59 Fun Facts About Medical History

Which Greek physician from Kos is called the "Father of Medicine"?

Hippocrates, born on Kos around 460 BC, is traditionally called the Father of Medicine, yet most of the sixty or so works that carry his name were probably written by others.

The four humours were blood, phlegm and two kinds of which fluid?

Bile came in two kinds, yellow and black; too much black bile was blamed for gloom, which is why 'melancholy' comes from the Greek for black bile.

Before serving Rome's emperors, Galen learned to treat severe wounds as chief physician to whom in Pergamon?

Gladiators: from 157 Galen patched up the troop kept by Pergamon's high priest, a rare look inside living bodies at a time when Roman custom barred human dissection, before he moved to Rome and the emperors' court.

Who compiled The Canon of Medicine, the 11th-century encyclopaedia that Europe's medical schools taught from for centuries?

Ibn Sina (Avicenna) made the Canon so central to Europe's medical teaching that the rebel doctor Paracelsus is said to have burned a copy in public in 1527.

The oldest known surgical treatise on trauma, written around 1600 BC, comes from which civilisation?

Ancient Egypt: the Edwin Smith Papyrus, thought to copy a far older text, works through injuries from the head downward with an examination, diagnosis and outlook for each, where other medical papyri lean on spells.

Sushruta is called the father of plastic surgery largely for describing which operation?

Rebuilding a cut-off nose: the Sushruta Samhita describes shaping a new one from a flap of the patient's own skin, an operation in demand because noses were cut off as a punishment.

Trepanning, one of the oldest surgical procedures known, involves doing what?

Drilling a hole in the skull is trepanning, from the Greek trypanon, a borer; healed trepanned skulls from the Neolithic show many patients survived the operation.

At which university was Vesalius a professor when he wrote De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543)?

Vesalius taught anatomy at Padua from 1537, basing the Fabrica on his own dissections; he then left to become physician to Emperor Charles V.

William Harvey's 1628 book De Motu Cordis was the first to describe in full what?

The circulation of the blood: Harvey measured how much the heart pumps and showed it was far more than the body could make afresh each hour, so the same blood had to be going round and round.

Ambroise Paré found gunshot wounds healed better with an egg-yolk ointment than with what standard treatment?

Boiling oil was poured into gunshot wounds, then thought to be poisoned; when Paré's supply ran out on campaign he dressed the rest with egg yolk, rose oil and turpentine, and found them healing better.

The red and white stripes of a barber's pole recall which practice once carried out by barber-surgeons?

Bloodletting was a barber-surgeon's trade: the red stripe stands for blood and the white for bandages, and the pole itself is said to recall the stick patients gripped to make their veins stand out.

Which US president asked to be bled for a throat infection, a treatment that likely hastened his death?

George Washington woke with a swollen throat in December 1799 and had his overseer bleed him before any doctor arrived; his physicians went on bleeding him through the day, and he died that night.

In 1796 Edward Jenner tested his new vaccine on James Phipps, the eight-year-old son of his what?

Gardener: on 14 May 1796 Jenner inoculated James Phipps, his gardener's son, with matter from a pox sore on milkmaid Sarah Nelmes's hand, then tried to give the boy the real disease, without effect.

The word "vaccine" derives from the Latin for which animal?

Cow: the Latin is vacca; Jenner named cowpox variolae vaccinae in 1798, and Pasteur later stretched 'vaccine' to cover every such inoculation in Jenner's honour.

Which disease did the WHO declare eradicated in 1980?

Smallpox: the last natural case was in Somalia in 1977, yet the final cases came a year later, when the virus escaped from a laboratory in England.

William Morton, who first publicly demonstrated ether anaesthesia in 1846, was by profession a what?

Dentist William Morton had used ether to extract a tooth painlessly from Ebenezer Frost on 30 September 1846 before the public demonstration at Massachusetts General Hospital on 16 October.

Which Scottish obstetrician first demonstrated chloroform anaesthesia in humans in 1847?

James Young Simpson tried chloroform on himself and two assistants at his Edinburgh home in November 1847, and before the year was out he was using it to ease childbirth.

Which monarch was given chloroform by John Snow during the births of her last two children in the 1850s?

Queen Victoria received chloroform from John Snow for the births of Prince Leopold in 1853 and Princess Beatrice in 1857, and her approval made anaesthesia in childbirth respectable.

Where was the public water pump John Snow had disabled during the 1854 Soho cholera outbreak?

Broad Street's pump lost its handle the day after Snow took his findings to the parish board; the well was later found to lie a few feet from a leaking cesspit.

In 1847 Ignaz Semmelweis cut deaths on his maternity ward by making doctors do what?

Wash their hands in chlorinated lime, Semmelweis ordered, and deaths on his ward fell from about 18 percent to under 2; most colleagues still rejected his findings, and he died in an asylum in 1865.

Which chemical did Joseph Lister use to pioneer antiseptic surgery at Glasgow Royal Infirmary?

Carbolic acid was already used to deodorise sewage, which gave Lister the idea of trying it on wounds in 1865; the mouthwash Listerine was later named after him.

Pasteur gave his rabies vaccine to nine-year-old Joseph Meister in 1885 after the boy had been what?

Bitten by a rabid dog in Alsace, Meister reached Paris on 6 July 1885; Pasteur, who was no licensed doctor, had a physician give the boy 13 injections, and he never developed rabies.

Robert Koch helped found bacteriology in 1876 by proving that a bacterium causes which disease of farm animals?

Anthrax: working at home, Koch infected mice with the bacillus taken from dead farm animals and traced its life cycle; he went on to find the tuberculosis and cholera germs.

Emil von Behring won a Nobel Prize in Medicine for a blood-serum cure for which childhood disease?

Diphtheria: Behring found that blood serum from an animal immunised against the toxin could cure an infected one, and by 1900 horses were being used to make the antitoxin.

René Laennec made the first stethoscope in 1816 after listening to a young woman's heart through what?

A rolled-up tube of paper let Laennec hear her heart more clearly than his bare ear ever had, and spared him pressing his head to her chest; he then built the idea into a hollow wooden tube.

Wilhelm Röntgen, who discovered X-rays in 1895, received which award in 1901?

The first Nobel Prize in Physics went to Röntgen in 1901 for the rays he found in his Würzburg laboratory; he never patented X-rays, wanting everyone to benefit from them.

Which scientist developed mobile X-ray units for French field hospitals in the First World War?

Marie Curie, physics laureate in 1903 and chemistry laureate in 1911, equipped some 20 mobile X-ray vans nicknamed 'petites Curies' and drove one to the front herself.

Which blood factor, the 'positive' or 'negative' in a blood type, did Karl Landsteiner identify with Alexander Wiener?

The Rhesus factor takes its name from the rhesus monkeys whose blood was used in the tests; a mismatch between mother and baby turned out to explain a deadly anaemia of newborns.

Willem Einthoven won the 1924 Nobel Prize for developing which heart device?

The electrocardiograph grew from Einthoven's string galvanometer, built because the earlier electrometer was so sluggish that every tracing needed mathematical correction; his wave labels P, Q, R, S and T are still used.

Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolated insulin in 1921 at which university?

At the University of Toronto, in J.J.R. Macleod's lab, Banting and Best extracted insulin in summer 1921; Banting shared his 1923 Nobel money with Best, whom the committee had passed over.

Jonas Salk's vaccine against which disease was declared a success in April 1955?

Polio: asked on television who owned the patent, Salk said the people did, adding 'Could you patent the sun?'; he never made money from the vaccine.

The first successful human kidney transplant, performed in Boston in 1954, was between which pair?

Identical twins Ronald and Richard Herrick shared the same tissue, so Richard's body did not reject his brother's kidney; their surgeon, Joseph Murray, won a Nobel Prize in 1990.

Christiaan Barnard performed the first human heart transplant on 3 December 1967 in which city?

At Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, Barnard gave Louis Washkansky the heart of Denise Darvall; Washkansky lived 18 days before pneumonia, abetted by anti-rejection drugs, killed him.

Louise Brown, born in England on 25 July 1978, was the first person conceived by what method?

In vitro fertilisation was developed by Robert Edwards, Patrick Steptoe and Jean Purdy on private money after Britain's Medical Research Council refused to fund it; Edwards won the 2010 Nobel Prize.

Geneva Medical College admitted Elizabeth Blackwell in 1847 after which group voted yes, treating it as a joke?

The student body: the faculty passed the decision to the all-male class, expecting a no, and the men voted her in as a prank; in 1849 she became the first woman to earn an American medical degree.

Florence Nightingale became 'The Lady with the Lamp' nursing wounded soldiers in which war?

The Crimean War took Nightingale to the Scutari barracks hospital in November 1854, where her night rounds earned the nickname; she later pioneered statistical graphics on army mortality.

Which medical classic of 1858 was illustrated by Henry Vandyke Carter?

Gray's Anatomy was surgeon Henry Gray's idea for a clear textbook that students could afford; Carter drew the illustrations, yet Gray had his own name put on the spine and paid him no royalties.

Why is the 1918 influenza pandemic misleadingly called the "Spanish flu"?

Spain's uncensored press reported it freely because the country was neutral, while nations at war hushed up their outbreaks; Spaniards, for their part, called it the 'French flu'.

"Typhoid Mary" Mallon, quarantined on North Brother Island in New York, worked as what?

A cook for wealthy New York families, Mallon was freed in 1910 on a promise to give up cooking, then took the name Mary Brown and cooked at a maternity hospital, where typhoid broke out again.

The Black Death of 1346-53 was caused by which bacterium?

Yersinia pestis, spread mainly by flea bites, is named after Alexandre Yersin, who tracked the bacillus down during a plague outbreak in Hong Kong in 1894, five centuries after the Black Death.

Marshall and Warren won the 2005 Nobel Prize for showing which bacterium causes most peptic ulcers?

Helicobacter pylori overturned the belief that stress and lifestyle caused ulcers; to prove the point, Barry Marshall drank a broth of the bacteria and came down with gastritis.

Which Dutch draper first saw bacteria through lenses he made himself?

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek had no university training and knew no language but Dutch, yet his letters describing the animalcules he saw won him election to the Royal Society in 1680.

Thalidomide was first sold in the 1950s as an over-the-counter sedative in which country?

West Germany's Chemie Grünenthal sold it as Contergan without prescription; FDA reviewer Frances Kelsey refused to approve it without better safety evidence, which kept it off the American market.

Godfrey Hounsfield shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Medicine for developing which imaging technique?

CT scanning grew from a scanner Hounsfield built at EMI and tried out on bullocks' brains before any patient; he shared the prize with Allan Cormack, who had worked out the maths on his own.

Salicin, the natural compound that led chemists to aspirin, comes from the bark of which tree?

Willow bark's salicin gave chemists salicylic acid, which eased pain but was harsh on the stomach, so in 1897 Bayer's Felix Hoffmann made a gentler acetyl version, sold from 1899 as Aspirin.

What is true of "First, do no harm" and the ancient Greek oath sworn by physicians?

It is not in the oath, which only vows to abstain from intentional wrong-doing and harm; the nearest ancient wording, to do good or to do no harm, comes from another Greek medical text, the Epidemics.

Before founding psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud championed which drug as a cure for morphine addiction?

Cocaine won Freud's praise from 1884: he gave it to a close friend dependent on morphine, who ended up addicted to both drugs, and the episode dented Freud's medical reputation for a time.

Louis Pasteur devised pasteurisation in the 1860s to stop which drink from turning sour?

Wine: Pasteur showed that gentle heating killed the microbes that soured it and patented the method in 1865; only later was the process extended to milk.

Which idea replaced the old belief that diseases are spread by "bad air"?

Germ theory won acceptance through Pasteur, Lister and Koch; once Koch tracked down the tuberculosis and cholera bacteria in the 1880s, doctors could hunt a specific microbe behind each infection.

Al-Zahrawi's thirty-part medical encyclopaedia from tenth-century Córdoba is famous for its drawings of some 200 what?

Surgical instruments fill the last part of his Kitab al-Tasrif; once translated into Latin in the 12th century, it stood for nearly 500 years as Europe's leading textbook on surgery.

The World Health Organization's emblem shows a snake coiled round the staff of which Greek god?

Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, carried the single-snake staff that the WHO set over the UN map when it chose its emblem in 1948; the two-snake caduceus of Hermes is a common mix-up.

Which legendary ruler gives his name to the Inner Canon, Chinese medicine's founding text?

The Yellow Emperor puts the questions and his ministers, chiefly Qibo, answer them, but he is a figure of myth: the text was compiled by unknown authors some two thousand years ago and credited to him.

Which simple treatment has been used widely since the 1970s against cholera and other diarrhoeal infections?

Oral rehydration salts proved themselves in 1971, when cholera struck refugees of the Bangladesh war and drips ran out: given by mouth, the solution cut the death rate from 30 percent to 3.6.

At which university did Karl Landsteiner discover the ABO blood group system in 1901?

At the University of Vienna's pathological-anatomy institute, Landsteiner mixed blood cells and serum from different people in 1901 and saw which combinations clumped, defining groups A, B and C (later O).

Mondino de Luzzi wrote his pioneering dissection manual in 1316 in which Italian city, home of Europe's oldest university?

At Bologna, Mondino dissected human bodies before his students, bringing the practice back into medical teaching after centuries; yet his manual still followed Galen's errors and stayed standard until Vesalius.

In 1747 naval surgeon James Lind ran an early clinical trial showing that what cured sailors of scurvy?

Citrus fruit: Lind gave pairs of sick sailors on HMS Salisbury different remedies, and only the pair fed oranges and lemons recovered quickly; even so, the Navy took until 1795 to adopt the cure.

Which Civil War nurse, nicknamed the "Angel of the Battlefield", founded the American Red Cross in 1881?

Clara Barton, a former Patent Office clerk, won permission to carry supplies through the battle lines herself; after the war she ran a bureau that searched for missing soldiers.

In which Abbasid city, the heart of the Arabic translation movement, did Hunayn ibn Ishaq put Galen's works into Arabic?

Baghdad was where Hunayn, a Nestorian Christian physician, and his students turned Greek medicine into Syriac and Arabic; his versions of Galen matter all the more because most of the Greek originals are lost.

Whose cancer cells, taken without her knowledge in Baltimore in 1951, became the first immortal human cell line?

Henrietta Lacks died that year, but her 'HeLa' cells kept dividing in laboratories around the world; her family did not learn of them until the 1970s.