Tag: 18th Century
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Hanaoka Seishū, inventor of an early general anesthetic
Kingston BridgesLondon, United Kingdom Since time immemorial, humans have sought to alleviate illness and suffering through surgical interventions. Amputations with improvised tools took place in the Upper Paleolithic period over 30,000 years ago, and skeletal evidence of trephining has been found in excavations on several continents. Throughout the centuries, as an understanding of the human…
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Matthew Dobson (1735?–1784)
Matthew Dobson is remembered mainly for examining in 1775 a thirty-three-year-old man and completing his evaluation by tasting his blood and his urine. He found the serum was opaque, much resembling common cheese whey, but not as sweet as the urine. On heating the urine, he found a residual granulated white cake that broke easily…
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John Fothergill (1712–1780), eminent physician, reformer, and botanist
Living at a time when physicians had wide interests in science and in particular in botany, John Fothergill collected many species of plants and was particularly interested in their medicinal properties. In 1762 he purchased thirty acres in the East End of London and built a large botanic garden with many rare species in hothouses.…
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Sea sick: Naval surgery and sanitation in eighteenth-century Britain
Melissa YeoOntario, Canada Scurvy, yellow fever, and typhus were considered “the three Great Killers of seamen.”1 Hygiene and diet were very poor aboard eighteenth-century sailing vessels, as ships were often overstocked with men to account for ensuing losses while at sea.2 The sanitation on board these ships was considered as bad or worse than the slums…
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Jean Astruc, the “compleat physician”
Jean Astruc was born in 1684 in Sauve, France and studied medicine at Montpellier, graduating in 1703. He then became professor of medicine in Toulouse (1710) and Montpellier (1716), superintendent of the local mineral waters (1721), physician to the king of Poland (1729), and professor of medicine at the royal College of Medicine in Paris…
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And for unto us… Medicine, Messiah, and Christmas
Desmond O’NeillDublin, Ireland Although the very first performance of the Messiah took place in April 1742 in Dublin with the London première following in March 1743, the oratorio is closely associated with the Christmas season in the Anglophone world. The origin of this custom has been claimed by the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston…
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Douglas Argyll Robertson and his pupils
JMS PearceHull, England In my student days, the Wasserman reaction (WR), though not specific, was performed almost routinely in patients on medical wards to detect syphilis. Several direct and serological tests of varying sensitivity and specificity have now replaced the WR. Since reaching a historic low in 2000 and 2001, the incidence of syphilis has increased…
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Francis Bacon’s natural philosophy and medicine
JMS PearceHull, England Lord Bacon was the greatest genius that England, or perhaps any country, ever produced.– Alexander Pope, 1741 The early seventeenth century was a time when natural philosophy, the precursor of modern science, was advanced dramatically by names still famous 300 years later. Philosophy and natural philosophy were intimately bound concepts, both inchoate,…
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Orthoses, prostheses, and splints
JMS PearceHull, England These common words are sometimes confused. Orthosis is a term first used in English in 1857, from the Greek ὄρθωσις—“making straight.” It is a device that supports or assists residual function after illness or injury. Prosthesis is a Latin word derived from the ancient Greek πρόσθεσις, meaning “addition.” Like many words, its…
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Jean-Baptiste de Sénac and his early textbook on cardiology
Göran WettrellLund, Sweden William Harvey was an important figure in the early days of cardiovascular physiology. Based on meticulous observations, he published De Motu Cordis and Sanguinus in 1628 and has been proposed as the founder of physiology and cardiology.1 During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, physicians such as Raymond Vieussens (1641-1715), Giovanni-Maria…