German physician Samuel Hahnemann coins the term 'homeopathy' and describes this new approach to medicine

René Laënnec, reluctant to press his ear to the chest of a young female patient, finds a solution in the stethoscope

William Burke and William Hare murder 16 victims and sell their bodies to the Edinburgh Medical School for anatomical study

The USA suffers the first of several cholera epidemics, spanning the sixty years to 1892

A dentist in Boston, William Morton, uses ether as an anaesthetic while surgeon John Collins Warren removes a tumour in a patient's neck

Scottish obstetrician James Simpson uses anaesthetic (ether, and later in the year choloroform) to ease difficulty in childbirth

German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz invents the ophthalmoscope, making it possible for a doctor to examine the inside of a patient's eye

The hypodermic syringe with a plunger is simultaneously developed in France and in Scotland

William Baikie, on an expedition up the Niger, protects his men from malaria by administering quinine

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

Hungarian physician Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis publishes his discovery that deaths from puerperal fever can be dramatically reduced by a strict hand-washing routine

English surgeon Joseph Lister introduces the era of antiseptic surgery, with the use of carbolic acid in the operating theatre

An outbreak of measles in Fiji, brought to the islands by British visitors, kills a quarter of the population

German bacteriologist Robert Koch announces his discovery of the bacillus that causes tuberculosis

Louis Pasteur uses rabies inoculation to save the life of 9-year-old Joseph Meister, bitten by a rabid dog

A German physiologist, Adolf Fick, grinds a pair of lenses to fit snugly in contact with a patient's eyeballs

British physician Ronald Ross identifies the Anopheles mosquito as the carrier of malaria

The Bayer company in Germany sells aspirin in the form of water-soluble tablets, the first medication of its kind

Sigmund Freud publishes one of his most significant works, The Interpretation of Dreams

The Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov keeps dogs alive almost indefinitely by severely curtailing their bodily functions

German surgeon Georg Clemens Perthes discovers, in Leipzig, that X-rays can inhibit cancer

Dutch physiologist Willem Einthoven invents the galvanometer, or electrocardiograph, for recording the electrical impulses within the heart muscle