Wound

In medicine, a wound is a type of physical injury in which skin is torn, cut or punctured (an open wound), or where blunt force trauma causes a bruise (a closed wound). In pathology, it specifically means a sharp injury which damages the dermis of the skin. A mortal wound is one that leads directly to the death of the victim.

TREATMENT

If you are stung, immerse the wound in water at 40C (104F) to disperse the poison.

Wounds on your tongue or in your mouth heal twice as fast as wounds on other parts of the body.

Ancient Greeks and Romans used aluminium salts as astringents for dressing wounds.

FAMOUS WOUNDS IN HISTORY

The Battle of Shrewsbury was fought on July 21, 1403, between the army of King Henry IV of England and a rebel army led by Henry "Harry Hotspur" Percy from Northumberland. The king's 15-year-old son Prince Henry was injured during the battle when an arrowhead lodged in his cheekbone. His father's surgeon, John Bradmore, washed the wound with honey which acted as a disinfectant over a period of several days, then used a metal device like an oversized corkscrew to pull out the arrowhead using a rawplug technique. The wound was then flushed with white wine, which again acted as a disinfectant. Six weeks later the prince’s face had healed, but it left Henry with permanent scars, evidence of his experience in battle.

Before his conversion, the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius of Loyola, took part in the Battle of Pamplona fighting the French. A cannonball shattered his right leg and the fracture was badly repaired meaning Ignatius' surgeons were forced to break his leg again to set it correctly. He was left with a permanent limp.

During a long and painful convalescence from his painful leg wound, Ignatius meditated and read about the lives of the saints. Inspired by their heroic lives, he committed himself to a spiritual life.

St Ignatius Loyola wearing leg splints, by De Favray

Henry VIII of England had a jousting accident in 1536, in which he suffered a leg wound. The accident reopened and aggravated a previous leg wound he had sustained years earlier, to the extent that his doctors found it difficult to treat. The wound festered for the remainder of his life and became ulcerated, thus preventing him from maintaining the level of physical activity he had previously enjoyed.

The author of Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes, served on the galley Marquesa during the Battle of Lepanto fought between the Holy League and the Ottoman Empire. Cervantes fought bravely on board a vessel, and suffered three gunshot wounds all together, in his chest and left arm. It was "for the greater glory of the right" he said of the wound to his left arm which rendered it useless for the rest of his life.

In 1824 William Beaumont, a US army surgeon stationed at Fort Mackinac, came across Alexis St Martin, a young Canadian trapper who had received an accidental gunshot wound through the side. St Martin's wound had only partially healed, and through an opening in the stomach wall, Beaumont was able to observe the workings of the stomach by dangling various foods on silk threads into the man's insides. He thus employed him and for ten years was able to study digestion directly.

In the American Civil War's Battle of Shiloh, there was a strange phenomenon of soldiers having wounds that glowed in the dark. This was because their wounds were infected with a type of luminescent bacteria.

Lieutenant-General Sir Adrian Paul Ghislain Carton de Wiart was a British Army officer who served in the Boer War, and both World Wars. He was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear, as blinded in his left eye, and tore off his own fingers when a doctor declined to amputate them. 

Ernest Hemingway's successful career as a best-selling author was overshadowed by numerous injuries throughout his life. a small sample of the wounds Hemingway suffered during his life include a finger gashed to the bone in an accident with a punching ball, laceration of arms, legs and face from a ride on a runaway horse through a deep Wyoming forest, and a car accident resulting in a broken arm.

FUN WOUND FACTS

Paper cuts sting because paper leaves behind chemicals that irritate the wound and, since the cut doesn't bleed a lot, it stays open longer.

Your bruise turns colors because your body is breaking down and reabsorbing the hemoglobin that leaked from your broken blood vessels.

Bruising or open wounds are the most frequent injury diagnoses in every USA state except Colorado, where falling is the most common injury.

Venom

Venom is a kind of poison used by animals, which is made in its body and is injected into the body of another animal by a bite or sting.

Venomous animals. By mixed up works from wikimedia (Collage)

All octopuses are venomous. To kill their prey they drill through the prey's shell and inject their venom into their body using their beak.

All known scorpion species possess venom, which they use to turn the insides of their prey into liquid as they are unable to eat solids.

Scorpion venom is the most expensive liquid on earth at $39,000,000 per gallon.

With just one bite, the king cobra snake releases enough venom to kill 20 people.

The toxins in many venoms have potential to treat a wide range of diseases. A snail’s venom can act as a painkiller one thousand times more powerful than Morphine - And it’s not addictive.

The venom of a wasp contains chemicals that attract other wasps to also attack the victim.

Wasp sting, with a droplet of venom. Wikipedia

The Weever fish is generally buried under the sea bed with their eyes on the back of its head and venomous dorsal fin poking out of the sand.

The blue ringed octopus contains enough venom to kill 26 adult humans within minutes. Their bites are tiny and painless and most people don't even realize they've been bitten until respiratory depression and paralysis start to occur. No antivenom is available.

The Platypus has a venomous spur capable of causing intense pain that lasts as long as four months. The amount of poison increases during the breeding season. It is one of the few species of venomous mammals.

The slow loris is the only venomous primate on Earth. It sucks venom from a patch on its elbow before giving a lethal bite to its victim.

The rough-skinned newt is the most poisonous animal in the Americas. It's strong toxin, which is exuded from its skin, is 10,000 times more poisonous than cyanide.

Rough-skinned newt. Josephine County, Oregon. By DSHil 

Australia is the only continent with more venomous snakes than there are non-venomous ones.

Unlike a traditional toxin, viper venom functions by preventing the blood from clotting, so the victims bleed to death.

Pigs, mongooses, honey badgers and hedgehogs are the only mammals with a natural immunity to snake venom.

Venomous animals resulted in 57,000 human deaths in 2013, down from 76,000 deaths in 1990.

Bill Haast (December 30, 1910 – June 15, 2011)  began extracting snake venom at 15 years old. He founded the Miami Serpentarium in 1947, where he extracted venom from snakes in front of paying customers. Haast had been bitten 172 times by the time he reached the age of 97 and his blood was used to save 21 snakebite victims.

A man who is immune to snake venom, Tim Friede, has received 160 snake bites in 16 years. This has made his body to develop a natural immune response and generate high levels of antibodies to fight the snake venom. He even survived the bite of Black Mamba, one of the most venomous snakes in the historical glass factories on Murano, an offshore island in Venice.

Skydiver Joan Murray survived a 14,500-foot drop in 1999 after landing on a mound of fire ants. Their numerous venomous stings caused an adrenaline rush to keep her heart beating long enough for doctors to assist.

There was only one airplane allowed to fly in the US on September 11, 2001 after the attacks. It was a flight from California to Florida that was carrying anti-venom for a man that was bitten by a venomous snake. The plane was accompanied by two fighter jets.

Typhoid Mary

Mary Mallon (September 23, 1869 – November 11, 1938) who was known as "Typhoid Mary", was the first known healthy carrier of typhoid fever in the United States, having contracted a mild case herself at some stage. She was blamed for spreading typhoid to 51 people, three of whom died, over the course of her career as a cook.

A historical poster warning against acting like Typhoid Mary

The 1903 New York epidemic was found to have begun with households where Mary had been a cook. When discovered, Mary disappeared and she continued to spread the illness by working with food under assumed names and when she was finally tracked down by a sanitary engineer, she refused medical help and claimed ignorance about hand washing. Typhoid Mary refused to cooperate with investigators, even refusing an offer of royalties on a book about the outbreak.

In 1907 the New York City Department of Health authorities had Mary committed to an isolation center, she was released three years later on the condition that she would she never accept employment that involved the cooking or handling food.

Mary Mallon in a hospital bed during her first quarantine

In 1914 there were outbreaks of typhoid at a sanatorium in Newfoundland, New Jersey, and at Sloane maternity Hospital in Manhattan. Mary had been a cook at both places. This time she was apprehended while preparing gelatin for a friend and she was returned to isolation center on North Brother Island, where she remained for the rest of her life.

On November 11, 1938, Mary died of pneumonia at age 69. A post-mortem found evidence of live typhoid bacteria in her gallbladder.

Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis is a disease caused by bacteria, most often affecting the lungs. 

Wikipedia

The organism that usually causes tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, can travel through the air and spread from one person to the next. This happens when infected people cough, speak, sneeze, or spit.

Tuberculosis was formerly known as consumption because of the severe weight loss and the way the infection appeared to "consume" the patient. 

Tuberculosis only started infecting humans recently. Scientists took a chunk of a mummified bishop's lung and found, using DNA sequencing, that tuberculosis started infecting humans only 6,000 years ago

Mycobacterium tuberculosis has been found in relics from ancient Egypt, China and India.

A close up of a culture of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Wikipedia

Spinal tuberculosis, known as Pott’s disease has been detected by archaeologists in Egyptian mummies.

The earliest recorded case of tuberculous in Britain occurred at Tarrant Hinton, Dorset in 300BC.

Tuberculosis of the lymphatic glands, also known as scrofula, was once known as the king's evil in England and France because it was believed their kings could cure it simply by touching those affected.

During his reign King Charles II of England touched 92,107 sufferers from scrofula, each of whom believed the King's touch would cure them.

With urban and industrial development from the sixteenth century onwards, tuberculous became increasingly dominant in the Western world. By the eighteenth century,  900 out of every 100,000 people were dying from the disease each year.

The cause of tuberculosis was unknown until 1882 when German doctor Robert Koch discovered the bacterium causing it. At this stage, TB was killing an estimated one out of every seven people living in the United States and Europe. 

Eight years later Koch announced he had developed tuberculin, a cure for tuberculosis. Though it proved ineffective as a vaccine against the disease it is used today as a way of finding out whether a patient had experienced TB.

Administration of tuberculin

The Bacillus Calmette–Guerin vaccine against tuberculous is based on a bovine strain of the bacterium. It was developed by Albert Calmette and Camille Guerin in the 1910s and first used on humans in 1921. Today, in countries where tuberculosis is common, one dose of BCG is recommended in healthy babies as close to the time of birth as possible. 

Streptomycin, the first antibiotic remedy for tuberculosis, was isolated by researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey on October 19, 1943. 

The use of Streptomycin meant that tuberculosis had largely been eradicated in developed countries by the 1970s.

The US Food and Drug Administration approved Sirturo (bedaquiline), a Johnson & Johnson tuberculosis drug on December 31, 2012. It was the first new medicine to fight the infection in more than forty years.

Tuberculosis used to be easily treated and cured with antibiotics. However, the bacterium is now highly resistant to this method of fighting TB.

Tuberculosis is currently the most common major infectious disease in the world. Almost one third of the world's population are carriers of the TB bacillus and are at risk for developing active disease. Worldwide ten million people are infected annually and 1.3 million died from the disease in 2016. Most of them live in the Third World.

Many people who recover from tuberculosis experience a significant loss of lung capacity. The extent of this loss can vary, but it's not uncommon for individuals to lose more than half of their lung function

Source News-medical

Syphilis

Syphilis is a venereal disease caused by the bacterium Treponema pallidum. It is most commonly spread through sexual activity, but may also be transmitted from mother to baby during pregnancy or at birth, resulting in congenital syphilis. 

There are four stages of syphilis: the primary, secondary, latent, and tertiary stages. In each stage, the signs and symptoms of syphilis are different. In the primary stage, a person usually just has a wound on their skin, called a "chancre." In the secondary stage, a person usually gets a rash. In the "latent" stage, which can last for years, there are few or no symptoms.  If syphilis reaches the tertiary stage, which is the most severe, it causes many serious symptoms. These can include problems with the nervous system and the heart. Eventually, many people with tertiary syphilis will die if they do not get medical treatment.

Reddish papules and nodules due to secondary syphilis. By Herbert L. Fred, MD, Hendrik A. van Dijk,

Syphilis was first recorded in Europe in Naples, Italy, during a French invasion (Italian War of 1494–98). It is believed the disease originated in the Americas and was brought to Italy by the returning crewmen from Christopher Columbus' voyage across the Atlantic. 

Syphilis was initially known as the "French disease" by the people of Naples, "Italian disease" by the French, "Spanish disease" by the Dutch, and "Christian Disease" by the Turks.

In the 1500s, Scotland called syphilis "Grandgore"—the only European country that didn't shift the blame by naming it after another nation.

An early medical illustration of people with syphilis, Vienna, 1498

In leading the Portuguese into the Indian Ocean and an Eastern Empire, Vasco da Gama also inadvertently spearheaded the spread of syphilis as far east as Japan.

The pastoral name "syphilis" (the name of a character) was first used by the Italian physician and poet Girolamo Fracastoro as the title of his Latin poem Syphilis sive morbus gallicus ("Syphilis or The French Disease"). It told of a shepherd boy named Syphilus who insulted Greek god Apollo and was punished by that god with a horrible disease. In this poem Fracastoro advanced the innovative theory that syphilis is spread by "seeds" sown by human contact.

Between the 16th and 19th centuries, syphilis was one of the largest public health burdens in terms of prevalence, symptoms, and disability. 

The picture below is a portrait of Gerard de Lairesse by Rembrandt van Rijn, circa 1665–67. De Lairesse, himself a painter and art theorist, had congenital syphilis that deformed his face and eventually blinded him. 

The wigs that English judicial officials wear today were invented in the 16th century —to cover the baldness of syphilis.

Since smallpox and syphilis lesions look similar, many American Civil War soldiers got syphilis attempting to vaccinate themselves against smallpox.

In 1885 Arthur Conan Doyle was awarded a doctorate from Edinburgh for his dissertation on syphilis.

The causative organism of syphallis, Treponema pallidum, was first identified by Fritz Schaudinn and Erich Hoffmann in 1905.

Electron micrograph of Treponema pallidum on cultures of cotton-tail rabbit epithelium cells 

The first effective treatment for syphilis was Salvarsan (meaning "that which saves by arsenic"), developed in 1910 by Paul Ehrlich. For four years he and his assistants had tried hundreds of compounds with molecules not unlike dyes but containing arsenic, as a part of his program to find a "magic bullet" that could locate and destroy the disease microbes in the body with only minor damage to the patient. The six hundred and sixth one they tried was found to be effective against the Treponema pallidum bacterium.

Malaria was once used to treat syphilis.  Between 1917 and the mid 1940s,Viennese neurologist Dr. Wagner von Jauregg injected sufferers with malaria-infected blood, causing an extremely high fever that ultimately killed the disease. Jauregg won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1927 for the treatment. It remained in use until penicillin came along and gave doctors a better, safer way to cure the STD.

The effectiveness of the treatment of syphilis with penicillin was confirmed in trials in 1943. Before the discovery and use of Salvarsan and then antibiotics, mercury was often used with the result that the patient was often killed by the treatment. 

Syphilis became much less common after penicillin became available in the 1940s. In 1999 it is believed to have infected 12 million additional people, with greater than 90% of cases in the developing world. However, since 2000, Since 2000, rates of syphilis have been increasing in the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia and Europe, primarily among men who have sex with other males.

In 2015, Cuba became the first country in the world to eradicate mother to child transmission of syphilis.

Stuttering

Stutterers are people who have a speech disorder in which the flow of speech is disrupted by involuntary repetitions and prolongations of sounds, syllables, words or phrases, and involuntary silent pauses or blocks during which the stutterer is unable to produce sounds.

Stuttering and stammering are not quite the same: a stutter is an involuntary repetition of one letter, while a stammer is any speech-slowing defect.

The ancient Greek Demosthenes stuttered and was inarticulate as a youth, yet, through dedicated practice, using methods such as placing pebbles in his mouth, became a great orator of Ancient Greece.

Greek orator Demosthenes practicing oratory at the beach with pebbles in his mouth

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was one of the 30% of stutterers who have an associated speech disorder—a lisp in his case—yet led his nation through World War II.

King George VI was so embarrassed by his stutter that he hired speech-language pathologist Lionel Logue and greatly improved his public speaking.

Country singer Mel Tillis stutters when talking but not when singing.

German actor Dieter Thomas Heck started stuttering after being trapped under a staircase after a bombing raid in World War II.

American actor James Earl Jones had a severe stutter as a child and refused to speak in school.

English comedian Rowan Atkinson incorporates his stuttering into his work by using over-articulation to overcome problematic consonants.

Golfer Tiger Woods stuttered as a child and used to talk to his dog until he fell asleep in an effort to get rid of it.

Bruce Willis had severe stuttering problems as a child. He discovered the stutter disappeared while performing in a school play through the memorization of lines. While studying acting in college it was the combination of acting and speech therapy which helped him overcome his condition.

Stammering

Stammering and stuttering are not quite the same: a stammer is any speech-slowing defect, while a stutter is an involuntary repetition of one letter.

One percent of the world's population have the speech disorder of stammering.

Men are three or four times as likely as women to stammer.

October 22 was designated International Stuttering Awareness Day (ISAD) in 1998.

The only book of the Bible to mention stammering is Isaiah: "Even the hotheads among them will be full of sense and understanding, and those who stammer in uncertainty will speak out plainly." (Isaiah 32:4),

Some say Moses was the first stammerer on the basis of Exodus 4:10 where he says to God: "I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue."

The Greek orator Demosthenes was an ancient stammerer who is said to have cured himself by learning to speak with pebbles in his mouth.

Bust of the Greek orator Demosthenes By Sting, 

The Roman emperor Claudius had a pronounced stammer and at times he was barely able to make himself understood. Despite his speech disorder, Claudius personally heard and judged cases in court.

Derek Jacobi, who played the title role in the acclaimed BBC series I, Claudius, has a International Stuttering Awareness Day birthday - he was born October 22, 1938.

The only Shakespeare play to mention stammering is As You Like It. Rosalind says in  Act 3, Scene 2: "I would thou couldst stammer, that thou might’st pour this concealed man out of thy mouth as wine comes out of a narrow-mouthed bottle."

Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, suffered from a stammer – a condition shared by most of his siblings. He was bullied mercilessly at Rugby School because of his speech disorder.

Lewis Carroll

Dodgson carried his stammer into adulthood. He referred to it as his "hesitation" and it continued to plague him throughout his entire life.

Because of his stammer, King George VI of the United Kingdom dreaded public speaking. He had speech therapy for the disorder, but never fully overcame it.

A favourite tongue-twister of Lionel Logue, who treated George VI, was: "She sifted seven thick stalked thistles through a strong, thick sieve."

After being confronted over his Fish Called Wanda character's speech impediment, Michael Palin founded the Centre for Stammering Children.

The actress Emily Blunt suffered from a bad stammer as a child but was encouraged by a teacher to act — and used various accents to help overcome her condition.

Source Daily Express

Sneeze

A sneeze is a convulsive expulsion of air from the lungs through the nose and mouth, usually caused by irritation of the nasal mucous membrane.

A man mid sneeze

Sneezing may be linked to sudden exposure to bright light, sudden change in temperature, a particularly full stomach, an allergy or viral infection, and can lead to the spread of disease.

HISTORY

There are two mentions of sneezing in the Bible. 2 Kings 4:35 "The boy sneezed seven times then opened his eyes. Job 41:18 "Light flashes when he sneezes."

Pope Gregory the Great originated the usage of the phrase "God Bless You", when someone sneezes, at a time when coughing was a mortal symptom because of the plague. It was on February 16, 600, that he declared "God bless you" to be the correct response to a sneeze.

On February 13, 1981, 11-year-old Donna Griffiths of Pershore, England, caught a cold and started sneezing. She carried on sneezing about every 30 seconds and surpassed the previous duration record of 194 days on July 26, 1981. It was estimated that she sneezed a million times in the first 365 days. Donna finally achieved her first sneeze-free day on September 16, 1983, 978 days later. It's still the world sneezing record.

FUN SNEEZING FACTS

The spit particles in a sneeze can reach up to 100mph.

If you keep your eyes open by force when you sneeze, you might pop an eyeball out.

Halting sneezing via blocking the nostrils and mouth is a dangerous manoeuvre. It may lead to numerous complications, such as perforation of the tympanic membrane (perforated eardrum), pneudomediastinum (air trapped in the chest between both lungs), and even rupture of a cerebral aneurysm.

About twenty-five percent of the human population sneeze when they are exposed to light. This trait is inherited.

Japanese and Cantonese are the only two languages where it's customary to apologize after sneezing.

The “ah-choo” sound people make when sneezing is a cultural learned behavior. For example, in the Philippines they instead say “ha-ching”, the Japanese say “hakashun”, and deaf people don’t add any sounds at all.

Languages have onomatopoeic words for sneezing:
English: ahchoo or achoo
Bengali: hachi
Cantonese: hat chi
Mandarin: ati
French: atchoum
German: hatschi
Greek: apsu

Between 15% and 30% the world's population have the photic sneeze reflex, which causes them to sneeze when exposed to bright light, such as sunlight. The exact cause of the photic sneeze reflex is not fully understood, but it is thought to be related to the trigeminal nerve, which is responsible for sensation in the face, including the eyes. Its more formal name is Autosomal-dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst Syndrome, which abbreviates to ACHOO. 

People don't sneeze when they are asleep because the nerves involved in the sneeze reflex are also resting.

Sneezing is not confined to humans. Many animals including cats, dogs, horses, chickens and iguanas sneeze.

African wild dogs use sneezing as a form of communication, especially when considering a consensus in a pack on whether or not to hunt.

Smallpox

Smallpox is a contagious viral disease, marked by fever and skin eruptions leaving pitted scars.

There were two forms of smallpox. Variola major was the severe and most common form, with a more extensive rash and higher fever. Variola minor was a less common presentation, and a much less severe disease, with historical death rates of 1 percent or less

The disease was endemic in Europe until the development of vaccination and in Asia until a World Health Organization campaign resulted in the eradication of smallpox.

The transmission electron micrograph below depicts a number of smallpox virus virions magnetized  approximately 370,000 times. The “dumbbell-shaped” structure inside the smallpox virion is the viral core, which contains the viral DNA. This DNA acts as the blueprint by which the virus replicates itself once it is released into the host cell.

By Photo Credit:Content Providers(s): CDC/ Dr. Fred Murphy; Sylvia Whitfield 

The first known victim of smallpox in the Mediterranean world was Pharaoh Rameses V of Egypt in 1157BC.

In ancient times, only the more densely populated areas of China and India were susceptible to major out breaks of smallpox. The Chinese and Indians had various procedures in their attempts to immune themselves from the infectious disease. One involved transferring some fluid from the spots of an infected person to a small cut made in the arm of an uninfected person. Alternatively they might sniff the drying scabs of smallpox victims.

Until the middle of the sixth century AD. the Japanese seemed to have escaped the epidemic diseases that had long scourged mainland populations. However, when the Buddhist missionaries from Korea visited the Japanese court, they bought with them smallpox, which reached epidemic proportions.

A  young girl in Bangladesh who was infected with smallpox in 1973.

A treatment for smallpox in medieval Europe was being sewn up in a pink woolen garment in front of a roaring fire.

The term "smallpox" was first used in Britain in the 15th century to distinguish the disease from syphilis, which was then known as the "great pox".

Within 40 years of Columbus' discovery of America, most of the indigenous population had died of diseases brought by the Europeans, mainly smallpox, measles and influenza.

In 1562 Queen Elizabeth I of England contacted smallpox and was saved by the skill of a German doctor. She recovered without a mark on her face.

Smallpox was a scourge of the eighteenth century, killing in Europe alone sixty million and all but five percent of those who survived suffered facial pockmark scarring.

You were more likely to get work if you had smallpox scars in the 18th century. The scars proved that you already had smallpox and could not pass it on to your employers.

Variolation or inoculation was the method first used to immunize an individual against smallpox (Variola is the medical name for smallpox.) The patient was inoculated against smallpox by deliberately causing a mild case of the disease using material taken from another patient or a recently variolated individual.

Variolation was first used in China and the Middle East before it was introduced into England and North America in the 1720s in the face of some opposition.

Comparison of smallpox (left) and cowpox (right) inoculations 16 days after administration

The British used smallpox as a biological weapon at the Siege of Fort Pitt in Pennsylvania in 1763 against France and its Native American allies.

In 1767, a smallpox epidemic in Siberia wiped out some 20,000 people. Voltaire suggested to Catherine the Great that she should summon the English Quaker and inoculator Thomas Dimsdale to inoculate her and her son against smallpox to prove to the people that variolation was a safe and effective procedure. He inoculated them successfully along with 200 other Russians.

Maria Theresa of Austria had her children inoculated against smallpox after the epidemic of 1767. This changed the negative perception of inoculation among Austrian physicians. Maria Theresa also held a dinner in her palace for the first 65 children who had been inoculated in Austria.

George Washington inoculated his troops against smallpox during the American Revolution, reducing a 17% death rate from the disease down to 1%.

It was a common observation in late 18th century England that milkmaids were generally immune to smallpox. English country doctor Edward Jenner thought that the pus in the blisters that milkmaids received from cowpox (a disease similar to smallpox, but much less virulent) protected them from smallpox.

On 14 May 1796, Jenner tested his hypothesis on an eight-year-old boy, the son of his gardener. In 1796, Jenner decided to test his theory. He took some pus from a cowpox blister on the fingers of a farmer's daughter, Sarah Nelmes and scratched it with a lancet into the skin of the left arm of an eight-year-old boy named James Phipps, who at first showed signs of a light fever but quickly recovered. Two months later he exposed the child to smallpox, but the boy did not get the disease. Jenner successfully tested his hypothesis on 23 more subjects.

In 1798 Jenner published a paper explaining his work. He named the process in which he used the cowpox sore, vaccination, which came from the Latin vaccinus, meaning "from cows."

Below is an 1802 cartoon of the early controversy surrounding Edward Jenner's vaccination theory, showing using his cowpox-derived smallpox vaccine causing cattle to emerge from patients.

Thomas Jefferson was one of the first prominent American men to submit for inoculation for smallpox. He has had his children inoculated as well.

To combat the spread of smallpox during the Civil War, soldiers would find someone with cowpox, cut open their pustules, and infect themselves with it. The less harmful cowpox made them immune to smallpox, but they sometimes confused cowpox with syphilis and gave themselves an STD instead.

During the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War vaccination was not compulsory for the French army and over 23,000 died of smallpox. However vaccination was compulsory in the Prussian army and less than 300 have died of the same disease.

Components of a modern smallpox vaccination kit 

The World Health Organization announced a global vaccination campaign against smallpox in 1967.

In 1975 Rahima Banu, a 2-year old girl from the village of Kuralia in Bangladesh, was the last known person to be infected with the more severe Variola major form of smallpox. The World Health Organization team arrived and cared for Banu, who recovered fully.

The last natural case of the less severe Variola minor form of smallpox was discovered in Merca district, Somalia on October 26, 1977 when Somalian hospital cook Ali Maow Maalin began displaying symptoms.

Janet Parker, a British medical photographer, became the last recorded person to die from smallpox on September 11, 1978. She often worked above professor Henry Bedson's laboratory at University of Birmingham Medical School where research on smallpox viruses was being conducted. In 1978, a year after smallpox was eradicated worldwide, the virus escaped from the lab. It infected two last patients, including Parker. Bedson, who had been working to rid the world of smallpox, killed himself the next day.

Her illness and death led to a debate on whether the virus should be preserved and eventually all known stocks of smallpox virus were destroyed or transferred to World Health Organisation laboratories.

In 1980 it was agreed that the global vaccination campaign announced thirteen years earlier by the World Health Organization had succeeded in completely eradicating smallpox. However, live copies of smallpox are still kept in different maximum-security laboratories around the world.

The WHO and the CDC consider October 26th to be the anniversary of the eradication of smallpox, the most spectacular success of vaccination the world has known.

Smallpox is the first infectious disease to have been completely eradicated. The second was rinderpest in 2011.

In July 2014, six sealed glass vials of smallpox dated 1954 were discovered by chance in a storage room in an FDA laboratory at the NIH in Maryland. Upon transfer to the CDC in Atlanta, two of the vials had virus which proved to be viable in culture. They were destroyed seven months later.

Sleepwalking

Sleepwalking  is called somnambulism (Latin somnus "sleep" + ambulare "to walk").

Sleepwalking occurs during slow-wave sleep of non-rapid eye movement sleep cycles. It typically occurs within the first third of the night when slow-wave sleep is most prominent.

According to research done, sleepwalking seems to be a problem related to the mechanism of waking up.

John Everett Millais, The Somnambulist, 1871

Sleepwalking seems to be more common in children, between ten and thirty percent of children are affected; in most cases, they stop sleepwalking during puberty.

Researchers reported in 2012 in the journal Neurology that about 3.6 percent of U.S. adults had walked in their sleep at least once in the previous 12 months  One percent experienced at least two episodes of sleepwalking per month.

More than 8 million Americans sleepwalk.

In one of the most famous scenes in Shakespeare's MacBeth, a doctor and a gentlewoman discuss Lady Macbeth's strange habit of sleepwalking:

"Since his majesty went into the field, I have seen her rise from her bed, throw her night-gown upon  her, unlock her closet, take forth paper, fold it, write upon't, read it, afterwards seal it, and again return to bed; yet all this while in a most fast sleep."

Lady Macbeth sleepwalking by Johann Heinrich Füssli

In 1987, Kenneth Parks killed his mother-in-law, assaulted his father-in-law, and drove to the police station to confess—in his sleep.

 A 15-year-old sleepwalker once had to be rescued after she climbed a crane that was 130ft tall.

Scurvy

Scurvy is a disease that is caused by not eating enough vitamin C, which is contained in fresh vegetables, fruit and milk. Early symptoms include feeling tired and sore arms and legs. Without treatment, the victim's skin and hair dries up, their teeth may loosen and even fall out and they may bleed from the mouth, nose, and gums. As scurvy worsens there can be poor wound healing, and finally death from infection or bleeding.

Page from the journal of Henry Walsh Mahon showing effects of scurvy (1841)

The Ancient Egyptians recorded scurvy's symptoms as early as 1550 BC and the disease was later documented by Hippocrates.

In 1498 Vasco Da Gama became the first European to reach India by sea. There was an outbreak of scurvy that killed so many of his men that due to a shortage of crewmen, he was forced to burn one of his ships.

When Ferdinand Magellan became the first person to reach Asia by sailing westwards across the Atlantic and Pacific, scurvy ran rampant amongst many of his crew. Magellan noted that the destructive effect of scurvy on his men was that "gums grew so over their teeth that they died miserably for hunger."

Scorbutic gums

In 1536, the French explorer Jacques Cartier, travelling up the St. Lawrence River, used the local natives' knowledge to save his men who were dying of scurvy. The Canadian Indians were able to show him how to cure the disease with by drinking a "tea" made from  pine needles and eating the bark and leaves of a tree. Pine needles have approximately 3 to 5 times more vitamin C than an orange.

Basque whalers and sailors didn’t die of scurvy because they drank 2-3 liters of cider everyday which, unbeknownst to them, contains vitamin C.

During the Seven Years War (1754–63), 1,512 British soldiers were killed in action and 100,000 died from scurvy.

The Scottish naval surgeon James Lind published his Treatise of the Scurvy in 1753, in which he showed the effectiveness of citrus fruits in preventing the disease. Lind was aware that the Dutch had employed citrus fruits for several centuries and his discoveries came as a result of searching for objective evidence of the healing effects of such fruits by doing experiments.

A portrait of Scottish doctor James Lind (1716–1794)

Captain James Cook lost 41 of his 98 men to scurvy on his first voyage to the Pacific in 1768. Inspired by Lind's findings the British explorer introduced lemon and lime juice, carrot marmalade and unfermented malt. Cook also placed on the deck of his ship a large barrel containing sauerkraut (cabbage reserved in brine, an unpopular food due to its German origins). To encourage his men to eat it he placed a notice on the barrel "FOR USE OF THE CAPTAIN AND OFFICER'S ONLY"
The crafty plan worked. No one caught scurvy and each night the levels of sauerkraut slowly decreased. Cook also made sure his men had clean and well-ventilated living quarters and their bedding and clothes was aired twice a week.

Only one sailor died of scurvy on Cook's last two voyages.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the importance of eating citrus to prevent scurvy was acknowledged and Sir Gilbert Blane made the use of lemon and lime juice mandatory in the British navy.

The singer James Blunt developed scurvy at Bristol university when he ate only meat for eight weeks.  Blunt started his carnivorous diet because he found himself surrounded by vegan and vegetarian classmates. 

Today, rates of scurvy in most of the world are low. Those most commonly affected are malnourished people in the developing world and the homeless.

Scurvy only exists in primates. It's only gorillas, chimps, humans, and a few monkeys that the body stops producing this necessary vitamin.

A major US study revealed that roughly two-thirds of children hospitalized for scurvy are autistic, largely due to extreme sensory food aversion and highly restrictive diets.