99 Fun Facts About Medicine

Which ancient Greek physician is widely regarded as the 'Father of Medicine'?

Hippocrates, born around 460 BC on the island of Kos, is credited with separating the practice of medicine from magic and superstition, advocating for observation and a scientific approach to disease.

What is the study of the body's structure called, from the Greek for 'dissection'?

Anatomy is the study of the body's structure. The Greek anatomē means 'dissection', from a verb meaning 'to cut up', because the subject was learned by dissecting bodies.

Which French physician invented the stethoscope in 1816 while working at the Hôpital Necker in Paris?

René Laennec pioneered listening to the chest to diagnose disease, a practice the stethoscope made routine.

What is the outermost layer of the human skin called?

The epidermis sits over the dermis and hypodermis, keeping infection out and regulating water loss from the body.

Which organ, the largest inside the body, both detoxifies your blood and makes the bile that breaks down fat?

The liver handles over 500 jobs. Its bile is an alkaline fluid of cholesterol and bile acids that emulsifies dietary fat.

Which imaging technique uses strong magnetic fields and radio waves to picture soft tissue, with no ionising radiation?

MRI nudges the body's hydrogen atoms with radio waves inside a strong magnetic field and reads the signals back, which is what separates it from CT and PET scans.

Edward Jenner's pioneering vaccine, the world's first, targeted which disease?

Smallpox, the target of that first vaccine, has since been eradicated worldwide.

Which is the largest artery in the human body?

The aorta branches upwards immediately after leaving the heart, then descends to the abdomen, where it forks into the two common iliac arteries.

What does a doctor mean by hypertension?

Hypertension means high blood pressure: persistently elevated pressure in the arteries, which forces the heart to work harder with every beat and damages blood vessels over time.

Which Scottish physician discovered penicillin in 1928, as a crude extract of a Penicillium mould?

Alexander Fleming only coined the name penicillin on 7 March 1929, on realising the mould had antibacterial properties.

Which hormone did Banting and Best first isolate in Toronto in 1921?

Insulin. Banting's idea was to tie off the pancreatic duct so the enzyme-making tissue withered while the islets of Langerhans survived, letting him and Best extract insulin from dog pancreases in 1921.

Which German physicist at Wurzburg in 1895 produced the radiation that bears his name in many languages?

Wilhelm Rontgen discovered X-rays at Würzburg in November 1895; German and several other languages call them Röntgen rays. He received the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901, and element 111, roentgenium, honours him.

Which South African surgeon carried out the world's first human-to-human heart transplant in 1967?

Christiaan Barnard performed the operation at Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town, on 3 December 1967. The recipient, Louis Washkansky, regained consciousness and could talk but died 18 days later of pneumonia, his immune system suppressed by anti-rejection drugs.

What had Karl Landsteiner found in 1901 when he noticed samples from two people clump together on contact?

He had discovered the blood groups: the clumping came from agglutinins in the serum, and he labelled the three groups he found A, B and C, the last later renamed O. AB was identified a year later by his colleagues.

Which Hungarian physician cut maternal deaths in Vienna in 1847 by making doctors wash their hands?

Ignaz Semmelweis, working in Vienna's maternity clinic, cut deaths from puerperal fever by making doctors wash in chlorinated lime. Colleagues rejected the idea; he died in an asylum in 1865, two weeks after a beating by guards.

Whose 1628 treatise De Motu Cordis first described in full how the heart pumps blood around the body?

William Harvey, physician to James I and Charles I, showed that the heart pumps blood in a continuous circuit. He could not see the capillaries linking arteries to veins; Marcello Malpighi found them with a microscope in 1661.

Who was the first human given Louis Pasteur's rabies vaccine, on 6 July 1885?

The boy received thirteen inoculations over eleven days after being mauled by a rabid dog and survived. He later worked as caretaker of the Pasteur Institute for decades.

Which substance did Joseph Lister introduce in the 1860s to sterilise instruments, wounds and hands?

Carbolic acid is what chemists now call phenol; Lister got the idea from its use to deodorise sewage. Listerine mouthwash was later named in his honour, though he had nothing to do with it.

What operation was performed at Morton's 1846 public demonstration of ether anaesthesia?

The patient was Edward Gilbert Abbott, and the operating theatre is now preserved as the Ether Dome. Morton, a dentist, spent years afterwards fighting over credit and money for the discovery.

What did Barry Marshall famously do in 1984 to prove a bacterium, not stress, caused stomach ulcers?

Marshall drank a broth of cultured Helicobacter pylori taken from a patient and developed gastritis within days, satisfying Koch's postulates. He and Robin Warren shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Which German bacteriologist identified the agents of TB, cholera and anthrax and set four postulates?

Robert Koch announced the tuberculosis bacillus on 24 March 1882, a date marked as World TB Day. His four postulates for linking a microbe to a disease, set out in 1890, became a foundation of microbiology.

Whose 1543 De humani corporis fabrica earned him the title of founder of modern anatomy?

Andreas Vesalius was 28 when the Fabrica appeared in Basel in 1543; its woodcuts came from Titian's workshop in Venice. Its dissection-based drawings overturned errors Galen had carried over from animal anatomy.

Paul Ehrlich's Salvarsan (1910) was the first effective medicinal treatment for which disease?

Salvarsan, an arsenic compound, was the first effective drug against syphilis; it was number 606 in Ehrlich's screening programme, hence its early nickname. Ehrlich called a drug that kills only its target a Zauberkugel, or magic bullet.

What passed through railroad foreman Phineas Gage's skull in an 1848 accident in Cavendish, Vermont?

The rod entered below his left cheekbone and exited through the top of his head, and he survived another eleven years. The iron is on display at Harvard's Warren Anatomical Museum.

What is the maximum possible Apgar score for a newborn?

Each of appearance, pulse, grimace, activity and respiration scores 0 to 2, giving a maximum of 10; babies are checked at one and five minutes after birth. The criteria spell Virginia Apgar's surname, a backronym coined a decade later.

On the Glasgow Coma Scale, published in 1974 by Teasdale and Jennett, what is the lowest possible score?

Eye, verbal and motor responses each score at least 1, so even a completely unresponsive patient scores 3. A fully alert patient scores 15.

In which country was the last natural case of smallpox recorded, in 1977?

Ali Maow Maalin, a hospital cook in Merca, Somalia, fell ill in October 1977, recovered, and later spent years as a polio vaccination volunteer. Two laboratory-linked cases in Birmingham, England, followed in 1978.

The Rh factor in blood typing takes its name from which animal used in the original experiments?

Landsteiner and Wiener found the antigen in 1937 by injecting rhesus monkey red cells into rabbits, hence 'Rh'. The human antigen later proved different from the monkey one, but the name stuck; about 15% of Europeans are Rh-negative.

Broca's area, linked to speech production, sits in which lobe of the brain, usually in the left hemisphere?

Paul Broca located the region in the left frontal lobe in 1861 through patient Louis Victor Leborgne, known as 'Tan' because that syllable was all he could say. Leborgne's brain was preserved in a Paris museum.

FDA reviewer Frances Oldham Kelsey was honoured by JFK in 1962 for refusing to approve which drug?

Kelsey withheld approval of thalidomide, pressing its US licensee for safety data it could not supply, so America was largely spared the birth-defect tragedy seen in Europe; JFK gave her the President's Award in August 1962.

What did Stanley Prusiner name the protein-only infectious agent that won him the 1997 Nobel Prize?

Prions cause mad cow disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and kuru, and the idea was so heretical that many scientists dismissed it for years. They cannot be destroyed by normal sterilisation.

Why did the first successful human kidney transplant, in 1954, work without anti-rejection drugs?

Ronald Herrick gave a kidney to his twin Richard, who lived another eight years. Murray shared the 1990 Nobel Prize with E. Donnall Thomas, a pioneer of bone-marrow transplantation.

Where does the holiday-sounding eponym for haemophilia B, a factor IX deficiency, come from?

The 1952 report happened to appear in the Christmas edition of the British Medical Journal. The disease is a deficiency of clotting factor IX, distinct from the factor VIII deficiency of haemophilia A.

Legionnaires' disease got its name from a 1976 outbreak at an American Legion convention in which city?

The July 1976 outbreak struck the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia: 182 conventioneers fell ill and 29 died. The bacterium, Legionella pneumophila, was identified only in January 1977.

'Typhoid Mary' Mallon spread the disease through which job?

Mary Mallon worked as a cook, infecting household after household with typhoid; she was confined on North Brother Island in New York's East River for about 26 years in total, until her death in 1938.

In 1939 the Nazi government forced Prontosil discoverer Gerhard Domagk to do what?

He was arrested by the Gestapo and made to sign a letter refusing the award. He finally collected his medal in 1947, but the prize money had by then reverted to the foundation.

Which is the only human bone not connected to any other bone?

The hyoid, a horseshoe-shaped bone in the neck, hangs from muscles and ligaments between the chin and the thyroid cartilage and anchors the tongue; it is often fractured in strangulation, so forensic pathologists check it closely.

The transplant drug ciclosporin was isolated in 1971 from what?

The fungus Tolypocladium inflatum turned up in soil samples collected in Norway and Wisconsin. Sandoz scientists were screening soil microbes for antibiotics and found an immune suppressant instead.

The deadliest natural substance known is a neurotoxic protein produced by which bacterium?

Botulinum toxin, made by Clostridium botulinum, is the most lethal natural substance known, with a lethal dose near a nanogram per kilogram; in minute doses the same toxin is sold as Botox to smooth wrinkles and treat muscle spasms.

The ring of arteries at the base of the brain is named after which 17th-century English physician?

Willis also coined the word 'neurology'. Only about a third of people actually have a complete, textbook-shaped circle; in the rest, some segment is missing or underdeveloped.

The islets of Langerhans, hormone-producing cell clusters discovered in 1869, are in which organ?

The islets of Langerhans lie in the pancreas, where their beta cells make insulin; Paul Langerhans described them in his 1869 Berlin doctoral thesis as a medical student, without knowing what they did.

Which cranial nerve, the tenth of twelve, has a Latin name meaning 'wandering'?

It runs from the brainstem down to the abdomen, slowing the heart and driving digestion. Electrical vagus-nerve stimulators are implanted to treat epilepsy and depression.

What did Jonas Salk reply in 1955 when asked on TV who owned his polio vaccine's patent?

Salk told Edward R. Murrow on See It Now: 'Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?' The vaccine was never patented; the March of Dimes had funded its development.

What was the name of Alois Alzheimer's first patient, a 51-year-old Frankfurt woman he began observing in 1901?

Auguste Deter, admitted to the Frankfurt asylum in November 1901, was the case Alzheimer presented at Tübingen in 1906 to an audience that asked no questions; her preserved brain slides were rediscovered in 1997.

Roughly how many bones does a newborn have, before fusion brings the adult total down to 206?

A newborn has around 270 bones, many of them partly cartilage; separate pieces such as the skull plates and the sacral and hip bones fuse during growth, leaving the adult total of 206.

What do mature human red blood cells lack, in order to leave maximum room for haemoglobin?

They are effectively sacks of haemoglobin; the red cells of most other vertebrates keep their nuclei.

Roughly what share of an adult's body weight is the 1.2 to 1.4 kg brain?

At 1.2 to 1.4 kg the brain is about 2% of a 70 kg adult's body weight, yet it uses roughly a fifth of resting energy and packs in some 86 billion neurons.

In a nephron, the tuft of capillaries where blood is filtered is called what?

The glomerulus is a knot of capillaries inside Bowman's capsule; filtration there is largely passive, driven by blood pressure in the capillaries, before reabsorption and secretion along the tubule.

How many pairs of cranial nerves are conventionally recognised, numbered with Roman numerals?

Twelve pairs of cranial nerves are numbered I to XII, from olfactory to hypoglossal; some anatomists count a thirteenth, the unpaired terminal nerve, and only the olfactory and optic nerves emerge from the cerebrum rather than the brainstem.

Which bone is the longest in the human body?

The femur, or thigh bone, runs from hip to knee and is roughly a quarter of a person's height, about 48 cm in an adult man; it is also the heaviest and one of the strongest bones.

The adrenal glands, which make adrenaline and cortisol, sit above which organs?

Each gland perches on top of one kidney in the retroperitoneum. Tumours arising from adrenal tissue are often found by accident on scans done for something else.

Which gland in the neck, just below the Adam's apple, is described as butterfly-shaped?

The thyroid wraps around the windpipe below the larynx, its two lobes joined by an isthmus; its hormones need iodine, and iodine deficiency is the leading preventable cause of intellectual disability worldwide.

The Ebola virus, first identified in 1976, takes its name from what?

Ebola is named after the Ebola River, which runs near Yambuku, the village in northern Zaire where the first recognised outbreak occurred in 1976; the 2013-16 West African epidemic was the largest on record.

The word 'vaccine' derives from the Latin name for which animal?

Edward Jenner coined Variolae vaccinae, 'smallpox of the cow', for cowpox in 1798. The protective effect of cowpox against smallpox gave the whole field its name.

Unlike Jonas Salk's injected vaccine, how was Albert Sabin's live attenuated one given?

Sabin's live attenuated vaccine was given by mouth, on a sugar cube or in drops, after he tested it on himself, his family and colleagues; cheap and easy to give, it became the workhorse of the global eradication campaign.

James Lind's 1747 experiment aboard HMS Salisbury tested six cures for which disease?

Lind split twelve scurvy-stricken sailors into six pairs, each given a different remedy from cider to vinegar; the two fed oranges and lemons recovered fastest, though the Royal Navy took until 1795 to issue citrus.

The iron lung, a tank ventilator, is most associated with epidemics of which disease?

Polio can paralyse the breathing muscles; the iron lung, introduced by Drinker and Shaw in 1928, breathes for the patient by changing the air pressure around the body, and vaccines plus modern ventilators made it almost obsolete.

The stapes, the smallest bone in the human body, is named for its resemblance to what?

The stapes, Latin for stirrup, is the innermost of the three middle-ear ossicles and passes vibrations to the oval window of the inner ear; its neighbours, the malleus and incus, are the hammer and anvil.

William Withering's 1785 study of digitalis traced the heart remedy to which plant?

Withering's 1785 An Account of the Foxglove traced a Shropshire folk cure for dropsy, the swelling of heart failure, to foxglove (Digitalis purpurea), whose glycosides digitoxin and digoxin take their names from the plant.

Felix Hoffmann first made pure, stable acetylsalicylic acid in 1897 for which firm?

The firm sold it as Aspirin. Willow bark, the folk source of salicylates, appears in Sumerian clay tablets and the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus thousands of years earlier.

Pfizer was seeking a drug for which condition in 1989 when it found sildenafil (Viagra)?

Pfizer's Sandwich laboratory developed sildenafil in 1989 as a treatment for angina, by relaxing blood vessels; it disappointed as a heart drug, but trial volunteers reported a striking side effect, and Viagra was approved in 1998.

Which lead dog on the final leg of the 1925 Nome serum run has a statue in Central Park?

Balto led Gunnar Kaasen's team on the last 55 miles into Nome, and his Central Park statue went up in December 1925; twenty mushers relayed the antitoxin 674 miles in under six days, and Togo's team ran farthest, 261 miles.

Imhotep, later deified as a god of medicine, served as chancellor to which Egyptian king?

Imhotep served Djoser of the Third Dynasty, around 2650 BC, and is credited with designing Djoser's step pyramid at Saqqara; almost nothing is known of him historically, and the physician legend grew over the following millennia.

John Snow curbed an 1854 Soho cholera outbreak by persuading the council to remove what?

Snow persuaded the St James's parish guardians to remove the Broad Street pump's handle on 8 September 1854 after mapping deaths clustered around it, though his microscope tests of the water proved nothing; it is a founding moment of epidemiology.

Quinine was first isolated in 1820 from the bark of which South American tree?

The tree is native to Peru, and the whole family of related compounds is called the cinchona alkaloids. Quinine's bitterness is why tonic water was invented.

The word 'placebo' comes from a Latin phrase meaning what?

Placebo is Latin for 'I shall please', the opening word of the medieval Vespers for the dead; its evil twin is the nocebo, 'I shall harm', when expecting a bad effect from an inert treatment produces one.

The blood thinner warfarin first went into large-scale commercial use in 1948 as what?

Warfarin was marketed from 1948 as a rat poison, killing rodents by internal bleeding, and was approved for human use in 1954; it blocks the recycling of vitamin K, and its name honours the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

In 1948 Australian psychiatrist John Cade found that salts of which element calmed mania?

Cade injected guinea pigs with lithium urate, noticed they became placid, then tried lithium carbonate on manic patients; his 1949 paper made lithium the first effective drug for a mental illness.

The heart's natural pacemaker, the sinoatrial node, sits in the wall of which chamber?

The sinoatrial node lies in the upper wall of the right atrium, near the entrance of the superior vena cava; its cells fire spontaneously to set the sinus rhythm, and autonomic nerves speed or slow that rate.

Roughly how long does a mature human red blood cell circulate before being recycled?

A red blood cell circulates for about 120 days; made in the bone marrow, it is eventually broken down by macrophages in the spleen and liver, and in a full-term infant the lifespan is shorter, around 80 to 90 days.

Stewart Adams discovered ibuprofen in 1961 while working for which British company?

Adams worked at Boots' Nottingham laboratory, which patented ibuprofen in 1961 and launched it as Brufen in 1969; he reputedly tested it on his own hangover before a speech, and it became an over-the-counter staple worldwide.

Which chemist in 1949 blamed sickle cell disease on a flaw in the haemoglobin molecule?

Linus Pauling, with Harvey Itano, showed in 1949 that sickle haemoglobin moves differently in electrophoresis and called sickle cell anaemia the first 'molecular disease'; carriers of one copy of the gene gain some protection against malaria.

From AD 157 Galen sharpened his anatomy as physician to which group in Pergamon?

The high priest of Asia made Galen physician to Pergamon's gladiators in 157; their wounds were his anatomy lessons, since human dissection was taboo, and he claimed only five died in his care against sixty under his predecessor.

John Charnley pioneered which operation at Wrightington Hospital in the 1960s?

Charnley's low-friction hip replacement of 1962 paired a small metal femoral head with a polyethylene socket fixed with bone cement; he insisted on working with engineers and built a biomechanics lab at Wrightington to test his implants.

Which drug, approved in the US in 1987, was the first treatment for HIV?

AZT (zidovudine), approved by the FDA in March 1987, was the first antiretroviral for HIV; Jerome Horwitz had synthesised it in 1964 as a would-be cancer drug, and on its own it only slows the virus.

Norwegian physician Gerhard Armauer Hansen found the bacterium behind which disease?

Hansen identified Mycobacterium leprae in Bergen in 1873, one of the first bacteria tied to a human disease, which is why leprosy is often called Hansen's disease.

Why did the 1918 influenza pandemic get its misleading 'Spanish' name?

Spain was neutral in the First World War, so its uncensored press reported the outbreak freely, including King Alfonso XIII's illness, while censors in the belligerent nations suppressed bad news; the H1N1 pandemic infected an estimated 500 million people.

The US Public Health Service's Tuskegee study of untreated syphilis ran from 1932 to when?

The study ran until 1972, when an Associated Press story by Jean Heller exposed it; 399 African American men with syphilis were left untreated so the disease could be followed to autopsy, even after penicillin became standard in 1947.

Edinburgh obstetrician James Young Simpson popularised which anaesthetic from 1847?

Simpson first used chloroform on patients in Edinburgh in November 1847, after trying it on himself and two assistants at a dinner party, and brought pain relief to childbirth; Queen Victoria's use of it in 1853 sealed its acceptance.

Napoleon's surgeon Dominique Jean Larrey invented 'flying ambulances' and a rule for what?

Larrey's 'flying ambulances' adapted the light carriages of the horse artillery to carry the wounded off the field, and his rule of triage had them treated by urgency of need regardless of rank or nationality.

What did Scipione Riva-Rocci's easy-to-use device of 1896 measure?

Riva-Rocci's 1896 mercury sphygmomanometer measured blood pressure with an inflatable cuff around the upper arm, read over the brachial artery; the 'systolic over diastolic' sounds were described in 1905 by Nikolai Korotkoff.

Tu Youyou's Nobel-winning malaria drug artemisinin was extracted from which plant?

Artemisinin comes from sweet wormwood, Artemisia annua (qinghao); Tu found the lead in Ge Hong's fourth-century handbook recommending the herb for intermittent fevers, and in 2015 became the first Chinese laureate in Physiology or Medicine.

Which device did John Gibbon use successfully for the first time on 6 May 1953?

Gibbon's heart-lung machine took over pumping and oxygenation on 6 May 1953 while he closed a hole between the atria of 18-year-old Cecelia Bavolek; he had conceived it during a Harvard fellowship in 1931.

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

Einthoven's string galvanometer of 1901 was the first practical electrocardiograph, sensitive enough to trace the heart's electrical signal, and he named the P, Q, R, S and T waves; he was born in Semarang, Java.

Karl Koller introduced which drug as a local anaesthetic for eye surgery in 1884?

Koller showed in September 1884 that cocaine drops numb the cornea, making painless eye surgery possible; his colleague Sigmund Freud had studied the drug's painkilling effects but missed its use as a local anaesthetic, and dentistry soon adopted it.

Baruch Blumberg's 1964 'Australia antigen' discovery led to a vaccine against which virus?

The Australia antigen turned out to be the surface protein of the hepatitis B virus; Blumberg had spotted it in the blood of an Australian Aboriginal man, shared the 1976 Nobel Prize, and helped develop the first hepatitis B vaccine.

Emil von Behring won the first Medicine Nobel (1901) for serum therapy against what?

Behring's diphtheria antitoxin, developed with Kitasato in 1890 and given to patients from 1891, made him the 'saviour of children', since diphtheria was a major killer of the young; the 1901 Nobel citation named it specifically.

Where was the first implantable pacemaker fitted to patient Arne Larsson in October 1958?

Surgeon Åke Senning implanted engineer Rune Elmqvist's device at Stockholm's Karolinska Hospital in Sweden on 8 October 1958, at the urging of Larsson's wife; the first unit failed within hours, and Larsson outlived both men, dying in 2001.

Witnessing the aftermath of which 1859 battle moved Henry Dunant to found the Red Cross?

Dunant reached Solferino on 24 June 1859, having gone to northern Italy to petition Napoleon III; his 1862 book A Memory of Solferino called for neutral relief societies, and he shared the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901.

Louise Brown, the first baby born after IVF, arrived in 1978 in which English town?

Louise Brown was delivered by planned caesarean at Oldham General Hospital on 25 July 1978, the work of Patrick Steptoe, Robert Edwards and embryologist Jean Purdy, who was the first to see her cells dividing.

Willem Kolff's 1943 prototype dialysis machine used which odd material as its membrane?

Built in the occupied Netherlands from orange-juice cans and car parts, it launched the field of artificial organs. Kolff later worked on the artificial heart.

Edinburgh physician Alexander Wood is credited with inventing which device in 1853?

Wood's hypodermic syringe of 1853 paired a glass syringe with a hollow needle, letting him inject morphine under the skin to treat neuralgia; Charles Pravaz in Lyon devised a similar instrument the same year.

Médecins Sans Frontières was founded in 1971 by French doctors in the aftermath of what?

MSF's founders, including Bernard Kouchner, had worked for the Red Cross during the Biafran famine of the Nigerian Civil War and wanted care delivered across borders regardless of politics; the group won the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize.

Which New York school took Elizabeth Blackwell in 1847 after a student vote made in jest?

Geneva Medical College's students voted to admit Blackwell as a joke, and she graduated first in her class in 1849 as the first woman with a US medical degree; the college was later absorbed into Syracuse and then SUNY Upstate.

Alexandre Yersin identified the plague bacillus in 1894 during an outbreak in which city?

Yersin isolated the plague bacillus, Yersinia pestis, in a straw hut beside a Hong Kong hospital in June 1894; Kitasato Shibasaburō reported it at almost the same time, but the organism bears Yersin's name.

The pituitary gland sits in the sella turcica, a saddle-shaped hollow in which skull bone?

The sella turcica, 'Turkish saddle', is a depression in the body of the sphenoid bone at the skull base; a fold of dura mater, the diaphragma sellae, roofs it and separates the pituitary from the brain above.

Akira Endo found the first statin in a mould growing on what, bought from a shop in Kyoto?

The mould, Penicillium citrinum, grew on rice from a Kyoto grain shop; Endo screened some 6,000 microbial cultures before it yielded three active compounds in 1973, one of them mevastatin, the first statin.

Metformin's drug class, the biguanides, grew out of research on which folk-medicine plant?

Goat's rue, Galega officinalis or French lilac, had been used for centuries for diabetes-like symptoms; its guanidine compound galegine led chemists to the biguanides, and two cousins in the class, phenformin and buformin, were later withdrawn.

Hans Berger recorded the first human EEG in 1924 and discovered which brain rhythm?

Berger's alpha rhythm, 8 to 13 Hz waves seen when a relaxed subject closes their eyes, is also called the Berger wave; he recorded the first human EEG in Jena in 1924 and coined the term electroencephalogram.