60 Fun Facts About Medical History

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

Hippocrates, born on Kos around 460 BC, is credited with prognosis, bedside observation and the first description of clubbed fingers, which are called Hippocratic fingers.

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

Bile came in two kinds, yellow and black; with blood and phlegm they made the four humours, and an excess or shortage of any one was thought to cause illness.

Galen based most of his anatomy on dissecting which animals, human dissection being forbidden in Rome?

Barbary apes (macaques) were his main model because Roman law forbade human dissection, which is why Galen's anatomy carried errors, such as a five-lobed liver, into the Renaissance.

Who compiled The Canon of Medicine, the 1025 encyclopaedia used as a European textbook into the 18th century?

Ibn Sina (Avicenna) completed the Canon in 1025; it was translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona in the 12th century and set the standard in medieval Europe and the Islamic world.

The Edwin Smith Papyrus, the oldest known surgical treatise on trauma, comes from which civilisation?

Ancient Egypt produced it around 1600 BC, probably copying an Old Kingdom original; it is named after Edwin Smith, the American dealer who bought it in Luxor in 1862.

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

Many patients were criminals whose noses had been cut off as 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, pumped round the body by the heart, was Harvey's thesis; the 72-page treatise was printed in Frankfurt in 1628 to reach the city's book fair.

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

Boiling oil was poured into gunshot wounds to cauterize them; at the siege of Turin in 1537 Paré ran out, used a yolk, rose-oil and turpentine salve, and found those patients fared 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 original pole carried brass basins for leeches and for the blood drawn.

Which US president asked to be bled heavily for a throat infection, likely hastening his death?

George Washington was bled of several pints of blood in a single day for a throat infection in December 1799 and died that night at Mount Vernon, aged 67.

In 1796 Edward Jenner tested his smallpox 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 exposed the boy to smallpox without effect.

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

Jenner coined Variolae vaccinae, "pustules of the cow", for cowpox in 1798.

In which year did the WHO certify smallpox as eradicated?

The World Health Assembly declared smallpox eradicated on 8 May 1980; the last natural case was Ali Maow Maalin in Somalia in October 1977, and rinderpest followed in 2011.

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 colleagues at his Edinburgh home on 4 November 1847, with the drug supplied by local pharmacists Duncan, Flockhart & Co.

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?

The Broad Street pump's handle was removed on 8 September 1854 after Snow mapped deaths around it; the outbreak killed 616 people and undermined the miasma theory.

In 1847 Semmelweis cut maternal deaths at Vienna General Hospital by making doctors do what?

Wash their hands in chlorinated lime was the order from May 1847; the doctors' ward death rate fell from around 10 percent toward the midwives' level, yet Semmelweis died in an asylum in 1865.

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

Carbolic acid is modern-day phenol; the mouthwash Listerine was later named in his honour.

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 on 4 July 1885, Meister was brought to Paris two days later; he received 13 inoculations over 11 days and survived.

Robert Koch's 1876 discovery of the bacterium behind which disease is considered the birth of bacteriology?

Anthrax: in 1876 Koch showed Bacillus anthracis caused the disease by growing it and reproducing the infection in mice; he later identified the tuberculosis and cholera germs and won the 1905 Nobel Prize.

Who won the first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, in 1901, for diphtheria serum therapy?

Emil von Behring received the inaugural 1901 prize for serum therapy against diphtheria, then a major killer of children, and was hailed as a 'saviour of children'.

René Laennec invented the stethoscope in 1816 partly thanks to which hobby?

Carving wooden flutes was a pastime that suited Laennec to turning his own instrument; in 1816 he rolled a paper tube to listen to a stout young woman's chest, then made a wooden one.

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 discovered in Würzburg in November 1895; he donated the prize money to his university, and element 111 is roentgenium.

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.

Besides the main blood groups, which later discovery with Alexander Wiener bears Karl Landsteiner's mark?

He also co-discovered the polio virus in 1909 and won the Nobel Prize in 1930.

Willem Einthoven won the 1924 Nobel Prize for inventing which diagnostic device?

The electrocardiograph earned Einthoven the 1924 prize; his string galvanometer of 1901-03 gave the first practical recordings, and he named the P, Q, R, S and T waves.

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.

At which London institution did Alexander Fleming discover penicillin in 1928?

At St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, Fleming noticed in September 1928 that a mould had killed staphylococci on a plate; he shared the 1945 Nobel Prize with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain.

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

Polio: the field trial results were announced at Ann Arbor on 12 April 1955, after Salk had spent about seven years on the killed-virus vaccine at the University of Pittsburgh.

The 1954 first successful human kidney transplant was between what kind of donor and recipient?

Identical twins Ronald and Richard Herrick were donor and recipient; Joseph Murray performed the operation at Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital on 23 December 1954, and Richard lived eight more years.

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, developed by Patrick Steptoe, Robert Edwards and Jean Purdy, produced Louise Brown at Oldham General Hospital; Edwards received the 2010 Nobel Prize for the work.

For what reason did Geneva Medical College admit Elizabeth Blackwell, the first US woman medical graduate?

The male students voted her in as a joke in 1847 when the faculty put her application to them; Blackwell graduated top of her class in January 1849.

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.

Gray's Anatomy, the classic anatomy textbook, was first published in London in which year?

Henry Gray wrote it and Henry Vandyke Carter drew the illustrations; the first edition appeared in London in 1858, and Gray died of smallpox three years later.

The 1918 influenza pandemic is misleadingly called "Spanish flu" for what reason?

Neutral Spain's papers reported it while wartime censors elsewhere did not, so the illness looked Spanish; the first documented US cases were at Camp Funston, Kansas, in March 1918, and the toll was 17 to 100 million.

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

A cook for wealthy New York households, Mallon was an asymptomatic carrier; she was isolated on North Brother Island from 1907 to 1910 and again from 1915 until her death in 1938.

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

Yersinia pestis, carried by rat fleas, caused the plague; the bacterium was identified by Alexandre Yersin in Hong Kong in 1894, and the English name 'Black Death' dates only from the 1750s.

Marshall and Warren's 2005 Nobel Prize was for showing most peptic ulcers are caused by what?

Helicobacter pylori overturned decades of doctrine blaming stress and stomach acid.

In which decade did Antonie van Leeuwenhoek begin exploring microbial life with his microscopes?

In the 1670s, with hand-ground single lenses, the Delft draper began reporting 'animalcules' to the Royal Society, describing protozoa in 1674 and bacteria in 1676.

Thalidomide was first marketed in 1957 as an over-the-counter drug in which country?

West Germany's Chemie Grünenthal launched it as Contergan in October 1957, sold without prescription; FDA reviewer Frances Kelsey kept it off the US market over safety doubts.

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

CT scanning, co-developed with Allan Cormack, produced its first clinical brain scan at Atkinson Morley Hospital in London in 1971; the Hounsfield scale of radiodensity is named after him.

Aspirin's precursor, salicin, used for 2,400 years, comes from the bark of which tree?

Willow bark, chewed for pain since ancient Greece, yields salicin; Bayer chemist Felix Hoffmann produced a stable acetylsalicylic acid in 1897, sold as Aspirin from 1899.

What is true of 'First, do no harm', the phrase often attributed to the Hippocratic Oath?

It does not appear in the original text; the Greek oath promises to 'abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm', and the Latin tag primum non nocere is a much later coinage.

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, was by training what kind of doctor?

A neurologist by training, Freud qualified in medicine in 1881, studied with Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris in 1885-86 and published a monograph on aphasia in 1891 before turning to psychoanalysis.

What is the technique of briefly heating milk and wine to kill spoilage microbes called?

Pasteurisation, devised by Louis Pasteur in the 1860s to keep wine from souring, heats liquids briefly, to about 60 degrees Celsius, and was later applied to beer and milk.

Which idea gradually replaced humorism as the explanation for sickness and made real cures possible?

Germ theory, the idea that specific microbes cause specific diseases, displaced the humours after Pasteur's fermentation studies, Koch's postulates and Lister's antiseptic surgery in the 1860s-80s.

Al-Zahrawi, the 10th-century Andalusian physician, wrote which thirty-volume medical encyclopaedia?

Kitab al-Tasrif, completed around the year 1000, devotes its final volume to surgery and illustrates some 200 instruments; its Latin translation guided European surgeons for centuries.

In which year was the World Health Organization founded as a United Nations agency?

The WHO constitution came into force on 7 April 1948, a date marked each year as World Health Day; its first World Health Assembly met in Geneva that June.

The Huangdi Neijing, the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon, is the foundational text of which medicine?

Chinese medicine rests on it: the Inner Canon, compiled over the last centuries BCE and into the Han dynasty, sets out yin-yang, the five phases and the channels of qi.

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

Oral rehydration salts, a measured mix of glucose and salts in clean water, were proven in Bangladesh's 1971 refugee camps and have been credited with saving tens of millions of lives.

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 the serum and cells of his staff in 1901 and saw which samples agglutinated, defining groups A, B and C (later O).

Mondino de Luzzi wrote the first anatomy textbook based on human dissection in which city?

At Bologna, Mondino de Luzzi performed public dissections and wrote the Anathomia in 1316, the first modern manual based on human bodies; it stayed a standard text for two centuries.

Which ancient Egyptian medical text is the oldest written source to mention enemas?

Egyptian medicine even had a specialist for such treatments, the Iri, or 'Shepherd of the Anus'.

Where did Theodor Fliedner found the first German nursing schools in 1836?

Kaiserswerth, near Düsseldorf, was where Fliedner and his wife Friederike opened the deaconess institute in 1836; Florence Nightingale trained there for three months in 1851.

Which Nestorian Christian scholar translated 129 of Galen's works into Arabic?

Hunayn ibn Ishaq, a Nestorian Christian physician in Abbasid Baghdad, led the ninth-century translation movement and listed 129 Galenic works rendered into Syriac and Arabic by his school.

Which Sassanid academy was the ancient world's most important medical centre in the 6th-7th centuries?

Gondeshapur, in Khuzestan, drew Greek, Syriac and Indian physicians under Khosrow I; its scholars later staffed the Abbasid court in Baghdad and carried Greek medicine into the Islamic world.