Thomas Willis and circle of arteries

In 1664 the British scientist Thomas Willis (1621-1675) described in his treatise about a circle of arteries at the base of the brain that act as a traffic for the blood flowing to the head.

Willis landmark text, Cerebri Anatome, 1664, was reproduced many times and developed into a pocket-sized standard textbook for medical students.

The circle of Willis provides a potential diversion for collateral blood supply following the occlusion of one major cranial arteries feeding, into it.

Because of Willis’s thorough illustrations and explanation of this structure, it is known today as the circle of Willis.

Scientists had observed this circle as early as the 16th century, but it was Thomas Willis, Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy at Oxford, who first noted it importance in directing the flow of blood. He was aware of this feature and asked his friend Christopher Wren, the architect of Canterbury Cathedral, to illustrate the arterial circle which he did masterfully.

Wren had for the first time injected fluid into the vessels of an animal while being architect for King Charles II, for whom he built St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and 53 other churches.
Thomas Willis and circle of arteries

Democedes of Cnidus: physician and adventurer

The peninsula of Cnidus was the seat of the most ancient medical school. Democedes was born in Croton, southern Italy in 560 or 555 BC. After travelling widely in Greek lands, Democedes became the medical attendant of the Persian monarch. Later he was employed as a spy to explore the coasts of Greece.

He escape from this service, however and settled in the Greek colony of Corto0n, in the instep of Italy. Here he devoted himself to writing a treatise in medicine. Croton became an important scientific center. The man who first made it famous in the world was Democedes.

Democedes left Croton and went to Aegina unequipped, without the tools of his craft, but his skill was such that within a year he surpassed the most famous physicians.

In the second year the Aeginetans appointed his state physician and paid him an annual salary of one talent, about $1200. In the third year the Athenians hired him for a hundred minae, and Polycrates in the next for two talent.

Herodotus records that Democedes was the physician of Polycrates of Samos, who perished in 522 BC and then of Darius, the King of Persia, from whom he was able to escape and return to his birthplace, Croton in 518 BC which toward the end of his life he had to leave again because of political difficulties.
Democedes of Cnidus: physician and adventurer

Avicenna

Avicenna (Arabic full name Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Al-Hasan ibn Ali ibn Sīnā c. 980 – June 1037) was a Persian polymath who is regarded as one of the most significant thinkers and writers of the Islamic Golden Age. He was the greatest physician in Islam.

He was born in Afsana, a village near Bukhara, the capital of the Samanids, a Persian dynasty in Central Asia and Greater Khorasan.

Avicenna memorized the Quran by the age of ten, and as an adult, he wrote five treatises commenting on suras from the Quran.

Avicenna’s independent thought was served by an extraordinary intelligence and memory, which allowed him to overtake his teacher at the age of fourteen. He wrote his first book, a compendium entitled Majmu (Compedium) at the age of 21.

About 100 treatises were ascribed to Avicenna. Some of them are tracts of a few pages. Others are works extending through several volumes.  His 14-volume The Canon of Medicine (Al-Qanoon fi al-Tibb, The Laws of Medicine) was a standard medical text in Europe and the Islamic world until the 17th century).

Among Avicenna’s first works translated by various schools of translators were the principal parts of his most detailed and longest philosophical treaties Kitab as-Shifa’. Several parts of Avicenna’s major philosophical encyclopedia as-Shifa’ were translated into Latin, mainly in Toledo at the end of the twelfth century and in Burgos at the end of the thirteenth century.
Avicenna 

Human anatomy discovery by Andreas Vesalius

The human anatomy references used by doctors through the year AD 1500 were actually based mostly on animal studies, more myth and error than truth.

Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) was the first to insist on dissections, on exact physiological experiment and direct observation.

Vesalius discovered many errors in Galen’s work and revealed his evidence to discredit Galen and to show that Galen’s description of curved human thighbones, heart chambers, segmented breast bones, etc, better matched the anatomy of apes than humans.

Vesalius dissected the cadavers himself. This contravened the usual procedure, on which the professor read from a Galenic text while the body was opened by a menial or prosector. Vesalius began to employ drawings to clarify the various structures of the body.

Vesalius detailed more than 200 discrepancies between actual human and Galen’s descriptions, Time after time, Vesalius showed that what every doctor and surgeon in Europe relied on fit better with apes, dogs, and sheep than human body.

Vesalius De Humani Corporis Fabrica was completed and published his magnificent anatomy book in 1542.

Ultimately the scientific study of anatomy became accepted as the avenue of increasing the knowledge of this discipline and the practice of medicine.

With the rise of modern science, the approach that Vesalius pioneered became the standard for medicine. Physicians followed him into the body dissecting it as a way of understanding how it worked.
Human anatomy discovery by Andreas Vesalius

Measles in history

Measles probably began with the start of urban life in the Middle East around 3000 BC.

Some historians believe that a plague that killed a large part of the Athenian army in 430 to 429 BC was measles. As urbanization occurred in subsequent centuries, the proximity or larger populations nurtured epidemics with continued circulation of virus in cities. There were massive epidemics in the Roman Empire starting in 165 and in 251 AD, and two similar epidemics in China in 162 and 310.

Jews physician such as Al Yehudi had recognized the illness but without distinction between it and other rash disordered.

Measles was first documented by an Arabic physician called Rhazes.

Rhazes lived in the 10th century but he quoted other authors on measles form as far back s Al Yehudi, who lived in the 7th century.

He distinguished between smallpox and measles even though he believed that the two conditions were part of one morbid process.

Rhazes referred it the disease as widespread throughout the East and the same opinion is expressed by Avicenna and other Arabic writers of the tenth and eleventh centuries.

By the 17th century, some European also physicians had identified the differences between measles and small pox.

In 1846, a Danish physician Peter Panum studied a measles outbreak on the Faroe Islands and was the first to describe the clinical presentation, incubation and infectious nature of measles.

The introduction of measles vaccine in 1963 and its subsequent widespread use led to dramatic declines in the reported incidence of measles.
Measles in history

History of aspirin

Salicylic acid, a component on the bark of willow tree is aspirin’s precursor.

In Greece the father do medicine, Hippocrates, recommended using the bark of the willow tree as an analgesic. The active ingredient of this bark, called salicin, a bitter glycoside of salicylic alcohol, was first isolated by Leroux in 1827.

Charles Frederich von Gerhant in France and Karl Johann Kraut in Germany synthesized aspirin in 1853 and 1869 respectively.  Charles Frederich had studied acetylating reactions and first produced aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid)  in 1853 by the treatment of sodium salicylate with acetyl chloride.

He also studied the alkaline hydrolysis of aspirin to acetic and salicylic acids and the reaction of the latter with silver oxide. Kolbe and Lautemann made synthetic salicylic acid from phenol in 1860.

In 1897, Felix Hoffman at Bayer prepared a more pure form of aspirin using an improved route.

After aspirin’s success in clinics, Heindrich Dreser discovered that aspirin is a pro-drug of salicylic acid. In 1949, Gibson described his successful use of aspirin in a small group do patients with vascular problems.

Around the same time, Lawrence Craven in California realized that his tonsillectomy patients who had take a chewable aspirin preparation for pain relief were more likely that other to bleed.

In 1971, John R. Vane at the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences of the University of London and the Royal College of Surgeon of England discovered that aspirin works by blocking cyclooxygenase, thus preventing the synthesis of prostaglandins.
History of aspirin

Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915)

Leukemia was described in the intervening years but it was 1879 before Paul Ehrlich published his method for staining blood films. Paul Ehrlich, German scientist who won Nobel Prize winner in 1908.

He is credited with the first description of the human basophil in 1879. He is also noted for his work in immunology and chemotherapy.

Paul Ehrlich was born in a Jewish family on 14 March 1854 in Strehlen, Prussia. As a schoolboy and student of medicine he was interested in staining microscopic tissue substances.

Ehrlich was restless and uninspired student, studying at the University of Breslau, Strasburg, Freiburg and Leipzig in the 1870s. His tutor at the University of Strasburg was the first professor to introduce the chemical outlook into medicine. Under his supervision, Ehrlich discovered a new variety of mastcells through his staining experiments.

He earned a medical degree from Leipzig I 1878. Later he became an assistant in the medical clinic of the University of Berlin and continued his research on dyes. During his term at Charite hospital in Berlin, Ehrlich reputation as an expert stainer grew. His discovery of tubercule bacilli led him to collaboration with Robert Koch.

He also developed the first drug designed to kill a particular kind of disease causing microorganisms inside the body.

Ehrlich had a slight stroke on December 1914, and then, while on vacation in Bad Homburg suffered a second strike, which killed him on August 20, 1915.
Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915)

Discovery of quinine

The discovery of quinine marked the beginning of modern pharmacology.

The first recorded account use of quinine came at the Viceregal Place in Lima, Peru, in 1638 when the illness of the Countess Cinchon, Francisca Henriquez de Ribera became so severe, that it was said, the court physician risked a desperate, last chance remedy with medicine he had heard was used for fever in the unhealthy gold mining district of Loja, not far from Quito.

The cure for malaria cam to Europe by way of the New World. In the 1600s Jesuit missionaries in Brazil and Peru began grinding up and chewing cinchona bark as a medicinal treatment for malaria.

In 1820, two French scientists, Pierre-Joseph Pelletier (1788-1877) and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou (1795-1877) identified and extracted the active ingredient an alkaloid from cinchona (or quina) bark and named it quinine. The purified compound began to be used instead of powdered bark to treat malaria.

After discovery of quinine several chemists thought that a third uncrystallizable alkaloid occurs in the barks of the cinchonas.

In 1828 Friedrich Wohler synthesized urea form ammonium chloride and silver cyanate, both considered minerals and showed that organic compounds might be made from inorganic ones.

This process, along with Hermann Kolbe’s preparation of acetic acid in 1845, gave hope to some that quinine might soon be artificially-synthetically-formed.

By 1830 quinine was being manufactured on a large scale and by the 1840s European in Africa were keeping pills by their bedstands. The death rate from malaria dropped dramatically.

In 1854, Adolph Strecker at the University of Christiana, Oslo determined quinines empirical formula. In 1944, the structure of the alkaloid molecule (C20H24N2O2) was discovered. 
Discovery of Quinine

Ancient Roman technology

By the first century AD Rome had become the biggest and most advanced city in the world.

One of the things about ancient Roman civilization that most impresses people today is the Roman’s use of technology.

The ancient Romans came up with new technologies to improve the city’s sanitation systems, roads and buildings.

They developed a system of aqueducts that piped freshwater into the city, and they built sewers that removed the city’s waste.

The farmers grew olives, grapes, wheat and other fruits and vegetables. They used tools seeds and techniques created earlier throughout the Mediterranean world. These included irrigation systems and ox-drawn plows.

Ancient Rome’s have a vast network of roads that reached throughout the empire. More than 50,000 miles of roads extended from Rome to the farthest provinces.

Army engineers often designed and constructed roads as a means to swiftly move army legions from place to place and to keep them supplied.

The Romans developed new techniques and used materials such as volcanic soil from Pozzuoli, a village near Naples, to make their cement harder and stronger.

Some of the most important construction methods that the Romans used in their building projects were arches, vaults and domes. Arches support weight better than flat-topped openings.

A doctor in ancient Rome had little or no training. Most of them simply learned their skills as apprentices to other doctors.

Roman doctors tackled some surprisingly delicate operations, such as removing small tumors and repairing a hernia. They even removed cataracts from the eyes.

Their medical tools were often made from bronze, as this was a practical and relatively cheap way to produce surgical instruments, though the best doctors preferred instruments made from fine quality.
Ancient Roman technology

Vitamin B Discovery

The Englishman Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins is given credit for approaching the discovery of the vitamin concept, when in 1906, he determined that food contains essential ingredients beyond carbohydrates, minerals fats, proteins and water.

The term vitamin was first used for water soluble substance which was necessary for the nutrition of infants and which was separated from wheat germ, yeasts and milk.

In fact this term was used after the first discovery of anti-beriberi factor by Casimir Funk in 1912. The first vitamin B discovered was vitamin B1 by Funk that was extracted from police rice husk.

It was then isolated in pure and crystalline form by B.C.P Jansen in 1925.

Casimir coined the term ‘vital amine’ to describe the class of chemicals that he and other researchers were studying, and the word was simplified to ‘vitamin’ by 1920.

Three years after this discovery, Elmer Vernon McCollum and Marguerite Davis labeled it ‘water soluble B’ which British biochemist Jack Cecil changed to vitamin B in 1920.

Casimir Funk (1884-1967), a Polish born American biochemist, collected all published literature in the issue of deficiency diseases. He was the first to isolate niacin, latter called vitamin B3.
Vitamin B Discovery

Biography of Waksman, Selman Abraham (1888 – 1973)

Biography of Waksman, Selman Abraham (1888 – 1973)
Russian born United States biochemist, who won the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the antibiotic streptomycin.

After immigrating to the USA in 1910, Waksman studied at Rutgers University and the University of California, from which he received his PhD in 1918. He returned to Rutgers as a lecturer in soil microbiology, becoming professor (1930 – 40) and then professor of microbiology (1940 – 58). He was made emeritus professor on his retirement in 1958.

Waksman’s special field was soil microbiology, in particular the role of fungi and bacteria in the decomposition of organic matter and humus formation. He wrote Principles of Soil Microbiology (1927), one of the most comprehensive works on the subject at that time. The discovery of penicillin’s therapeutic potential encouraged Waksman to investigate the soil microorganisms called actinomycetes in the hope of finding new antibiotics (a terminology introduced by Waksman in 1941).

In 1944 he announced the discovery of streptomycin, which he had isolated from Streptomyces griseus. This was the first safe antibiotic found that was effective against Gram-negative bacteria, including the species responsible for tuberculosis, which are resistant to penicillin. He later discovered another antibiotic, neomycin, obtained from Streptomyces fradiae. This is used to treat bowel infections and local skin or eye infections.
Biography of Waksman, Selman Abraham (1888 – 1973)