Revisiting the 'She Doctor' Panic of 1869 | Undark Magazine
“Preston remained unfazed. After another 13 years of persistence the hospital finally gave in again. Now, Ann and her students would test the waters a second time with a new crop of students. And the male students did their best to trouble that water.”
Helen M. Free and Alfred Free | Science History Institute
“Helen and Alfred went beyond testing for glucose and developed other strips for testing levels of key indicators of disease. Once they achieved success with a number of different test strips, they turned their attention to combining more than one test on a single strip.”
The Doctor Who Challenged the Unicorn Myth | Wellcome Collection
“I do not believe in the existence of unicorns and therefore the remedy of the horn of the unicorns cannot be real. Some said it looked like a horse, others said it looked like a donkey, others claimed it looked like an elephant. Some claim that there is more than one unicorn species.”
Your Friendly Neighborhood Inoculator | Lapham's Quarterly
“Daniel Sutton's book is a remarkable account of a clinician scientist at work. His many detailed observations and experiments may be unique in 18th century medicine. His investigation of the role of the skin in inoculation is one of the very first systematic studies of the pathogenesis of a disease process. Yet no one remembers him. Sutton made a serious mistake by publishing his book too late. He procrastinated.”
Boylston A. (2012). Daniel Sutton, a forgotten 18th century clinician scientist. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 105(2), 85–87. https://doi.org/10.1258/jrsm.2012.12k001
The Pioneering Surgeons Who Cleaned up Filthy Hospitals | BBC
“Lister is often referred to as the father of modern surgery, because he laid the foundations for future surgical and operative care – to think that such a step change in surgery occurred in the hospital where I work is phenomenal.”
Claude Bernard | French Physiologist | 1813-1878
“Reasoning will always be correct when applied to accurate notions and precise facts; but it can lead only to error when the notions or facts on which it rests were originally tainted with error or inaccuracy. That is why experimentation, or the art of securing rigorous and well-defined experiments, is the practical basis and, in a way, the executive branch of the experimental method as applied to medicine.”
Casimir Funk Introduced us to Vitamins | COSMOS Magazine
“A century later, although we may find limitations in Casimir’s theory, this does not detract from his genius, or his influence on medical thinking and his role in founding the vitamin industry.”
The History of Cheating Death: A Timeline of Cryonics | BBC Science Focus
“In the 1960s and 1970s, cryonics pioneers struggle to maintain the temperature of their frozen patients. Bedford is the only person frozen in this era who remains frozen today.”
The Doctor by Gerard Dou | Book Excerpt
“The physician, in the act of examining the urine, is depicted in many manuscripts, dating as far back as the early fourteenth century, and the subject becomes still more common among the wood- featured cuts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from which period it became a popular subject among artists of repute. Pictures representing the physician, the apothecary or the charlatan in the act of diagnosing the disease of a patient from his urine glass are apparently innumerable.”
The Dr. Strange of the American Revolution | Nautilus Blog
“Rush was a founder of American psychiatry. As a scientist, he was fascinated by mental illness; as a doctor, he was horrified by its treatment. Where most saw the workings of God or demons in the manners of the mentally ill, Rush saw malfunctioning parts. It was no sin to be deranged. The mentally afflicted deserved sympathy and sophisticated care.”
A Brief History of Ventilation | Wellcome Collection
“Today, medical professionals would recognise this technique as a tracheotomy. Vesalius’s experiment demonstrated the power of mechanical ventilation – though it would not be incorporated into widespread medical practice for several more centuries. This was partly due to the fact that doctors did not yet fully understand the purpose of respiration.”
Sicko Doctors | The Public Domain Review
“To understand why this was the case, we might take a closer look at the above-excerpted review, which uses a metaphorical doctor to evoke a real ethical question that obsessed Americans at the time: the appropriate way to relate to other people’s suffering.“
The Fascinating History of Clinical Trials | The Conversation
“These clinical trials largely fall into two groups. With observational studies, researchers follow a group of people to see what happens to them. With experimental studies, people are assigned to treatments, then followed.
These study designs have come about from centuries of people trying out different ways of treating people.”
“Invisible Little Worms” Athanasius Kircher’s Study of the Plague | The Public Domain Review
“Although the epidemic continued for more than a year, many of these tactics did help prevent the spread of the disease. The effects of the plague in Rome were much less devastating than in Naples — only about fifteen thousand people died. But living through it was frightening. One figure who did: the fairly eccentric, extremely prolific Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher.”
The Chloroquine Chronicles: A History of the Drug That Conquered the World | PRI
“Looking for a treatment for the disease, priests from the Jesuit Roman Catholic order set out on a scientific expedition and mission, traveling as far as the Andean region of South America. It was there that they found the cinchona plant. “