Tag: England
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The global journey of variolation
Mariel TishmaChicago, Illinois, United States Humanity has eliminated only one infectious disease—smallpox. Smallpox is a very old disease and efforts to prevent it are almost as old. They included a technique called variolation, also known as inoculation or engrafting, in which individuals were infected with live smallpox virus to produce a milder form of the…
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Thriving in the face of uncertainty
Sally Mather Chris Millard Ian Sabroe Sheffield, England The experience of uncertainty has appeared as a frequent narrative in articles, autobiographies, and memoirs written by doctors over the last century. A persistent belief that better training, tests, evidence, and pathways will reduce uncertainty has not been borne out in the experience of contemporary clinicians.…
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Plague epidemics and the evolution of language in England
Andrew P. K. Wodrich Washington, DC, United States Pierart dou Tielt’s illustration depicts the mortal toll of the Black Death in a Belgian town circa 1353. Similarly, the plague decimated the population of England, spurring the change from French to English as the country’s dominant spoken language. Via Wikimedia Commons here. Epidemics have had a profound impact…
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Ernest Henry Starling and the birth of English Physiology
JMS Pearce Hull, England Fig 1. Ernest Starling. Univ. College. Graduate Guy Hospital. 1890. London. (From Images from the History of Medicine (NLM) ). Accessed via Wikimedia Science has only one language, quantity, and only one argument, the experiment -EH Starling Ernest Henry Starling (1866-1927) (Fig 1) was an outstanding figure in the…
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Richard Mead
Arpan K Banerjee Solihull, UK Richard Mead. Mezzotint by R. Houston after A. Ramsay. Credit: Wellcome Collection. (CC BY 4.0) Richard Mead was born on 11 August 1673, the eleventh child of Matthew Mead, a preacher and somewhat controversial character of his time.1 Matthew Mead was a scholar and Fellow of King’s College Cambridge,…
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A Cold War vaccine: Albert Sabin, Russia, and the oral polio vaccine
James L. Franklin Chicago, Illinois, United States Albert Sabin (second from left) and Mikhail Chumakov (third from left). Credit: Courtesy Hauck Center for the Albert B. Sabin Archives, Henry R. Winkler Center for the History of the Health Professions, University of Cincinnati Libraries. Fair Use. In the midst of the 2020 Covid–19 pandemic, when international…
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Joseph Merrick, “The Elephant Man”
JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom Fig 1. The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences by Frederick Treves. As a specimen of humanity, Merrick was ignoble and repulsive; but the spirit of Merrick, if it can be seen in the form of the living, would assume the figure of an upstanding and heroic man .…
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The other Charles Darwin (1758–1778)
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom “’Precursoritis’ is the bane of historiography.”– Stephen Jay Gould One of the best-known and important discoveries in the practice of medicine was the introduction of digitalis by William Withering (Fig 1). It was the subject of controversy that involved the Darwin family. For almost two hundred years digitalis was the…