Medicine through History. Key Individuals Flashcards
Hippocrates
Ancient
Greek Physician (doctor) who developed the theory that the body was made up of four humours. If they were out of balance, this would make a human sick Ancient Times
Galen
Ancient
Created the theory of Opposites which suggested to re-balance the four humours if one fell out of balance. Humoural treatments.
Ancient Times
Paracelsus
Renaissance
The first to theorise that the body was made up of chemicals and that chemicals could be created to cure sickness. He experimented with chemicals such as arsenic and mercury. Iatrochemistry
Vesalius
Renaissance
In 1543, he published “The Fabric of the Human Body”. This corrected many of Galen’s mistakes to do with the anatomy (structure) of the body.
Francastro
Renaissance
Developed the theory of contagion suggesting that diseases could be spread from one person to another. In 1546 he published ‘on contagion’
William Harvey
Renaissance
He developed the correct theory of circulation in the early 1600s, how blood pumped around the body.
Von Helmont
Renaissance
He claimed in 1648 that digestion happened because of stomach acid, not because of anything to do with the Four Humours.
Thomas Sydenham
Wrote the Observationes Medicae (1676). This was a direct challenge to the very basis of the Four Humours. Sydenham theorised that disease happened because of things attacking the body, not because of imbalances within it. He also theorised that diseases came in families.
Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek
Renaissance
He developed the first microscope with funding from the Royal Society. In 1702, he published images of what he called “animalcules”. They were in fact germs.
Lady Mary Montague and Thomas Dimsdale
Industrial
Lady Mary Montague, She observed the use of variolation (inoculation) in Asia and introduced it to Britain.
Thomas Dimsdale popularised inoculation in Britain in the early 1700s.
Edward Jenner
Industrial
Developed the first vaccination, in 1796 for Smallpox, through observing milkmaids who seemed to be immune to it from contracting cowpox - a milder disease from the same family of diseases.
Edwin Chadwick
Industrial
He published a report in 1842, that suggested the government needed to do more for the poor in big cities as a way of dealing with big outbreaks of illness.
James Simpson
Industrial
He developed the first popular anesthetic, after discovering chloroform had the ability to make you unconscious for periods of time.
Florence Nightingale
Industrial
Improved hospital training and conditions after experiencing how bad things were in the Crimean War of 1853. Created the pavilion style hospital
John Snow
Industrial
He made chloroform safer by inventing a dispenser. Later, in 1854, he used an outbreak of cholera in Soho, London to prove the link between water and that disease.
