medicine factors: chance/luck

Question 1

medieval: medicine

Answer 1

Bald’s Leechbook:

• Using crop leek and garlic mixed with bullock’s gall and wine applied from a horn with a feather (no medical sense, but it still worked)
• Microbiologists have now found it effective in treating superbug MRSA

Question 2

medieval: surgery

Answer 2

Barber Surgeons’ tooth worms:

• Used hot wire and put it into cavity to kill the ‘tooth worm’ making the holes.
• Had the effect of killing the nerve, therefore killed the pain.

Question 3

early modern: medicine

Answer 3

Edward Jenner:

• lucky to overhear milkmaids chatting and saying they never caught smallpox due to having cowpox.
• injected James Phipps with cowpox pus then (once he recovered) with smallpox pus.

Question 4

early modern: surgery

Answer 4

Ambroise Pare:

• surgeon and army doctor in Italian War (siege of Milan).
• Ran out of oil used for cauterisation, so made a mixture of rose oil, turpentine, and egg yolk.
• this worked very effectively and was less painful.

Question 5

19th century: medicine

Answer 5

chicken cholera:

• chicken cholera was a problem for French farmers in 1879, so Louis Pasteur isolated the germ and tried to weaken it, by injecting the chicken with various forms of it.
• the research was abandoned over the Summer, and some chicken cholera solution was accidently left exposed to the air.
• His assistant, Chamberland, happened to inject chicken with this solution and it immunised the chicken.
• exposure to air had weakened the germ.

Question 6

19th century: sugery

Answer 6

Simpson and Chloroform:

• Simpson experimented with chemical as anaesthetics, when he invited some friends over for dinner.
• He poured Chloroform into some glasses and they all passed out.
• He had accidently found a gaseous anaesthetic.

Question 7

20th century: medicine

Answer 7

Alexander Fleming:

• During WW1 he was sent to study wounded soldiers.
• Looked for something that would kill the microbes that caused infection.
• Germ Staphylococci caused septicaemia. Fleming was investigating it when he went on holiday.
• Spores from mouldy bread left in his lab had gotten on the petri dish and killed the germ.
• Mould was penicillin (antibiotic)