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| Primitive Times
Early Man learnt the use of herbal medicines through trial and error, by watching animals eat specific plants when they were unwell. |
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| Indian medicine enshrines the theory that the human body consists of three substances, and that health requires a balance between them. They are usually translated as spirit, phlegm and bile. | |||
| Hippocrates practises and teaches medicine on the Greek island of Kos. He was to be later regarded as the father of medicine - partly because he, unlike his more theoretical contemporaries, paid close attention to the symptoms of diseases. |
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| A Chinese text, the Nei Ching or 'Book of Medicine', describes the practice of acupuncture. The document is written in about the 1st century BC, by which time
acupuncture is already a long-established tradition. |
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| The cytotoxin cortisone, in injection form, was used to treat rheumatoid arthritis. Cortisone inhibits the immune system leading to its use in organ transplants so that the body would not reject the organ. Later cytotoxins were used to suppress cancerous growth. Streptomycin, found in chickens, was used successfully to treat TB. This treatment was pioneered in America. Streptomycin could also treat many other diseases that penicillin could not. | |
| René Laënnec, a physician at the Necker Hospital in Paris, specializes in diseases of the chest. IHe constructs the first stethescope. |
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| A 1265 page-long manuscript contains the first detailed description of an anaesthetic, though similar mixtures are believed to have been used in the Alexandrian school
of medicine 1000 years earlier. |
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| At some time before the end of the 17th century a bold procedure, possibly practised already for several centuries in parts of Asia, becomes established in Turkish medicine. It is the use of inoculation to protect against the extremely infectious and frequently fatal disease of smallpox. | |
| On 14 November, the newly established Royal Society of London conducted an experiment. The artery of a small mastiff was joined by a quill to the vein of a spaniel. Another vein of the spaniel was opened to let out an equivalent amount of its blood. The mastiff bled to death in front of the Society. The spaniel was produced at the next meeting, a week later, in good health. | |