert Jarvik,
US inventor of the artificial heart, was born in Midland, Michigan
1937,The first artificial
heart was implanted in a dog.
1937, The Rhesus blood
factor was discovered by Karl Landsteiner and
Alexander S Wiener.
15 March 1937. Bernard Faustus set up America�s first
blood bank at Cook County Hospital, Chicago.
1930,
Karl Landsteiner won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of the
blood groups, making transfusions more successful.
8 November 1922, Dr Christian
Barnard, South African surgeon
who pioneered heart transplants, was born in Beaufort West, Cape Province.
27 March 1914. The first successful blood transfusion took
place, in a hospital in Brussels. Earlier blood transfusions had met
with the problem of the blood clotting, but in 1914 it was discovered that
sodium citrate could be used as an anti-coagulant. This discovery led to the
development of modern blood banks.
21 June 1903, Dutch
physiologist Willem
Einthoven described the first
electrocardiograph
14 November 1900, Dr Karl Landsteiner of the Pathological and Anatomical Institute of Vienna announced the discovery of the three major blood groups.
9 September 1896. Surgery was performed on the heart for the
first time, at Frankfurt City Hospital, Germany. The 22 year old patient had been
stabbed in the heart during a pub brawl and stitches were inserted in the organ.
1838,
Jons Jakob
Berzelius pioneered the understanding
of haemoglobin in the blood, realising the role of iron in oxygen
transportation in the body.
25 September 1818, The first blood transfusion using human
blood, as opposed to animal blood, took place in London, at Guys Hospital.
1675,
Dutch scientist Anton
van Leeuwenhoek, aged 43, gave the first accurate description of red
blood cells. He pioneered the development of the microscope. See also Technology and
Innovation.
1669,
Richars Lower�s Tractatus del Corde described the properties of the heart as
a muscle,� and how blood changes colour
as it passes through the lungs.
12 June 1667. The first blood transfusion was made at Montpellier University. A 15 year old boy was given 9
oz. of blood from a lamb � surprisingly he recovered from this, and the fever
he had been suffering. It was likely that blood clotting, of the sheep�s blood,
had prevented much from actually entering the boy�s own bloodstream.
1658, Dutch naturalist
Jan Swammerdam
gave the first description of red blood
cells.
3 June 1657, William Harvey,
anatomist and physician, died near
Saffron Walden, Essex. He discovered and demonstrated the circulation of the
blood.
12 February 1637, Jan Swammerdam was born this day in Amsterdam.
In 1658 he became the first person to
see and describe red blood cells.
1628, William Harvey showed that blood circulated in the bodies of animals. Until then it
had been assumed that arterial and venous blood, different in colour, were separate
and had different finctions. Some thought that arterial blood carried some sort
of energy from the air to the muscles, and venous blood carried food from the
liver. By dissection and logical arguent, in his work Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus
('The Anatomical Function of the Movement of the Heart and the Blood in
Animals'), Harvey showed that there was just one blood
system, pumped around by the heart. However until oxygen was discovered there
was no known reason for the blood to circulate, and until capillaries were
discovered there was no known mechanism for this circulation between arteries
and veins.
21 May 1618, Death of Italian physician Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente,
who discovered one-way valves in veins.
1 April 1578, William Harvey, British anatomist who discovered the circulation of the blood, was
born at Folkestone.
1540, The pulmonary circulation
of the blood was discovered by Michael Servetus, Spanish theologian and physician. He was
later burnt at the stake for heresy.
492 BCE, The Greek philosopher Empedocles
of Sicily recognised the heart as the centre of the system of blood vessels; he
wrongly attributed emotions to this organ also.
Appendix 2
� Kidneys and Bladder
30 September 2021, At the University of Alabama Hospital, 2
pig kidneys were transplanted into a brain-dead person. They survived 77 hours.
25 September 2021, At New York University Hospital, a pig
kidney was transplanted into a brain dead patient, who survived 54 hours.
16 February 1989, Harley Street kidney specialist Dr Raymond
Crockett resigned over a �cash for kidneys� scandal in which organs were taken from poor Turks for
wealthy patients.
1964, Home kidney
dialysis was introduced in the USA
1963,
Chimpanzee kidnneys were transplanted intok 13 peopole. One survived for 9
months.
1963,
Baboon kidneys were transplanted into 6 people, but none survived more than 3
months.
1960, A
long term dialysis machine was invented.
30 October 1960, Surgeon Michael
Woodruff performed the UK�s first kidney transplant.
23 December 1954, The first
successful kidney transplant was performed. Earlier transplant attempts had
been thwarted by the problem of rejection; the recipient in this case went on
to live another 8 years.
17 June 1950. In the US, the first
kidney transplant took place. The patient, 44 year old Ruth Tucker, survived for 5
years but then died when the transplanted kidney failed.
1943, The first dialysis machine
for patients with kidney failure was invented. It provided only short-term
dialysis whilst the kidney recovered.
24 August 1906, Kidney
transplants were carried out on dogs, at a medical conference in Toronto, Canada.
1861, The principle of dialysis
was demonstrated for the first time, by Glasgow-born chemist Thomas Graham
(1805-69). This led to the invention of the first kidney dialysis machine in 1943.
1678,
The excretory ducts of the human kidneys (Bellini�s Diucts) were discovered by
the Italian anatomist Lorenzo Bellini, 35; Bellini had taught medicine at
Pisa since 1664. Bellini also discovered the action of nerves on muscles.
Liver
1966, A chimpanzee liver was
transplanted into a child, but it only lasted a few days,
1 March 1963, Thomas Starzl performed the first liver
transplant.
Appendix 3
� Reproduction, STDs and Childbirth
31 July 2000. Cases of
sexually transmitted diseases had risen sharply among young people in the
past year, according to official UK figures.
16 November 1992. A
brain-dead woman had been artificially kept alive to allow her foetus to be
born; however she miscarried and the life support was turned off.
30 January 1990, Surgeons at Guy�s Hospital, London,
performed the first surgery on a baby in its mother�s womb.
1 October 1987, 48 year
old surrogate grandmother Mrs Pat Anthony
gave birth to triplets for her daughter
Karen Ferriera-Jorge in Johannesburg, South Africa.
15 August 1987. Septuplets, three boys and four girls,
were born to Susan Halton
in Liverpool�s Oxford Street Hospital.�
Their combined weight was 9 � pounds. None survived; the last lived
until 31 August 1987.
29 March 1986, The first test-tube quintuplets were born, in London.
4 January 1985, Mrs Kim Cotton, believed to be the first commercial surrogate mother in
Britain, gave birth to a girl.
1983, In Australia, the first
birth from a woman without ovaries, using donated eggs, was achieved.
18 November 1983, In Liverpool Janet Walton, 31, gave birth to sextuplets, all girls.
28 December 1981, The first
American test-tube baby, Elizabeth Jordan Carr, was born
in Norfolk, Virginia.
25 July 1978. The world�s first �test tube� (IVF) baby was
born, in Britain.
Louise Joy
Brown was born by Caesarean section at Oldham General Hospital,
Lancashire, to Lesley
Brown. She had been conceived by combining the sperm and egg in a
Petri Dish, because her mother�s Fallopian Tubes were blocked.
1977, The first successful case
of in-vitro fertilisation. A couple, John
and Lesley
Brown had tried and failed to conceive naturally for 9 years.
Scientists Robert
Edwards and Patrick Steptoe removed an egg from Lesley�s
ovaries and injected John�s sperm into the egg. Two days later the
now 8-celled embryo was implanted back into Lesley�s uterus. A baby girl was
successfully born on 25 July 1978. By 2017, some 5 million babies had been
conceived in-vitro.
28 March 1974, In Britain, the NHS Family Planning Service was
inaugurated.
11 January 1974. The first
surviving sextuplets were born to Mrs Sue Rosenberg in Cape Town, South
Africa.
16 October 1972. Venereal Disease cases amongst under 16s in
the UK were up 10% on last year.
13 November 1969, In London, a woman had quintuplets after
fertility drug treatment.
13 February 1969. Scientists in Cambridge announced the first
successful in-vitro fertilisation of
a human being.
1 December 1968, Henry Nadler first used amniocentesis to
diagnose Down�s Syndrome prenatally.
1953, The first
birth using a human egg that had been fertilised using previously-frozen sperm.
17 September 1953, The first
successful separation of Siamese Twins took place, at the Ochnser
Foundation Hospital in New Orleans.
1952, Virginia Apgar developed the Apgar Score to assess the viability of
a newborn infant, in order to combat high neonatal mortality rates. Still used
today, each infant is scored 0, 1 or 2 on 5 parameters; heart rate, breathing,
reflexes, muscle tone and colour. The result is a score out of ten indicating
any need for medical intervention.
1944, In Britain the Royal
College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists recommended that 70% of births
should take place in hospitals. Previously most births took place at the
mother�s home, with the assistance of a midwife. The cost of a hospital birth,
before the inception of the NHS, was 6 guineas,but for those women who could afford it,
a hospital birth was a welcome respite from rationing, laundry and housekeeping
duties.
15 December 1942, The British Government began a campaign against venereal disease, which had increased
markedly since the war began.
26 November 1928, The first
twins to be born by Caesarean section in Britain were delivered in
Manchester.
3 November 1916, There was concern about rising rates of
sexually-transmitted diseases in Britain, with 50,000 cases reported amongst
servicemen in 1916.
1900, The age of menarche in
Western girls was down to 14, from 17 in the late 1700s. By 2000 it was down to
13, and was around 12.5 by 2017.
17 January 1874. The original Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng Bunker, died within three hours of each
other, aged 62. Chang and Eng meant Left and Right in Thailand, where they were
born.
11 May 1811. The original Siamese
twins, Chang
and Eng Bunker, were born of Chinese parents in Maklong, Siam. They
were joined at the chest.
31 January 1747, The first venereal disease clinic opened at
London Lock Hospital.
1741, William Smellie became the first
obstetrician to make a scientific study of childbirth. From 1741
Smellie gave midwives and medical students in London
unprecedented practical lectures on childbirth. He achieved this by offering
his services to poor women on condition that his students could attend the
birth. In 1752 he published the Treatise
on midwifery, the first scientific approach to obstetrics.
1721, Jean Palfryn introduced the use
of forceps for facilitating birth.
1500, Jakob Nufer of Switzerland
performed the first recorded Caeasarian operation on a living woman.
Appendix
3a, Thalidomide
30 July 1973, Families of thalidomide victims won �20 million damages
after an 11-year court case fought on their behalf by The Sunday Times
newspaper. Babies had been born with missing or malformed limbs after their
pregnant mothers took the drug for morning sickness.
16 October 1972. Protesters demanded compensation from the
makers of the drug Thalidomide.
29 November 1971, The British Government announced a fund of �3
million for the victims of thalidomide.
23 March 1970, In the UK, the High Court awarded �370,000 damages
to 18 children born with birth defects due to thalidomide, against Distillers (Biochemicals). Five
children born with tiny �flipper� arms, the worst-disabled, received �28,000
each.
27 May 1968, The trial of the executives of the Chemie-Grunenthal
company, responsible for the Thalidomide disaster that killed 80,000 babies
and maimed 20,000 more, opened in Alsdorf, near Aachen. The trail was expected
to last at least three years, but was shut down on 18 December 1970. All defendants
were granted immunity from prosecution. The German Government and Grunenthal
agreed a compensation scheme that many parents regarded as inadequate. Thalidomide
was launched as a wonder cure for morning sickness on 1 October 1957; it was
withdrawn on 27 November 1961. It was sold as Distaval in the UK, as Contergan
in Germany. It emerged that no tests were done for effects on embryos; the
executives claimed nobody in the 1950s realised that drugs taken by the mother
could affect the foetus, which claim was untrue even then. Adults who took thalidomide
as a sedative in 1959 had suffered serious nerve damage.
14 September 1962, Distillers
Company agreed to pay �14 million to the victims of thalidomide.
1961, Thalidomide was withdrawn from
sale. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the USA had been slow to
approve it, so it was little-used there. A 1964 FDA report stated that just 17
US babies were affected. However there were clinical trials of Thalidomide in
the US, and some US doctors prescribed it without waiting for FDA approval,
meaning several hundred US babies were likely affected; not all victims know
that their congenital malformations were due to the drug,
31 December 1958, There were fears that a drug prescribed for
morning sickness, thalidomide, might be causing birth defects.
Phocomelia, or �seal-limbs�, where the long bones of the leg and arms did not
develop,� appeared to be on the rise. It was later discovered that thalidomide was toxic to foetuses of between 27
and 40 days after conception. Some 10,000 babies were born woth congenital
malformations due to this drug.
1 October 1957, Thalidomide was first prescribed to pregnant
women, as a cure for morning sickness.
AIDS
AIDS statistics, click here, https://www.avert.org/global-hiv-and-aids-statistics
3 January 1995, The
World Health Organisation announced that the official umber of AIDS cases had
passed 1 million. However there were probably in reality 4x that number, as
many cases, especially in Africa, had not been diagnosed. Officially, 70^% of the cases
were in Africa, 9% in the USA, 9% in other parts of the western hemisphere, 6%
in Asia, 4% in Europe, and 2% in other parts of the world.
3 December 1994, Elizabeth Glaser, campaigner on AIDS, died.
24 November 1991. Freddie Mercury, lead
singer of the rock group Queen, died of AIDS, aged 45.
10 October 1992, Tens
of thousands rallied in Washington, D. C., calling on the government to
dedicate more funding to combating HIV/AIDS.
24 July 1992, 8th International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam. It
was predicted that AIDS patients would number 40 million by 2000.
17 June 1991. 8,000 scientists met for an international
conference on AIDS at Florence. AIDS was now in 163 countries and especially
severe in Africa; the WHO estimated that over 1.5 million people had developed
AIDS, with a total of 8�10 million infected. WHO expected a total of 40 million
AIDS cases by 2000. In the USA, 170 had the disease, and a further 6,000 contracted
it every month; in the UK 4,500 cases had been reported since 1981.
4 June 1991. The AIDS epidemic worsened in Malawi, with
37% of the population now carrying the virus.
2 May 1991. The World
Health Organisation estimated that 40 million people will have the AIDS virus
by 2000.
11 December 1990, The British Government announced it would
award �42 million to haemophiliacs
who became infected with HIV after
being treated with contaminated
Inhibitor Factor VIII.
8 March 1990. Over 3,000
people in the UK now had AIDS.
11 January 1990. In
the UK, 1,612 have died of AIDS.
8 November 1988. In
the UK, the death toll from AIDS reached 1,002, with 1,862 cases reported. A
government report issued on 30 November 1988 feared that up to 50,000 in the UK
could be HIV+ and that by 1992 17,000 AIDS deaths might have occurred.
5 September 1988. Britain now had 1,730 reported cases of
AIDS and 949 deaths.
11 July 1988. 8,500 people
in the UK were known to be carrying the AIDS virus.
13 January 1988. One
in every 61 babies born in New York in December 1987 had the AIDS virus.
Doctors believed up to 40% of them would develop AIDS. In the UK, there were 1,277 AIDS cases; 697 had died from the disease.
10 August 1987, One person a day was dying of AIDS in
Britain.
4 May 1987, The World Health Organisation approved a Global AIDS Strategy, which
by December 1987 had caused 71,751 cases of illness.
20 March 1987, The drug AZT was launched to combat AIDS.
15 February 1987. The
World Health Organisation announced that a total of 38,401 AIDS cases had been
reported in 85 countries. The AIDS virus had been discovered in the USA on 23
April 1984.
21 November 1986, The
UK Government began an AIDS awareness advertising campaign focussed on safe sex.
16 December 1985, 8,000
Americans had now died of AIDS.
2 October 1985. Hollywood
actor Rock Hudson died of AIDS, aged 59.
26 September 1985, The
British Government announced �1 million funding to stop the spread of AIDS.
25 July 1985, Film star Rock Hudson was admitted to hospital suffering from AIDS.
10 May 1985. The World
Health Organisation announced that AIDS cases were doubling every year in the
USA and Europe. Worldwide, 11,000 AIDS cases had been reported since the virus
was discovered on 23 April 1984.
11 April 1985. An 18-month old boy became the first British
baby to die of AIDS.
15 March 1985, In Britain, blood donors were now to be tested for
AIDS.
23 April 1984. The
discovery of the AIDS virus was announced in the USA.
21 May 1983. The US made
AIDS top health priority.
1 May 1983, The HIV virus that caused AIDS was identified
31 December 1981. Doctors
became aware of a new disease that destroyed the immune system and appeared to
be common in homosexuals. This was to be known as AIDS.
5 June 1981, The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention
reported that five homosexual men in Los Angeles, California, had a rare form
of pneumonia seen only in patients with weakened immune systems. These were the first recognised cases of
AIDS.
Cancer
2 August 2005, Scientists at Stanford |University, USA, announced
they had used nanotechnology to destroy cancer cells.
9 May 1997, An Australian study suggested that some mice,
after prolonged exposure to cell phone radiation, showed an increase in
lymphoma cancer.
1981, Onco-genes (cancer genes)
were discovered by US research teams. They do not directly cause cancer but
become carcinogenic when affected by viruses, ionising radiation or
carcinogenic chemicals.
13 April 1959, French oncologist Georges Mathe reported on his
first ever attempted bone marrow transplant.
1949, Cobalt-60 was first used
to treat cancer, at the Ohio State University.
1947, Sidney Farber
(1903-73) founded the Children�s Cancer Research Foundation at Boston�s
Children�s Hospital. He� observed that
folic acid (one of the B vitamins) could increase the number of abnormal
white cells in children with acute leukemia. If these children were given a
drug that reduced the effects of folic acid, the abnormal cells decreased. The
idea that drugs could counteract cancer, or chemotherapy, was developed from this finding.
21 September 1946. The first ant1
cancer chemotherapy trials were described/
8 January 1914, Doctors
at the Middlesex Hospital successfully treated cancer with radium.
13 August 1912, In Paris,
Dr Gastin Odin discovered a microbe capable of causing cancer.
1 November 1901. In Chicago, Dr J E Gilman announced an X-Ray treatment for breast cancer.
1775, Sir Percival Potts suggested
that chimney sweeps in London were developing cancers of the scrotum and nasal
area due to exposure to soot. This was
one of the first conceptions that environmental factors could cause cancer.
Cholera
10 January 2010, Deaths
from a cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe
now amounted to 4,293, with 98,741 cases reported.
1961, The El Tor
outbreak of cholera started in
Indonesia. Assisted by air travel, it reached Taiwan by 1963, and by 1964 was
present in Taiwan, Hong Kong, India and Egypt. By 1965 it was found in Iran and
Saudi Arabia, and by1970 had reached Libya, Lebanon and Astrakhan,
29 August 1902, A cholera epidemic in Egypt killed over
9,000.
1853, An epidemic of cholera in
London began. In August 1854 an outbreak of cholera in Soho was traced by
physician John Snow to a conatminated public water pump in Broad Street. Sewage
from a nearby tenement block where a cholera sufferer lived had contaminated
the well. The pump handle was removed.
13 February 1832. Asiatic
Cholera appeared for the first time in London.
21 June 1831, King William IV
of England, on opening the UK Parliament, announced the arrival of a
virulent strain of cholera in
Europe. Starting in the Ganges area of India in 1826, cholera had spread
through Iran and Turkey into south east Europe. It first hit the UK at
Sunderland on 19 October 1831. Thereafter it spread rapidly in the slums of the
new industrial cities, killing 3,000 in Glasgow, 700 in Leeds, 200 in York,
1,500 in Liverpool, 900 in Manchester and 6,800 in London. Britain was
subsequently hit by a further cholera outbreak in 1848/9 (450 deaths in
Edinburgh, 3,800 in Glasgow, 7,000 across the whole of Scotland). Cholera came
again in 1853/4, starting from Tyneside, and in 1854 in London. This outbreak
killed 30,000 across the UK; 10,738 in London alone. The fourth and final
outbreak of cholera in Britain was in 1866, starting from Southampton; total UK
fatalities amounted to 18,000.
1817, A cholera pandemic began in India and spread to east Africa
and across much of SE Asia, from Japan to the Philippines.
Diabetes and
Insulin
23 May 1977, Scientists reported using bacteria to
make insulin.
1 November 1969, Dorothy Crowfoot (later, Hodgkin) published the 3-d
structure of insulin
1865, Insulin was first
synthesised.
24 July 1925. Insulin (patented 12 June 1922) was first used to
successfully treat a patient, 6 year old Patricia Cheeseman, at Guy�s Hospital London.
12 June 1922, Insulin,
the treatment for diabetes, was patented by Frederick Banting. See 27 July 1921
and 24 July 1925.
11 January 1922, Leonard Thompson, aged 14, became the first
patient to be treated with insulin for his diabetes, at Toronto General. Hospital. He lived for another 13 years before dying
of pneumonia at age 27.
27 July 1921. Insulin
was isolated by Dr
Frederick Banting at the University of Toronto medical School,
helped by his assistant Charles Best, and tested
on a de-pancreatised dog the same day. It was first used successfully on a
human on 11 January 1922.
1916, The name �insuline� was
first coined by English physiologist Edward A Sharpey-Schafer for the hormone
produced by the Islets of Langerhans in the pancreas.
27 January 1899, Charles Best, Canadian co-discoverer of insulin for treating diabetes, was born
in West Pembroke, Maine.
14 November 1891, Sir Frederick Banting,
Canadian co-discoverer of insulin
with McLeod
and Best
in 1922, was born in Alliston,
Ontario.
1889,
German physiologists J
von Mering and OMinkowski
removed the pancreas from a dog and noted that the animal now urinated more
frequently, and its urine attracted flies and wasps. The urine was found to
contain sugar, and the dog went into a diabetic coma and died.
1869,
The Islets of Langerhans were
discovered in the pancreas by German medical student Paul Langerhans,
aged 22. These cells produce glucagon and insulin, essential for the body to
regulate its sugar metabolism.
1860,
French physician Etienne
Lancereaux, 31, attributed diabetes to a pancreatic disorder.
25 July 1847, Physician
Paul
Langerhans was born in Berlin, Germany. In 1869 he discovered
the small groups of cells in the pancreas now known as the islets of Langerhans. They were later discovered to be the source
of insulin.
1815,
Michel
Chevreul, born Angers, France, 31 August 1786, showed that the
sugar in the urine of diabetics was glucose; an important step in understanding
the disease. See 1860.
1788,
English physician Thomas
Cawley noted abnormalities in the pancreas of a diabetic
person n whom he was conducting an autopsy. However Cawley disregarded this observation,
still believing that diabetes was a disease of the kidneys,
1683,
Swiss anatomist Johann
Conrad Brunner, aged 30, removed the pancreas of a dog and shwed
that the animal then developed a huge thirst. This was an early indication that
diabetes was due to an abnormality in the pancreas, see 1788.
11 November 1675, Death of Thomas Willis,
physician to King
Charles II and to the Duke of York. He was the first to notice an
increase in what we now know as diabetes amongst his more affluent clients � he
called it �the pissing evil�. He also noted the very sweet nature of this
urine. The wealthy in England were raising their consumption of sugar, now
being imported from the Caribbean, both in desserts and in tea. In fact the
issue of sweet urine and diabetes was also known to the ancient Greeks, Indians
and Chinese.
643, Death of the Chinese
physician Chen Ch�uan. He was the first to describe the symptoms of diabetes,
including thirst and sweet urine.
Ebola
15 May 2019, The number of Ebola
cases in the north-east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo now exceeded
1,600 since the current outbreak began in August 2018. In April 2018 the rate
of new cases suddenly accelerated from around 30 to around 100 per week,
29 December 2015, For the first time
since March 2014, Guinea was declared free
from Ebola virus transmissions by the World Health Organization.
26 July 2015, Ebola
continued in Guinea and Sierra Leone, albeit at much lower levels than the peak
of the late-2014 outbreak. The Lancet reported on a vaccine with a 1005 success
rate, as total cases from February 2014 now stood at: Guinea, 3,786 cases,
2,520 deaths; Liberia, 10,672 cases, 4,808 deaths; Sierra Leone, 13,290 cases,
3,951 deaths. There had also been 1 case in Italy, 8 cases and 6 deaths in
Mali, 20 cases and 8 deaths in Nigeria, 1 case in Senegal, 1 case in Spain, 1
case in the UK, and 4 cases, 1 death in the USA.
21 January 2015, Confirmed
Ebola cases in Guinea reached 2,806 cases with 1,814 deaths. In Liberia cases
eached 8,331 cases with 3,538 deaths. In Sierra Leone cases reached 10,124,
with 3,062 deaths.
9 January 2015, Confirmed
Ebola cases in Sierra Leone reached 7,718, with early 3,000 deaths. However the
epidemic seemed to be abating, with many areas free of new cases for over a
month.
22 October 2014, Total
Ebola cases now stood at 9,936, with 4,877 deaths. Mali reported its first
case.
18 October 2014, The total
Ebola toll was as follows. Guinea, 1,519 cases, 7788 deaths. Liberia, 4,076
cases, 2,316 deaths. Nigeria, 20 cases, 8 deaths. Senegal, 1 case, 0 deaths.
Sierra Leone, 3,410 cases, 1,200 deaths. Overall total, 9,191 cases, 4,546
deaths.
11 October 2014, The
number of Ebola deaths in West Africa passed 4,000.
26 September 2014, The total
Ebola toll was as follows. Democratic Republic of Congo, 70 cases, 42 deaths.
Guinea, 1,074 cases, 648 deaths. Liberia, 3,458 cases, 1,830 deaths. Nigeria,
20 cases, 8 deaths. Senegal, 1 case, 0 deaths. Sierra Leone, 2,021 cases, 605
deaths.
20 September 2014, The total
Ebola toll was as follows. Guinea, 1,008 cases, 632 deaths. Liberia, 3,022
cases, 1,578 deaths. Nigeria, 20 cases, 8 deaths. Senegal, 1 case, 0 deaths.
Sierra Leone, 1,813 cases, 593 deaths.
31 July 2014, The
number of fatalities in the Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia
passed 1,200; cases were also reported in Nigeria.
18 February 1996. The World Health Organisation sent experts to Gabon
where ten people had died of the Ebola
virus.
30 May 1995, 153 had died in Zaire after being infected with Ebola
16 May 1995, An Ebola outbreak in Zaire had now killed 77. The disease kills
victims so fast they have little time to pass it on, so does not cause major
pandemics.
Influenza
and other respiratory (click here for Covid-19)
10 August 2010, The
World Health Organisation declared the H1N1 influenza pandemic officially over.
11 June 2009, The
influenza strain H1N1 sparked fears of a
global flu pandemic.
28 April 2009, The Mexican Government confirmed an outbreak of Swine Flu
in humans.
5 April 2006, Avian flu was
confirmed to have reached Britain when a mute swan was found dead of the highly
pathogenic H5 strain near St Andrews, Scotland. A 1,000 square mile exclusion
zone was imposed, with poultry farmers told to keep their flocks indoors at all
times.
30 September 2005, The UN
issued warnings that a pandemic of Avian Flu
might be imminent, and kill between 5 and 150 million people.
SARS,
2003-03
7/2003, The SARS epidemic was declared over by the WHO.
Some 8,000 people had been infected across 27 countries, and 774 had died.
5 July 2003, The WHO
declared SARS to be �contained�
23 April 2003,
Beijing closed all schools for 2 weeks due to the SARS outbreak.
15 March 2003,
The WHO declared SARS a global
health emergency. The virus was believed to have originated in China�s
Guangdong Province.
13
March 2003, The first case of SARS was reported, in
Hanoi, Vietnam. The SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) virus killed 813 and affected 8,400 people. In
Canada there were 251 cases and 41 deaths. In China there were 5,327 cases and
349 deaths. In Hong Kong there were 1,755 cases and 300 deaths. In Taiwan there
were 665 cases and 180 deaths.
16 November 2002, A Chinese
farmer was admitted to hospital in Foshan, Guangdong Province, China with
severe atypical pneumonia. This new disease was later known as SARS, a novel
strain of coronavirus. The virus became known to the outside world when a US
businessman who had visited Guangdong Province became ill on a return flight
from China; he was transferred to a hospital in Hanoi, Vietnam, where he later
died, as did several nurses and doctors at this hospital.
29 December 1997, The Hong Kong Government ordered a mass
slaughterof its entire chicken population, to prevent the spread of avian flu
to humans. The virus had already caused severe illness in 18 people, of whom 6
had died. 1.2 milliomn chockens were killed, as well as large numbers of ducks,
geese, quail and other poultry. Farmers and vendors were compensated.
9 January 1970, In Britain, Hong
Kong Flu claimed 2,850 lives in a week.
Spanish
Flu, 1918-21
7/1921, The last new�
cases of Spanish Flu were
being reported in New Caledonia.
1920, The Spanish Flu pandemic had killed 50 - 100 million people. In the
developed world, mortality was about 2%; in Britain, 250,000 died, mostly aged
between 20 and 40. Deaths in other countries included, Bulgaria 51,000, France
238,000, Germany 427,000, Italy 544,000, Portugal 136,000, Spain 252,000. However
in India, where 18.5 million died, it was 6%, and in Egypt, where 138,000 died,
mortality was 10%. Death rates tended to be higher in populations which had
been less exposed to the flu virus previously.
26 October 1918. In London alone, in the past week, Spanish flu claimed 2,225
lives.
21 October 1918. The Spanish Flu
epidemic began in Britain. 150,000 died of this disease in the last quarter of
1918. It killed twice as many as died in World War One.
4 March 1918,
The first recorded case of Spanish flu, in a US soldier at Cape Funston,
a military base in Kansas.
17 February 1900, The influenza epidemic in Britain
ended.
9 January 1900, The influenza epidemic in London was killing 50 people a day.
Malaria
2016, There were 216
million malaria cases worldwide, 80% of them in India and 14 sub-Saharan
countries. 445,000 people died of malaria.
31 December 2014, During 2014, malaria killed 627,000 worldwide, 77%
of these being children under 5. In 2014 there were 207 million new cases of
malaria, and Africa lost an estimated US$ 12 million productivity due to the
disease.
1977, The number of malaria
cases in India stood at 10 million, up from 100,000 in 1965. The emergence of
resistant strains of the disease was to blame.
10 April 1944, The anti-malarial drug quinine was discovered by Robert Edward
and William
van Eggers.
10 December 1902. Major Ronald
Ross of the British army won
the Nobel Prize for medicine because of his work relating malaria to
mosquitoes.
8 July 1898, Ronald Ross traced the malaria parasite to the
salivary glands of mosquitoes.
20 August 1897, Sir Ronald Ross
discovered that malaria was spread by mosquitoes.
Measles
6 December 2019, A surge in measles cases worldwide was reported,
with 10 million cases and 142,000 deaths occurring in 2018. Survivors often die
soon after because their immune system has been compromised. Anti-vacination
sympathies have been blamed for the increase, with cases in 2019 trending
towards three times that for 2018.
27 September 2017, The World Health Organisation declared that
measles had been �eliminated� from the UK, Spain and Denmark for the frst time
ever; these countries had been free of the disease for 36 months. 33 of the 53
countries in Europe wree now measles-free. However doctors in the UK were still
treating 1,000 cases from overseas. Over 95% of British children had been
vaccinated with the MMR jab, despite publicity against it.� In 1961 there were 764,000 measles cases in
Britain, resulting in 152 deaths.
1963, First vaccine
for measles was licenced.
1954, The measles
virus was first isolated.
10 September 1624, Physician Thomas Sydenham was born in
England. He was the first to describe measles and identify scarlet fever. He
advocated the use of opium to alleviate pain, chinchona bark (quinine) to
relieve malaria, and iron to treat anaemia.
Mental
illness
20 February 1996, Solomon Asch, psychologist, died.
29 December 1987, Prozac made its debut in the USA. It was
initially developed as a drug to treat high blood pressure, but the success
seen in animals in this area failed to materialise with humans. However it
found a role as an anti-depressant. Before Prozac and other drugs, depression, sometimes
romantically referred to as �melancholy�, could lead to committal to a mental
institution in the most severe cases, so sufferers were reluctant to seek
treatment. Prozac boosts the level of serotonin in the brain by preventing its
destruction after it has delivered its message; it is a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor or SSRI. Although some
patients have alleged that it changes personality, even leading to suicide
attempts, some 35 million people (2006) take it worldwide.
5 May 1986, The Tau protein was identified as the major
component of neurofibrillary tangles associated with Alzheimer�s Disease.
4 November 1906, Alois
Alzheimer produced a public report on the
brain of a dead dementia patient.
8 April 1906, D Auguste, the first recorded Alzheimer's victim, died (born 1850)
13 November 1962. UK doctors estimated that 40,000 Britons were taking pep pills.
12 November 1953, The Samaritans
Helpline was set up by Reverend Chad Varah, at St Stephens Church,
Walbrook, London.
6 May 1946, LIFE Magazine published "Bedlam 1946: Most
U.S. Mental Hospitals are a Shame and a Disgrace" in its May 6, 1946,
issue. Albert
Q. Maisel's expos� of the atrocities at two mental institutions, in
Ohio and Pennsylvania, which he described as "concentration camps masquerading
as hospitals", spurred reforms in psychiatric care.
3 June 1944, Hans Asperger described a form of autism that
would later become known as Asperger�s Syndrome.
28 March 1938, Psychiatrists Ugo Cerletti and Lucio Bini used electric shock
treatment on a patient for the first time.
The subject was a man found wandering in a railway
station and mumbling to himself.
1937, Italian doctors Ugo Cerlutti
and Lucio
Bini developed the use of electro-convulsive
therapy (ECT) to treat schizophrenia.
12 November 1935, Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz
performed the first lobotomy.������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
1921, Swiss psychiatrist Hetrmann
Rorsach perfected his Inkblot Test.
1916, F W Mott developed a theory of
shell-shock.
20 March 1904, BF Skinner, psychologist, was born.
1911, Bleuler in Switzerland coined the term
�schizophrenia�.
1910, The medical technical term
�moron� was first used, denoting an
adult with a mental age of between 8 and 12. Already by the 1920s it had become
a common insult and is no longer in use as a medical term.
17 September 1910, A London
doctor stated that if lunacy kept
increasing at the current rate, the sane would be outnumbered by the insane
within 40 years.
27 April 1908, The First International Congress of Psychoanalysis opened in Salzburg.
18 February 1906, Hans
Asperger, Austrian pediatrician and eponym of
Asperger syndrome, was born in Vienna (died 1980)
1 January 1906, In Britain the Lunacy Commission reported that on this date 121,979 persons were certified as insane.
27 January 1903, John Carew Eccles, neuropsychologist, was
born.
1894, Intelligence Tests were
devided by French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857 � 1911).
11 July 1857, Alfred Binet, psychologist who invented the IQ
test, was born.
6 January 1938. Sigmund
Freud
arrived in London, fleeing Nazi persecution.
4 November 1899, Sigmund Freud�s book, The Interpretation of Dreams, was published in Switzerland.
Although only 600 copies of the book were initially printed, it took 8 years to
sell them all.
3 December 1895, Anna Freud, psychoanalyst, was born.
1890, In Britain the Lunacy Act compelled local authorities
to provide asylum accommodation for all those who, through mental incapacity,
could not provide for themselves and who had no relatives to care for them.
1878, German psychologist Wilhelm Max
Wundt, aged 46, established the first laboratory for experimental
psychology, bringing scientific methods
to the study of the human mind.
29 November 1874, Antonio Caetano de Abreu Freire Egas Moniz was
born in Avanca, Portugal. In 1935 he
developed prefrontal lobotomy as a treatment for mental illness.
15 February 1856. Birth of Emil Kraepelin, pyschiatrist who
differentiated schizophrenia and ,manic-depressive illness.
15 January 1842, Josef Breuer, psychologist, was born.
18 December 1839, Theodule Ribot, French psychologist, was born
in Guingamp.
3 February 1772, Jean Esquirol, French psychiatrist, was born
(died 13 December 1840. In 1817 he began a series of lectures on the treatment
of the insane in French asylums, exposing such mistreatment� that the Government appointed a commission to
investigate.
24 March 1732, William Tuke, who pioneered the humane
treatment of the insane, was born in York (died 1822). In 1792 he promoted the
Retreat at York, run by the Society of Friends, whose success led to UK
legislation on the treatment of the insane.
Polio
8/2020, Africa was declared free
of polio.Nigeria was the last African country where the disease was
present..The disease was present in nature now only in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
1957, Cases of polio in Britain
had fallen this year to 6,000, from 58,000 in 1952, due to the Salk vaccine.
12 April 1955, The Salk polio
vaccine was pronounced safe.
23 February 1954, In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, the first mass inoculation of
children against polio began, using the Salk vaccine.
23 February 1954, In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, the first mass inoculation of
children against polio began, using the Salk vaccine.
11 November 1953. The polio
virus was identified.
26 March 1953. The Salk vaccine proved effective
against polio.
1927, The �Iron Lung�, or Drinker Respirator, was
invented by Harvard Professor Philip Drinker. It was intended for child
victims of respiratory faulire due to acute poliomyelitis.
28 October 1914. Jonas Salk, US bacteriologist� who discovered the anti-poliomyelitis
vaccine, was born in New York City, to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents.
Smallpox
8 May 1980. The World Health Organisation declared that smallpox had
been eradicated.
11 September 1978. The world�s last smallpox victim died. She
was a medical school photographer in Birmingham, and had caught the virus on 30
August 1979 after it escaped from a laboratory located on the floor below her
workplace. The Head of Department responsible for this laboratory later
committed suicide by cutting his throat.
13 November 1976, The World Health Organisation declared Asia
was free of smallpox for the first time in history.
21 January 1962 . Smallpox was also a threat as an epidemic hit
Britain and other countries insisted visitors from the UK were vaccinated.
19 February 1902. France made
smallpox vaccinations compulsory.
31 January 1902, The number
of smallpox victims in London rose to 2,273.
21 January 1799. Edward Jenner introduced the smallpox vaccination. In the 18th century,
smallpox took over from the bubonic plague as the major killer disease. Edward Jenner
worked as a doctor in Berkeley, Gloucestershire. By observing local milkmaids, Jenner
tested the generally held belief that cowpox sufferers were immune to smallpox.
In 1796 he experimented by scraping pus from a cowpox sore on the arm of a
milkmaid and inserting it into two cuts on the arm of a young boy. On 1 July 1796
he did the same with pus from a smallpox sore. The boy caught cowpox but not
smallpox. After doing this to 23 other people, Jenner called this method
�vaccination�, meaning �from a cow�. Jenner published his findings in 1798 and
despite scepticism from doctors, vaccination became widely accepted. Even
members of the Royal Family were vaccinated. Vaccination became free for all
infants in 1840 and compulsory in Britain in 1853. In 1980 the World Health Organisation
declared smallpox had been eradicated throughout the world.
14 May 1796. Dr Edward Jenner, born 17 May 1749, from
Berkeley, Gloucestershire, carried out his first human vaccination. He infected an eight year old, James Phipps, with cowpox, or
�vaccinia� disease, having once heard a dairymaid claim that she would never
catch smallpox because she had been infected by cowpox. Then on July 1st
he deliberately exposed the boy to smallpox; he proved resistant to the
disease.
17 May 1749, Edward Jenner,
pioneer of vaccination, was born at Berkeley vicarage, Gloucestershire.
13 February 1713, Dutch sailors inadvertently introduced smallpox
to the indigenous Khoisan people of South Africa. The mortality rate was 90%.
Syphilis
26 February 1971. Hammersmith Borough Council launched a
lurid and aggressive campaign against the spread
of venereal diseases such as syphilis.
20 August 1915, Paul Erlich, bacteriologist, dies of a stroke
in Bad Homburg, Germany. Born in Strehlen, in 1909 he developed the
first compound designed specifically to cure a disease; Salvarsan, for syphilis.
22 October 1910, Paul Erlich announced his cure for syphilis,
Salvarsan.
1909, The antibiotic Salvarsan
(compound 606) �was discovered bythe
German, Paul
Ehrlich. It was very effective against syphilis.
1579, William Clowes, surgeon at
Bartholomews, London,� published the
first text in English on syphilis.
1546, The first description of
syphilis was made by Italian physician Girolamo Fracastoro in his work, De contagion et contagiosis morbis.
1502, Syphilis first appeared in China, brought to the port of Canton by
European traders.
Tuberculosis
23 April 1993. The World Health Organisation declared tuberculosis a global emergency,
saying TB could kill 30 million people by
2003.
22 February 1946, Dr Selman Abrahams announced the discovery
of streptomycin, an antibiotic for treating tuberculosis.
27 May 1910, Robert Koch, German bacteriologist and Nobel
Prize Winner who discovered the tuberculosis
bacillus, died.
1907, C Pirquet developed a method of
diagnoising tuberculosis;
1894, The first British
sanatorium for the open-air treatment of tuberculosis
opened in Edinburgh. Others soon followed in Glasgow, Renfrewshire and Frimley
(Surrey). The notion that open clean air could assist in the treatment of
tuberculosis had been popular since the late 1800s; the wealthy would take the
train to the Alps of the south of France. Wealthy philanthropists funded the
British sanatoria, although because tuberculosis was considered a disease of
the poor, it attracted less funding than cancer.
24 March 1882, In Berlin, Dr |Robert Koch announced the discovery of the
tuberculosis bacterium. He received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1905.
Appemdix a
� National Health Service (UK)
27 July 2000. Tony Blair�s government unveiled its national
plan for the Health Service, with a ten-year package of sweeping reforms and
restructuring. The days of dirty wards,
inedible food, and entertainment restricted to volunteer-staffed radio stations
were over, according to the proposals.
29 January 1988. Junior Health Minister (Conservative), Edwina Curry,
told people they should forego holidays
to pay for private health care.
10 June 1968, NHS prescription charges were reintroduced.
See 1 February 1965.
1 February 1965, In the UK, NHS prescription charges were
removed. They were re-introduced on 10 June 1968, see Price; 16 January 1968.
6 July 1960. Aneurin Bevan, founder of the National Health
Service in 1948, Minister of Health 1945-51, died.� He was born on 15 November 1897.
7 June 1960, The first NHS hearing aids were issued.
23 April 1951. The Labour Health Minister Nye Bevan
and two other ministers resign over the introduction of charges for NHS glasses and false
teeth. The charges were imposed to pay for defence costs.
6 October 1949, Aneurin Bevan
gave some
figures for the demand on Britain�s new NHS since its inception on 5 July 1948.
187,000,000 prescriptions had been dispensed at a cost of 2s 9d (14p) each;
5,250,000 pairs of glasses had been given out, with another 3,000,000 on order;
8,500,000 dental patients had been treated. The Government Actuary, Sir George Epps,
had
estimated that the cost of the NHS in its first year would be �170 million; the
actual figure turned out to be �242 million. Annual costs were expected to fall
as the population grew fitter; in fact annual costs rose to �384 million in
1952/3.
5 July 1948. The National Health
Service was established in the UK. Introduced under a Labour
government, it provided free medical
treatment, and free prescriptions for glasses, teeth, and wigs. In its
first year the NHS cared for 47.5 million patients, provided 5.25 million pairs
of glasses, 7,000 artificial eyes and 5,000 wigs. Doctors wrote 187 million NHS
prescriptions, and by 1950, 95% of UK citizens were using the NHS.
7 June 1948, Over half of UK doctors agreed to join the NHS.
18 February 1948. In a poll by the British Medical Association, 86% of doctors voted against joining the NHS.
27 January 1948, UK medical consultants threatened to boycott the new National Health Service.
21 March 1946. Aneurin Bevan announced Labour Government
plans for a National Health Service.to become operational in 1948. The cost per year was
expected to be around �152 million (�5,000 million in 2015 prices; actual 2015
NHS spending is more like �115,000 million).
17 February 1944, In the UK, the White Paper on the National Health
Service was published.
4 May 1910. Lloyd George introduced a National Health Insurance Bill.
Appendix c
� Anaesthitics,
13 February 1906, The US Patent
Office registered the local anaesthetic procaine for Alfred Einhorn.
1905,
Procaine, commercial name Novocaine, became the first synthetic local
anaesthetic.
7 April 1853, Queen Victoria used chloroform to help
her through the birth of her seventh child, Prince Leopold. This established
chloroform as the favoured anaesthetic in Britain.
9 November 1847, Obstetrician Sir James Simpson, Professor of
Midwifery at the University of Edinburgh
demonstrated a new anaesthetic, trichloromethane,
better known as chloroform. Claimed
to be three times as effective as ether, it was to be of great use during
difficult childbirths; however Scottish Calvinists opposed the use of any
anaesthetic during childbirth.
21 December 1846. Anaesthetic was used in a British
hospital for the first time (see 16 October 1846).It was used by surgeon Robert Liston
during a leg amputation at University College Hospital, London.
16 October 1846. Anaesthetic was used successfully
for the first time in a major operation, at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Dentist William
Morton Warren used diethyl ether before removing a tumour from a
man�s jaw.
30 March 1842. The first anaesthetic, ether, was used in
an operation, in Jefferson, Georgia, USA. The surgeon was Dr Crawford Long. He removed a
cyst from the neck of a Mr James Venables. The bill for the anaesthesia was US$
2.25. Dr Long performed 9 successful operations with ether, including the
amputation of a boy�s finger, but was accused of sorcery by the older citizens
of Jefferson and threatened with lynching if he continued.
1830, Chloroform was discovered as an
anaesthetic� independently by Justus von
Liebig and by US chemist Samuel Guthrie.
1 November 1815, Crawford Williamson Long, surgeon, was born in
Danielsville, Georgia, USA. He is credited with the first use of ether as an
anaesthetic, on 30 March 1842.
27 October 1794, Birth of Robert Lister, Scottish doctor who performed the first operation using
anaesthetic.
1500 BCE, Opium poppies
were being used to induce a form of anaesthesia in the Middle East.
1236, Dominican
Friar
Theodoric of Lucca pioneered a form of anaesthetic. He advocated the
use of sponges soaked in narcotic and held to the patient�s nose; he favoured
the use of opium and mandragora.
Famous
medical people
7 October 2005, Michael Ward, doctor, died (born
6 March 1925)
28 July 2004, Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, died aged 88.
16 October 1982, Hans Hugo Selye, Austrian endocrinologist who
pioneered studies on stress, died.
5 August 1982, John Charnley, British orthopaedic surgeon,
died aged 70.
7 March 1982, Margulies Lazar, US physician, died.
4 August 1977, Edgar Douglas Baron, English physiologist,
died in London.
3 June 1977, Archibald Vivian Hill, English physiologist,
died in Cambroidge.
1 February 1976, Gene Hoyt Whipple, US physician, died in
Rochester, New York, USA.
8 December 1970, Philip Edward Smith, endocrinologist, died in
Florence, Massachusetts.
21 February 1968, Lord Florey, Australian-born British pathologist who made possible the
large-scale production of penicillin, died.
11 June 1967, Wolfgang Kohler, Russian-German-US
psychologist, died in Enfield, New Hampshire, USA.
24 April 1964, Gerhard Domagk, German pathologist (born 30
October 1895 in Brandenburg) died in Burgberg.
6 June 1961, Carl Gustav Jung, Swiss psychologist and
associate of Freud,
died aged 85.
6 May 1958, Olivier H�l�non, French radiologist, was born
16 August 1955, James Reilly: Irish surgeon, was born.
11 March 1955, Sir Alexander
Fleming, discoverer of penicillin in 1928 and Nobel
prize-winner in 1945, died.
25 February 1950, George Richards Minot, US physician, was born
in Brookline, Massachusetts.
5 October 1949, Major Greenwood
(born 9 August 1880) English epidemiologist and medical statistician, died.
9 July 1943, Clifford Beers, US mental hygiene pioneer,
died aged 67.
2 March 1943, Alexandre Yersin, physician, died.
21 February 1941, Sir Frederick Banting,
Canadian
scientist
who along with Charles Best discovered insulin
in 1921, was killed in an air crash.
15 July 1940, Eugen Bleuler, Swiss psychiatrist who
introduced the term schizophrenia to describe the disorder previously known as
dementia praecox, died aged 82.
23 September 1939. Sigmund Freud,
Austrian psychiatrist, born 6 May 1856, died
in Hampstead aged 83.� He had moved to
London in 1938 following Hitler�s annexation of Austria.
24 May 1937, Luis F. �lvarez, Spanish American physician
died aged 84.
16 November 1935, Sir Magdi Yacoub, cardiothoracic surgeon, was
born.
23 September 1933, Lloyd Old, US immunologist, was born.
9 July 1933,
Oliver Sacks,
neurologist, was born.
31 December 1932, Mildred Scheel, German doctor, was born.
16 September 1932, Sir Ronald Ross, English physician, died in London.
3 December 1935, Charles Robert Richet, French physiologist, died in Paris.
2 May 1927, Ernest Henry Starling, English physiologist, died at sea
near Kingston, Jamaica.
27 February 1926, David H Hubel,
neuroscientist, was born.
6 March 1925, Michael Ward, doctor, was born
(died 7 October 2005)
11 February 1924, Jacques Loeb, German-US physiologist, died in
Hamilton, Bermuda.
10 February 1923. William Konrad Von Roentgen, German physicist
who discovered X rays in 1895, died.
9 April 1922, Patrick Manson, Scottish
physician, died aged 77
23 January 1921, Heinrich Wilhelm Gottfried von Waldemeyer-Hartz,
German anatomist, died in Berlin.
29 December 1919, Sir William Osler, medical teacher, died in
Oxford, England.
14 May 1918, James Hardy, US surgeon who performed the
first lung transplant, was born in Newala, Alabama (died 2003)
27 July 1917, Surgeon Emil Theodor Kocher died.
16 July 1916, Victor Horsley, British neurosurgeon, died
(born 1857)
17 March 1916, Charles Bent Ball, Irish surgeon, leading
innovator in abdominal and rectal surgery, died (born 1851)
27 December 1915, William Masters, US physician, senior member
of the Masters and Johnson sexual research team, was born in Cleveland (died
2001)
10 February 1912. Charles
Lister. Lord Joseph Lister, surgeon and discoverer of antiseptics, died aged
84 at Walmer, Kent.
26 August 1910, William James, US psychologist, was born in
Chocorua, new Hampshire.
13 August 1910. Florence Nightingale, born 12 May 1820, died
in London aged 90.
31 January 1908, Karl von Voit, physiologist, was born in
Munich, Germany.
21 May 1907, Sir Joseph Fayrer, English physician, died
(born 6 December 1824)
18 April 1904, Sir Henry Thompson, English surgeon, died
(born 6 August 1820 in Framlingham, Suffolk)
20 August 1903, Gayle Pierce, US medical practitioner who
favoured unconventional and spiritualistic methods, was born.
14 June 1903, Karl Gegenbaur,
German anatomist, died in Heidelberg.
23 November 1902, Walter Reed, US military surgeon, died in
Washington DC.
2 November 1902, Rudolf Albert von Kolliker, Swiss anatomist
and physiologist, died in Wurzburg, Bavaria.
5 September 1902, Rudolf Carl Virchow, German pathologist, died
in Berlin.
4 December 1901, Sir William MacCormick, Irish surgeon, died
(born 17 January 1836).
11 December 1898, Sir William Jenner, English physician, died
(born 30 January 1815).
13 March 1898, Sir Richard Quain, Irish physician, died in
London (born 30 October 1816 in County Cork)
28 September 1895, French chemist Louis Pasteur died (see 6 July 1885). He had been born in
Dole, France, on 27 December 1822.
23 April 1895, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig, German
physiologist, died in Leipzig, Saxony.
4 March 1895, Sir William Savory, British surgeon, died in
London (born 30 November 1829 in London)
6 February 1894, Albert Billroth, surgeon, died (born in Rugen
26 April 1829).
16 August 1893, Jean Charcot, French physician, died (born 29
November 1825).
22 March 1892, David Agnew, US surgeon died (born 24 November
1818).
3 February 1892, Sir Morell MacKenzie, British physician,
died (born 7 July 1837).
19 July 1891, Sir Prescott Hewett, British surgeon, died
(born 3 July 1812)
29 January 1890, Sir William Gull, English physician, died
(born 31 December 1816).
30 November 1889, Edgar Adrian,
English
physiologist, was born. He studied the neurons of the nervous system.
24 March 1889, Franciscus Cornelia Donders, Dutch
physiologist, died in Utrecht.
22 July 1888, Selman Abraham Waksman, Russian
microbiologist whose search for
antimicrobial substances in soil led to the discovery of actinomycin and
streptomycin, was born.
23 June 1888, Edmund Gurney, English psychologist, died
(born 23 March 1847).
30 September 1887, Bernhard Langenbeck, German surgeon, died
(born 9 November 1810).
17 July 1887, Dorothy Lynde Dix, pioneer in the humane
treatment of the mentally disabled in the US (born 4 April 1802 in Hampden,
Maine), died in Trenton, New Jersey.
21 January 1887, Wolfgang Kohler, psychologist, was born in
Revel, Estonia. He was one of the founders of the gestalt school.
11 November 1886, Paul Bert, French physiologist, died in Hanoi
(born in Auxerre 17 October 1833).
13 March 1886, Austin Flint,
heart research pioneer, died (born 20 October 1812)
2 March 1886, John Forster, British surgeon, died (born
1823).
21 September 1884, Charles Joules Henri Nicolle was born in
Rouen, France. In 1909 he discovered that typhus was spread via the body louse.
20 July 1884, Caesar Hawkins, British surgeon, died (born 19
November 1798)
24 August 1882, Charles Morehead, Scottish physician, died
(born 8 February 1807)
23 January 1882, Sir Robert Christison, Scottish physician,
died (born 18 July 1797).
9 July 1880, Paul Broca,
French surgeon and anthropologist, died (born 28 June 1824).
5 October 1879, Francis Peyton
Rous was born in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1910 he discovered that
some animal cancers were caused by viruses.
26 January 1878, Ernst Heinrich,
German physiologist, died in Leipzig, Saxony,
25 September 1877, Carl Reinhold
Wunderlich, German physician, died in Leipzig, Saxony.
10 February 1877, Sir William Fergusson, British surgeon, died
(born 20 March 1808).
17 September 1875, Guillaume Duchenne, French physician, died
(born 17.9/1806).
26 July 1875, Carl Jung, Swiss psychoanalyst, was born in
Kesswil.
2 March 1874, Neil Arnott, Scottish physician (born 15 May 1788)
died.
20 April 1873, Henry Bence-Jones, English physician, died in
London (born in Suffolk, 1814).
19 October 1871, Physiologist
Walter Bradford Cannon was born in
Prarie du Chien, Wisconsin. He devised the use of bismuth compounds to make
soft organs visible on X-rays.
6 May 1870, Sir James Young Simpson, Scottish physician,
died in Edinburgh (born 7 June 181 in Bathgate)
7 February 1870, Birth of Alfred Adler, the psychoanalyst
who introduced the concept of the inferiority complex.
9 October 1869, Otto Erdmann, physician who introduced
vaccination into Saxony, died (born 11 April 1804).
28 July 1869, Karl Carus, German physician, died (born 1789)
8 April 1869, Harvey Cushing, US surgeon, was born.
28 August 1868, Antoine Clot, French physician, died (born 7
November 1793).
29 July 1868, John Elliotson, English physician, died (born
29 October 1791).
15 July 1868, William Thomas Morton, US dentist, died in New
York City, New York.
8 December 1867, Jean Pierre Flourens, French physiologist,
died.
6 March 1867, John Goodsir, Scottish anatomist, died (born
20 March 1814).
21 February 1866, August von Wasserman, German bacteriologist who invented a test for syphilis,
was born.
6 November 1865, William Leishman was born in Glasgow,
Scotland. In 1900 he discovered that the disease now known as Leishmaniasis is
spread by a parasite of sandflies.
17 August 1865, Ignatz Philipp Semmelweiss, Hungarian
physician, died (born 1 July 1818 in Vienna)
21 October 1862, Sir Benjamin Brodie, English surgeon, died
(born 1783)
10 December 1861, Thomas
Southwood Smith, English physician, died in Florence, Italy (born 21
December 1788 in Martock, Somerset)
15 December 1860, Physician Neils Finsen was born in the
Faroe Islands.
12 June 1859, Jacob Bell, pharmaceutical chemist, died (born
in London 5 March 1810).
16 December 1858, Physician Richard Bright died in London,
England.
14 August 1858, George Combe, Scottish phrenologist, died
(born 21 October 1788).
28 April 1858, Johannes Muller, German anatomist, died.
7 March 1857, Julius Wagner von Jauregg was born in Wels,
Austria. In 1927 he was awarded the Nobel prize for his treatment of some forms
of paralysis using malaria inoculation to induce the fever.
6 May 1856, Sigmund Freud,
Austrian
pioneer of psychoanalysis, was born in Freiburg, Moravia.
15 March 1854,
Emil von Behring, bacteriologist who won
the Nobel Prize in 1901 for his work on immunisation aganist diphtheria,
was born.
14 March 1854, Paul Erlich, bacteriologist, was born in Strehlen,
Silesia (now Poland); died 20 August 1915.
13 September 1853,
Bacteriologist Hans Christian Joachim Gram
was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. In 1884 he developed a dye that could
distinguish between two classes of bacteria, those that took up the dye and
those that didn�t. The groups react differently to antibiotics.
23 September 1852,
Surgeon William Halstead was born in
New York City. In 1890 he introduced the practice of wearing sterilised rubber
gloves during surgery.
12 March 1851,
Bacteriologist Charles Chamberland
was born in Chilly le Vignoble, France.
He improved sterilisation techniques and invented filters to trap bacteria,
which led to the discovery of viruses.
2 June 1850, Jesse Boot, British pharmacist, was born in
Nottingham.
26 September 1849, Ivan Pavlov, son of a village priest, was born
this day near Ryazan, Russia. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1904 for
his discovery of conditioned reflexes.
23 December 1848, James Cowles Prichard, English physician, died
in London (born 11 February 1786 in Ross, Herefordshire)
22 June 1848, Sir William Macewen, surgeon, was born.
7 December 1847, Robert Liston, surgeon, died (born 28 October 1794)
9 August 1847, Andrew Combe, physiologist, died (born 27
October 1797).
23 March 1847, Edmund Gurney, English psychologist, was born
(died 23 June 1888).
27 October 1845, Jean Charles Athanase Peltier, French
physician, died in Paris (born 22 February 1785)
14 November 1844, John Abercrombie,
Scottish physician (born 10 October 1780) died in Edinburgh.
11 December 1843, Robert Koch, German bacteriologist, was born in
Klausthal.
21 August 1843, William Pepper, US physician, was born in
Philadelphia (died 28 July 1898 in Pleasanton, California).
2 July 1843, The originator of homeopathic medicine, Samuel Hahneman,
died in Paris aged 88 (born 10 April 1755). He believed that diseases could be
cured by drugs producing similar symptoms, only in much smaller doses than
normal; the �law of similars�.
28 April 1842, Sir Charles Bell, anatomist, died near
Worcester (born in Edinburgh 11/1774).
12 February 1841, Sir Astley Cooper, English surgeon, died in
London (born 23 August 1768 in Norfolk).
13 December 1840, Jean Esquirol, French psychiatrist, died (born
3 February 1772).. In 1817 he began a series of lectures on the treatment of
the insane in French asylums, exposing such mistreatment� that the Government appointed a commission to
investigate.
17 November 1838, Francois Broussart, French physician, died
(born 17 December 1772).
7 July 1837, Sir Morell MacKdnzie, British
physician, was born (died 3 February 1892).
28 March 1837, Willy Kuhne, German
physiologiat,was born (died 10 June 1900).
25 August 1836, Christoph Hufeland, German physician,died
(born 12 August 1762).
20 July 1836, Physician Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt was born in
Dewsbury, England. In 1866 he developed the clinical thermometer; previously
thermometers in medicine took some 20 minutes to determine the patient�s
temperature.
8 March 1836, Sir Michael Foster, English physiologist, was
born (died 29 January 1907).
17 January 1836, Sir William MacCormick, Irish
surgeon, was born (died 4 December 1901).
17 October 1835, Paul Bert, French physiologist, was born in
Auxerre (died in Hanoi 11 November 1886).
8 February 1835, Guillaume Dupuytren, French surgeon, died
(born 6 October 1777).
26 June 1834, Sir Gilbert Blane, Scottish physician, died in
London (born 29 August 1749).
20 April 1831, John Abernethy,
British surgeon (born 3 April 1764 in London) died in Enfield.
30 November 1829, Sir William
Savory, British surgeon, was born in London (died 4 March 1895 in
London)
26 April 1829, Albert Billroth,
surgeon, was born in Rugen (died 6 February 1894).
21 December 1828, Sir John Burdon-Sanderson, physiologist, was
born (died 23 November 1905).
1 November 1828, Balfour Stewart, Scottish physician, was born
(died 19 December 1887).
23 July 1828, Sir Jonathan Hutchinson, English surgeon, was
born.
22 May 1828, Albrecht von Grafe, eye specialist, was born
(died 20 July 1870)
5 April 1827, Joseph Lister
was born in London. He was a surgeon, and pioneered the use of antiseptics.
28 October 1826, Sir Andrew Clark, British physician, was born
(died 6 November 1893).
26 October 1826, Philippe Pinel, French physician, died in
Paris (born 20 April 1745 in Tarn Department)
13 August 1826, Rene Lannec,
French doctor who invented and named the stethoscope
in 1819, died.
29 November 1825, Jean Charcot,
French physician, was born (died 16 August 1893).
6 December 1824, Sir Joseph Fayrer,
English physician, was born (died 21 May 1907).
28 June 1824, Paul Broca,
French surgeon and anthropologist, was born (died 9 July 1880).
26 January 1823, Edward Jenner, pioneer of vaccination, died in
Berkeley, Gloucestershire..
27 December 1822, Louis Pasteur
was born in Dole, France.
10 May 1822, Roch-Ambroise
Cucurron Sicard, instructor of deaf-mutes,
died in Paris (born 20 September 1742 in Haute-Garonne)
12 May 1820. Florence Nightingale
was born in Florence, Italy; she was named after the city. She had a
privileged education but shocked her family by turning down several marriage
proposals to pursue a career in nursing. In 1854 she nursed soldiers in the Crimean War and resolved to improve the
appalling medical conditions there.
15 April 1820, John Bell, Scottish surgeon, died in Rome
(born in Edinburgh 12 May 1763).
24 November 1818, David Agnew, US surgeon (died 22 March 1892) was born.
11 September 1818, John Marshall, English surgeon, was born (died
1 January 1891).
19 July 1818, Sir John Erichsen, British surgeon, was born
(died 23 September 1896).
31 December 1816, Sir William Gull, English physician, was born
(died 29 January 1890).
29 December 1816, Karl
Freidrich Wilhelm Ludwig was born in Witzenhausen, Germany. In 1847 he
demonstrated that the blood circulation is purely mechanical, due to heart
pumping action.
23 August 1815, Sir Henry Acland, English physician, was born (died16
October 1900)
10 October 1816, Sir John Simon, English physician, was born in
London (died 23 July 1904)
4 August 1815, Physician Carl Reinhold Wunderlich was born in Sulz, Germany.
He was the first to realise the usefulness of taking accurate readings of a
patient�s temperature.
30 January 1815, Sir William Jenner, English physician,was born
(died 11 December 1898).
19 April 1813, Physician
Benjamin
Rush died in Philadelphia, USA.
15 March 1813, Dr John Snow, pioneer bacteriologist, was
born.
20 October 1812, Austin Flint, heart research pioneer, was
born.
31 August 1812, John Bennett, English physician, was born in
London (died 1875).
3 July 1812, Sir Prescott Hewett, British surgeon, was born
(died 19 July 1891)
9 November 1810, Bernhard Langenbeck, German surgeon, was born
(died 30 September 1887).
5 March 1810, Jacob Bell, pharmaceutical chemist, was born
in London (died 12 June 1859).
9 July 1809, Friedrich Henle, German anatomist, was born
(died 13 May 1885).
5 May 1808, Pierre Cabanis, French physiologist, died
(born 5 June 1757).
15 October 1806, Paul Barthez, French physician, died in Paris
(born in Montpellier 11 December 1734).
17 September 1806, Guillaume Duchenne, French physician, was born
(died 17 September 1875).
13 June 1806, Julia Brace, US blind deaf mute, who contributed
much to studies in this area, was born in Connecticut (died in Connecticut 12
August 1884).
31 August 1805, James Currie, Scottish physician, died (born
31 May 1756).
11 April 1804, Otto Erdmann, physician who introduced
vaccination into Saxony, was born (died 9 October 1869.
10 February 1804, Carl Rokitansky, founder of the Vienna School
of Pathoological Anatomy, was born in Bohemia (died 23 July 1878 in Vienna)
21 January 1804, Ernst Baldinger, German physician, died in
Marburg (born near Erfurt 13 May 1738).
27 December 1801, Charles Clay, English surgeon, was born (died
19 September 1893)
17 May 1801, William Heberden, English physician, died
(born 1710).
9 March 1801, Johann Ackermann, German physician (born 17
February 1756) died.
6 October 1799, Physician William Withering died in
Birmingham, England.
7 September 1799, James Syme, Scottish surgeon, was born in
Edinburgh (died 26 June 1870 in Edinburgh)
28 September 1799, Pierre Brasdor, French surgeon, died (born
1721).
19 November 1798, Caesar Hawkins, British surgeon, was born
(died 20 July 1884).
11 December 1797, Richard Brockelsby, English physician, died
(born 11 August 1722).
27 October 1797, Andrew Combe, physiologist, was born (died 9
August 1847).
18 July 1797, Sir Robert Christison, Scottish physician, was
born (died 23 January 1882).
24 June 1795, German physiologist Ernst Heinrich Weber was born in
Wittemberg. He began, in 1826, experiments with two point skin stimulation; how
close can two needle points be felt before they are perceived as just one
sensation.
1 June 1795, Pierre Desault, French surgeon, died (born 6
February 1744).
28 October 1794, Robert Liston, surgeon, was born (died 7
December 1847).
13 July 1794, Scottish physician James Lind died in Hampshire,
England.
13 April 1794, Jean Pierre Marie was born in France. He
studied the nervous system,located the centre of respiration, and showed that
the cerebellum controlled muscular movements.
7 November 1793, Antoine Clot, French physician, was born (died
28 August 1868).
29 October 1791, John Elliotson, English physician, was born
(died 29/ July 1868).
5 February 1790, William Cullen, physician, died (born 15 April
1710).
23 December 1789, Charles Epee, who did much for the deaf-mute,
died (born 25 November 1712).
22 December 1788, Percivall Pott, English surgeon, died in
London (born 6 January 1714 in London)
21 December 1788, Thomas Southwood Smith, English physician, was
born in Martock, Somerset (died 10 December 1861 in Florence, Italy)
21 October 1788, George Combe, Scottish phrenologist, was born
(died14 August 1858).
15 May 1788, Neil Arnott, Scottish physician, was born in
Arbroath (died 2 March 1874 in London).
8 March 1787, Karl Grafe, German surgeon, was born (died 4
July 1840).
11 February 1786, James Cowles Prichard, English physician, was
born in Ross, Herefordshire (died 23 December 1848 in London)
20 August 1785, Valentine Mott, US surgeon, was born (died 26
April 1865).
22 February 1785, Jean Charles Athanase Peltier, French physician,
was born (died 27 October 1845 in Paris)
30 March 1783, William Hunter, British physician, died (born
23 May 1718).
16 February 1781, Rene Laennec, French doctor who invented and
named the stethoscope, was born in
Quimper, Brittany.
26 December 1780, John Fothergill, English physician, died (born
8 March 1712).
10 October 1780, John Abercrombie, Scottish physician (died 145
November 1844) was born in Aberdeen.
6 October 1777, Guillaume Dupuytren, French surgeon, was born
(died 8 February 1835).
10 February 1773, John Gregory,Scottish physician, died (born 3
June 1724).
17 December 1772, Francois Broussart, French physician, was born
(died 17 November 1838).
6 December 1771, Giovanni Morgagni, Italian
anatomist, died (born 25 February 1682).
9 September 1770, Bernhard Albinus, German anatomist, died in
Leiden (born 14 February 1697 in Frankfurt on Oder).
23 August 1768,� Sir Astley
Cooper, English surgeon, was born (died 12 February 1841).
3 April 1764, John Abernethy, British surgeon, was born in London
(died 20 April 1831 in Enfield).
12 May 1763, John Bell, Scottish surgeon, was born in
Edinburgh (died in Rome 15 April 1820).
5 June 1757, Pierre Cabanis, French physiologist, was born (died
5 May 1808).
31 May 1756, James Currie, Scottish physician, was born
(died 31 August 1805).
10 April 1755, Samuel Hahnemann, founder of homeopathy, was
born (died 2 July 1843).
10 April 1752, William Cheselden, English surgeon, died (born
19 October 1688).
1749, David Hartley
(born 30 August 1705 in Yorkshire, England), in his work Observations on man, first used the term �psychology� as a systematic study of the operation of the mind.
29 August 1749, Physician
Sir Gilbert
Blane was born in Blanefield, Scotland. In 1795 he got the Royal
Navy to make consumption of lime juice by sailors compulsory to prevent scurvy.
This earned British sailors the nickname �limeys�.
6 February 1744, Pierre Desault, French surgeon, was born (died
1 June 1795)
20 September 1742, Roch-Ambroise Cucurron Sicard, instructor of
deaf-mutes, was born in Haute-Garonne (died 10 May 1822 in Paris).
23 September 1738, Hermann Boerhaave, Dutch physician, died in Leiden (born
near Leiden 31 December 1668).
13 May 1738, Ernst Baldinger, German physician, was born near
Erfurt (died in Marburg 21 January 1804).
11 December 1734, Paul Barthez, French physician, was born in
Montpellier (died in Paris 15 October 1806).
23 May 1733, Friedrich Mesmer, medical researcher, was born
(died 5 March 1815)
21 April 1730, Belgian surgeon Jean Palfyn was born in Ghent.
13 February 1728, John Hunter, British surgeon, was born (died
16 October 1793).
3 June 1724, John Gregory,Scottish physician, was born
(died 10 February 1773)
2 February 1723, Italian anatomist Antonio Valsalva died in
Bologna,
11 August 1722, Richard Brockelsby, English physician, was
born (died 11 December 1797).
11 May 1722, Peter Camper, Dutch anatomist, was born (died
7 April 1789)
21 January 1720, Italian anatomist and pathologist Giovanni
Lancisci died in Rome.
23 May 1718, William Hunter, British physician, was born
(died 30 March 1783)
16 August 1715, French anatomist Raymond Vieussens died in
Montpellier.
6 January 1714, Percivall Pott, English surgeon, was born in
London (died 22 December 1788 in London)
20 October 1713, Archibald Pitcairne, Scottish physician, died
in Edinburgh (born 25 Decemeber 1652 in Edinbiurgh
25 November 1712, Charles Epee, who did much for the deaf-mute,
was born (died 23 December 1789).
8 March 1712, John Fothergill, English physician, was born
(died 26 December 1780).
10 April 1707, Sir John Pringle, British physician, was born
in Roxburghshire (died 18 January 1782 in London)
3 October 1704, French physician Jean Baptiste Denis died in
Paris.
8 January 1704, Lorenzo Bellini, Italian physician, died in
Florence (born in Florence 3 September 1643)
4 November 1698, Erasmus Bartholin, Danish physician, died in
Copenhagen.
1 March 1697, Francesco Redi, Italian physician, died in
Pisa.
14 February 1697, Bernhard Albinus, German anatomist, was born
in Frankfurt on Oder (died 9 September 1770 in Leiden).
30 November 1694, Marcello Malpighi died in Rome.
17 January 1691, Richard Lower, English physician, died in
London.
29 December 1689, Thomas Sydenham, physician, died in London
(born 10 September 1624 in Dorset)
19 October 1688, William Cheselden, English surgeon, was born
(died 10 April 1752).
9 March 1683, Michael
Ettmuller, physician, died (born 26 May 1644).
25 February 1682, Giovanni
Morgagni, Italian anatomist, was born (died 6 December 1771)
4 December 1680, Thomas
Bartolin, Danish physiologist, died in Copenhagen.
16 October 1677, Francis
Glisson, English physiologist, died in London.
15 November 1673, Thomas
Warton, English anatomist, died in London.
21 August 1673, Regnier
van der Graaf, Dutch anatomist, died in Delft.
19 November 1672, Franciscus
Sylvius, Dutch physician, died in Leiden.
31 December 1668, Hermann
Boerhaave, Dutch physician, was born near Leiden (died in Leiden 23
September 1738).
29 April 1667, John Arbuthnot, British physician, was born
(died 27 February 1735).
17 June 1666, Antonio Maria Valsalva was born in Imola,
Italy. In 1704 he provided the first detailed description of the physiology of
the human ear.
26 October 1654, Giovanni Maria Lancisi, Italian physiologist,
was born in Rome. In 1707 he wrote a detailed text on cardiac pathology.
25 December 1652, Archibald Pitcairne, Scottish physician, was
born in Edinbiurgh (died 20 October 1713 in Edinburgh)
30 December 1644, Jan Baptista van Helmont, Flemish physician,
died in Vilvoorde, near Brussels.
3 September 1643, Lorenzo Bellini, Italian physician, was born
in Florence (died in Florence 8 January 1704)
30 July 1641, Physician Regnier de Graaf was born in Schoonhyoven,
Holland.
6 March 1636, Italian physician Sanctorius Sanctorius died in
Venice.
24 October 1632, Anthony van Leeuwenhoek, naturalist, was born.
Inventor of the microscope, he was the
first person to see bacteria.
12 December 1630, Olof Rudbeck, physician, was born in Westeras,
Sweden.� In 1652 he demonstrated the
lymphatic system to Queen Christiana of Sweden, using a dog.
10 March 1628, Marcello Malpighi was born in Crevalcore,
Italy. In 1660 he demonstrated, using the newly-invented microscope. that the
lungs consist of many small air pockets and a complex system of capillaries.
5 December 1624, Gaspard Bauhin, Swiss anatomist, died in Basel.
9 May 1622, Jean Pecquet, French physician, was born in
Dieppe. In 1647 he discovered the thoracic duct.
27 January 1621, Birth of Thomas Willis at Great Bedwyn,
England. In 1659 he published� De febribus, describing typhoid fever.
20 October 1616, Thomas Bartholin, physician, was born.
31 August 1614, Thomas Wharton, English physician, was born in
Stockton on Tees. In 1656 he published a work describing the entire human
glandular system.
15 March 1614, Physician Franciscus Sylvius was born in Hanau, Germany.
He was one of the first physicians to abandon the theory that disease was
caused by an imbalance of the four humors (blood, bkack bile, yellow bile and
phlegm) and attributed it to an acid-base imbalance instead.
23 February 1603, Andreas Caesalpinus, physician to Pope Clement
III, died (born 1519).
7 November 1599, Gasparo Tagliacozzi, Italian surgeon, died in
Bologna (born 1546 in Bologna)
20 December 1590, Ambroise Pare, known as the father of modern
surgery, died in Paris.
12 January 1579, Jan Baptista van Helmont was born in Brussels,
Belgium. In 1626 he proposed the diseases were caused by tiny organisms he
called archaea.
21 September 1576, Girolamo Cardan, Italian physician, died (born
24 September 1501).
27 August 1574, Bartolomeo Eustachio, Italian anatomist, died
in Urbino.
10 May 1566, Leonhard Fuchs, German physician, died (born
17 January 1501)
9 October 1562, Fallopius Gabriello, anatomist, died.
29 March 1561, Sanctorius Sanctorius, physician, was born in
Justinopolis (Yugoslavia). He invented a device that used a pendulum to count
heatbeats.
26 April 1558, Jean Francois Fernal, French physician, died
in Fontainebelau.
20 May 1537, Hieronymous Fabricius, physician, was born in
Italy. In 1604 he published a major work on embryology.
20 October 1524, Thomas Linacre, physician to King Henry VII
and VIII and founder of the Royal
College of Physicians in 1518, died.
31 December 1514, Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius was born. In
1543 he published De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Structure of the Human
Body)
2 August 1512, Alessandro Achillini, Italian anatomist, (born
29 October 1453 in Bologna) died in Bologna.
29 September 1511, Physician Michael Servetus was born in
Villanueva de Sixena, Spain.
24 September 1501, Girolamo Cardan, Italian physician, was born
(died 21 September 1576).
17 January 1501, Leonhard Fuchs, German physician, was born
(died 10 May 1566)
15 May 1482, Paolo Toscanelli, Italian physician, died in
Florence
29 October 1463, �Alessandro
Achillini, Italian anatomist, (died 2 August 1512 in Bologna) was
born in Bologna.
370 BCE. Death of the great
physician Hippocrates, born ca. 460
BC.