istoryworld
Events relating to the medici
William Withering's Account of the Foxglove describes the use of digitalis for dropsy, and its possible application to heart disease
In Berkeley, Gloucestershire, Edward Jenner inoculates a boy with cowpox in the pioneering case of vaccination
German physician Samuel Hahnemann coins the term 'homeopathy' and describes this new approach to medicine
William Burke and William Hare murder 16 victims and sell their bodies to the Edinburgh Medical School for anatomical study
Scottish obstetrician James Simpson uses anaesthetic (ether, and later in the year choloroform) to ease difficulty in childbirth
James Young Simpson is the first to deliver a baby (christened Anaesthesia) using chloroform
The hypodermic syringe with a plunger is simultaneously developed in France and in Scotland
English physician John Snow proves that cholera is spread by infected water (from a pump in London's Broad Street)
Florence Nightingale, responding to reports of horrors in the Crimea, sets sail with a party of twenty-eight nurses
Jamaican-born nurse Mary Seacole sets up her own 'British Hotel' in the Crimea to provide food and nursing for soldiers in need
Florence Nightingale opens a training school for nurses in St Thomas's Hospital, establishing nursing as a profession
English surgeon Joseph Lister introduces the era of antiseptic surgery, with the use of carbolic acid in the operating theatre
British physician Ronald Ross identifies the Anopheles mosquito as the carrier of malaria
A typhus epidemic sweeps through Serbia, severely weakening the nation's armed forces
New Zealand surgeon Harold Gillies sets up a plastic surgery unit at Aldershot, a British military base
A world-wide pandemic of influenza breaks out, and within the space of a year kills 30 million people
Canadian physiologists Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolate insulin from the pancreas for the treatment of diabetes
English psychologist Henry Havelock Ellis completes a thirty-year project, his 7-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex
Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming accidentally discovers a mould that selectively kills bacteria, and calls it penicillin
British biochemist Max Perutz begins the analysis of haemoglobin
Lord Nuffield donates to Commonwealth hospitals 'iron lungs', built at his Morris Oxford factory,
British biologists Ernst Chain and Howard Florey develop penicillin as a safe and useful antibacterial drug
The Medical Research Council in Britain produces a report, by Austin Hill and Richard Doll, linking smoking and lung cancer
The drug Thalidomide, synthesized in West Germany, is shown to have been the cause of severe defects in about 12,000 children born in 46 countries
Fidel Castro releases, for $53 million in food and medicine, the Cuban exiles taken prisoner in the Bay of Pigs fiasco
