60 Fun Facts About Medical History

Which Greek physician from Kos is called the "Father of Medicine"?

He is credited with prognosis, clinical observation and the first description of clubbed fingers.

The four humours were blood, phlegm and two kinds of which fluid?

An excess or shortage of any one was thought to cause illness, which is why bloodletting seemed logical for two thousand years.

Galen based most of his anatomy on dissecting which animals, human dissection being forbidden in Rome?

He also encouraged students to inspect dead gladiators and bodies washed up on shore to learn human anatomy.

Who compiled The Canon of Medicine, the 1025 encyclopaedia used as a European textbook into the 18th century?

It set the standard for medicine in both medieval Europe and the Islamic world.

The Edwin Smith Papyrus, the oldest known surgical treatise on trauma, comes from which civilisation?

It is named after the dealer who bought it in 1862 and may originally date from the Old Kingdom.

Sushruta is called the father of plastic surgery largely for describing which operation?

Many patients were criminals whose noses had been cut off as punishment.

Trepanning, one of the oldest surgical procedures known, involves doing what?

The word comes from a Greek term for a borer or auger.

At which university was Vesalius a professor when he wrote De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543)?

He later became imperial physician to Emperor Charles V.

William Harvey's 1628 book De Motu Cordis was the first to describe in full what?

He published the 72-page treatise in Frankfurt to catch the city's book fair.

Ambroise Paré found gunshot wounds healed better with an egg-yolk ointment than with what standard treatment?

He ran out of oil one night, tried the ointment, and found those patients had recovered while the others were in agony.

The red and white stripes of a barber's pole recall which practice once carried out by barber-surgeons?

The original pole had a brass basin at the top for leeches and one at the bottom to catch the blood.

Which US president asked to be bled heavily for a throat infection, likely hastening his death?

Bloodletting rested on Galen's belief that the humours had to be kept in balance.

In 1796 Edward Jenner tested his smallpox vaccine on James Phipps, the eight-year-old son of his what?

The words vaccine and vaccination come from Variolae vaccinae, Jenner's Latin name for cowpox.

The word "vaccine" derives from the Latin for which animal?

Jenner coined Variolae vaccinae, "pustules of the cow", for cowpox in 1798.

In which year did the WHO certify smallpox as eradicated?

The last natural case was diagnosed in October 1977; rinderpest, a cattle disease, followed in 2011.

William Morton, who first publicly demonstrated ether anaesthesia in 1846, was by profession a what?

Weeks earlier he had used ether for a painless tooth extraction on a patient named Ebenezer Frost.

Which Scottish obstetrician first demonstrated chloroform anaesthesia in humans in 1847?

The drug was supplied by a local Edinburgh pharmacist, and Simpson helped popularise it in medicine.

Which monarch was given chloroform by John Snow during the births of her last two children in the 1850s?

Prince Leopold and Princess Beatrice were the children; royal approval helped make anaesthesia respectable.

Where was the public water pump John Snow had disabled during the 1854 Soho cholera outbreak?

The authorities removed the pump handle; the outbreak killed 616 people and helped bury the miasma theory.

In 1847 Semmelweis cut maternal deaths at Vienna General Hospital by making doctors do what?

Doctors' wards had three times the death rate of midwives' wards; he was later committed to an asylum, where guards beat him.

Which chemical did Joseph Lister use to pioneer antiseptic surgery at Glasgow Royal Infirmary?

Carbolic acid is modern-day phenol; the mouthwash Listerine was later named in his honour.

Pasteur gave his rabies vaccine to nine-year-old Joseph Meister in 1885 after the boy had been what?

Meister received 13 inoculations over 11 days and survived.

Robert Koch's 1876 discovery of the bacterium behind which disease is considered the birth of bacteriology?

He went on to identify the tuberculosis and cholera germs and won the 1905 Nobel Prize.

Who won the first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, in 1901, for diphtheria serum therapy?

He was hailed as a "saviour of children" because diphtheria was a major cause of child death.

René Laennec invented the stethoscope in 1816 partly thanks to which hobby?

He was examining a young woman too stout for hand percussion to work, and rolled up a tube instead.

Wilhelm Röntgen, who discovered X-rays in 1895, received which award in 1901?

The element roentgenium is also named after him.

During the First World War, which double Nobel laureate developed mobile X-ray units for field hospitals?

She had won the 1903 physics prize and the 1911 chemistry prize for radium and polonium.

Besides the main blood groups, which later discovery with Alexander Wiener bears Karl Landsteiner's mark?

He also co-discovered the polio virus in 1909 and won the Nobel Prize in 1930.

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

His first practical version dates from 1895, using a string galvanometer.

Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolated insulin in 1921 at which university?

Banting became the youngest ever medicine laureate at 32 and split his prize money with Best, whom the Nobel committee had overlooked.

At which London institution did Alexander Fleming discover penicillin in 1928?

He shared the 1945 Nobel Prize with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, whose Oxford team purified the drug.

Jonas Salk's vaccine against which disease was declared a success in April 1955?

He had spent seven years on it at the University of Pittsburgh.

The 1954 first successful human kidney transplant was between what kind of donor and recipient?

Joseph Murray moved a kidney from Ronald Herrick to his dying twin Richard in a five-and-a-half-hour operation in Boston.

Christiaan Barnard performed the first human heart transplant on 3 December 1967 in which city?

Patient Louis Washkansky lived 18 days before dying of pneumonia brought on by the anti-rejection drugs.

Louise Brown, born in England on 25 July 1978, was the first person conceived by what method?

The technique was developed by Patrick Steptoe, Robert Edwards and Jean Purdy.

For what reason did Geneva Medical College admit Elizabeth Blackwell, the first US woman medical graduate?

Every other school she applied to rejected her; she later became the first woman on Britain's Medical Register too.

Florence Nightingale became 'The Lady with the Lamp' nursing wounded soldiers in which war?

She was also a pioneering statistician and is regarded as the founder of modern nursing.

Gray's Anatomy, the classic anatomy textbook, was first published in London in which year?

Henry Gray wrote it and Henry Vandyke Carter drew the illustrations; new editions have been issued ever since.

The 1918 influenza pandemic is misleadingly called "Spanish flu" for what reason?

The earliest probable cases were actually in Haskell County, Kansas; the death toll was at least 17 million and possibly 100 million.

"Typhoid Mary" Mallon, quarantined on North Brother Island in New York, worked as what?

An asymptomatic carrier, she is thought to have infected up to 57 people.

The Black Death of 1346-53 was caused by which bacterium?

It spread mainly by flea bites; the English name "Black Death" was not used until the 1750s.

Marshall and Warren's 2005 Nobel Prize was for showing most peptic ulcers are caused by what?

Helicobacter pylori overturned decades of doctrine blaming stress and stomach acid.

In which decade did Antonie van Leeuwenhoek begin exploring microbial life with his microscopes?

He was largely self-taught and called the creatures he saw "animalcules".

Thalidomide was first marketed in 1957 as an over-the-counter drug in which country?

FDA reviewer Frances Kelsey refused to approve it in the US over safety doubts, sparing American families the worst.

Godfrey Hounsfield shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Medicine for developing which imaging technique?

The Hounsfield scale of radiodensity used to read CT scans is named after him.

Aspirin's precursor, salicin, used for 2,400 years, comes from the bark of which tree?

Chemists at the German company Bayer worked out the structure and production of acetylsalicylic acid in the late 1800s.

The phrase "First, do no harm" is often attributed to the Hippocratic Oath. What is true of it?

The original text vows only to "abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm".

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, was by training what kind of doctor?

He introduced free association, dream interpretation and the analysis of transference.

What is Louis Pasteur's technique of heating milk and wine to stop bacterial contamination called?

It was soon applied to beer and milk, and he also developed vaccines for anthrax and rabies.

Which idea gradually replaced humorism as the explanation for sickness and made real cures possible?

Pasteur, Koch and Lister were among those who turned it from idea into practice.

Al-Zahrawi, the 10th-century Andalusian physician, wrote which thirty-volume medical encyclopaedia?

His surgical instruments and procedures were used in East and West well into the modern era.

In which year was the World Health Organization founded as a United Nations agency?

Global life expectancy has risen since to about 67 years by 2010, and above 80 in some countries.

The Huangdi Neijing, the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon, is the foundational text of which medicine?

Written between the 5th and 3rd centuries BCE, it was first referenced by Zhang Zhongjing's Treatise on Cold Damage in the Han era.

Which simple treatment has been used widely since the 1970s against cholera and other diarrhoeal infections?

It sits alongside DDT spraying against malaria and mass vaccination as one of the great low-cost public health tools of the century.

At which university did Karl Landsteiner discover the ABO blood group system in 1901?

He experimented on his own staff, mixing their blood and noting which samples clumped together.

Mondino de Luzzi wrote the first anatomy textbook based on human dissection in which city?

Ancient Greek and Roman taboos had banned dissection; the practice revived among medieval teachers and students there.

Which ancient Egyptian medical text is the oldest written source to mention enemas?

Egyptian medicine even had a specialist for such treatments, the Iri, or 'Shepherd of the Anus'.

Where did Theodor Fliedner found the first German nursing schools in 1836?

Florence Nightingale visited and found the nursing there admirable but the standards below what she wanted for England.

Which Nestorian Christian scholar translated 129 of Galen's works into Arabic?

Galen and Hippocrates remained the pre-eminent authorities as Islamic physicians built on Greek, Persian and Indian medicine.

Which Sassanid academy was the ancient world's most important medical centre in the 6th-7th centuries?

Its Persian scholars, together with Byzantine Constantinople, carried Greek medicine through the early Middle Ages.