X-Ray

X-radiation is a kind of electromagnetic radiation. X-rays are produced when high-energy electrons from a heated filament cathode strike the surface of a target on the face of a massive heat-conducting anode, between which a high alternative is applied.

X-rays have a shorter wavelength, and therefore more energy, than ultraviolet radiation. They have a much shorter wavelength than visible light (the light that we can see).

Applications of X-rays make use of their short wavelength (such as X-ray crystallography) or their penetrating power ) as in medical X-rays of internal body tissues,)

Pixiebay

German physics professor Wilhelm Röntgen was experimenting at Wurzburg University on November 8, 1895 with the flow of electricity through gases when he noticed the fluorescence of a barium platinocyanide screen. After further investigations he found that the radiation causing this was able to pass through everyday materials such as paper, wood and living tissue and it produced an image on photographic plates as well as a fluorescent screen.

Röntgen could not determine how the radiation was carried through space or why it had such penetrating power. For this reason he called the radiation X rays, taking the name from the mathematician's use of x to denote the unknown quantity in a problem.

Realizing that he had created a means by which physicians could see inside the human body, Röntgen made the first X-ray, an image of his wife Bertha's hand.

First medical X-ray by Wilhelm Röntgen of his wife Anna Bertha Ludwig's hand

The first use of X-rays under clinical conditions was by John Hall-Edwards in Birmingham, England on January 11, 1896, when he radiographed a needle stuck in the hand of an associate.

The x-ray machine was exhibited (in New York City) for the first time in 1896. To see the machine, people had to pay a 25¢ admission charge.

Röntgen was awarded the first Nobel Prize in physics, in 1901, for his discovery and he donated the monetary reward from the prize to his university. He refused to take out any patents related to his discovery on moral grounds, as he believed that the products of scientific research should be made freely available to all.

In the late 1890s, Thomas Edison began investigating materials for ability to fluoresce when X-rayed; by the turn of the century he had invented a fluoroscope with sufficient image intensity to be commercialized.

Thoracic fluoroscopy using handheld fluorescent screen, 1909.

Clarence Dally, a glass blower of lab equipment and tubes at Edison’s laboratory, was repeatedly exposed, to radiation poisoning, In 1904, he became perhaps the first person to die of man-made radiation when he passed away from skin cancer. Edison refused to work with x-rays ever again.

Dally's death caused some scientists to begin taking the risks of radiation more seriously, but they still weren't fully understood. During the 1930s, 40s and 50s, in fact, many shoe stores featured shoe-fitting fluoroscopes that used to X-rays to enable customers to see the bones in their feet; it wasn't until the 1950s that this practice was determined to be risky business.

Before people knew the full extent of x-rays, women would get face x-rays in order to kill bacteria which would make skin look healthy and beautiful. After a while people who did this started developing tumors on their faces and some even died. Doctors also used this method for hair removal.

During World War I, Marie Curie established the first military field radiological centres. She invented a mobile x-ray machine for usage on the front line and taught 150 women to use them.

Curie died in 1934 of aplastic anemia brought on by exposure to radiation. Curie believed her radiation exposure during her time developing her mobile X-Ray machine during the First World War caused her terminal illness.

English chemist Rosalind Franklin (July 25, 1920 –April 16, 1958 is the unsung hero of DNA research. James Watson and Francis Crick got the Nobel Prize for discovering the double helix after Franklin's lab partner showed Watson one of her best images — an X-ray labelled ‘photograph 51'. Many believe she should have shared in their Nobel prize.

Dorothy Hodgkin was a British chemist who advanced the technique of X-ray crystallography, a method used to determine the three-dimensional structures of biological molecules. Hodgkin solved the structures of cholesterol (1937), penicillin (1946) and vitamin B12 (1956), for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964.

One of Hodkins' students in the 1940s was Margaret Roberts — later Mrs Thatcher
In her final year at Oxford, Thatcher studied X-ray crystallography under Dorothy Hodgkin.

The first brain-scan using x-ray computed tomography (CT or CAT scan) was performed at Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon, London in 1971. The original 1971 CT Scan took 160 parallel readings with each scan taking a little over five minutes. The images from these scans took 2.5 hours to be processed on a large computer.

The secret police in Communist Romania subjected the leaders of a 1977 coal miners' strike to 5-minute chest X-rays to ensure that they developed cancer.

In the USSR, when foreign music was banned, bootleg records were made on old x-rays pulled from medical trash. These were called "ribs" and "bone records".

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.

Veterinary science

Veterinary science is the prevention and cure of disease and injuries in animals.

Pixabay

HISTORY

Veterinary medicine may have been established as a specialty as early as 2000 BC in Babylonia and Egypt. An Egyptian document dated around 1800 BC contains descriptions of treatments for birds, cattle, dogs and fish. Because these ancient cultures considered the animals sacred, the practice of veterinary science was often limited to external observations only.

It was not until the time of the ancient Greeks, a thousand years later, that the practice of veterinary medicine became a science based on experimentation and observation.

Hippiatrica is a Byzantine veterinary compilation of ancient Greek texts  dedicated to the care and healing of the horse. The texts were probably compiled in the 5th or 6th century AD by an unknown editor. Below is written and illustrated instructions in Hippiatrica on drenching a horse to induce diarrhea.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, veterinary science went into a sharp decline. For the next 1,300 years, the practice of treating animals tended to focus on horses because of their economic significance. In the Middle Ages, farriers or horseshoers combined their work in horseshoeing with the more general task of "horse doctoring."

Rinderpest, also known as cattle plague, was a highly contagious viral disease that devastated cattle populations in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries. The outbreak of rinderpest led to the establishment of veterinary colleges and schools in Europe and other parts of the world, as efforts were made to develop measures to control and prevent the spread of the disease.

The world's first veterinary school was founded in Lyon, France in 1762, by French veterinarian Claude (March  27, 1712 – January 3, 1779) . Bourgelat's school was dedicated to the training of veterinarians to care for both farm animals and horses, and it became a model for similar institutions around the world. Today, Lyon's veterinary school is part of the University of Lyon and is one of the oldest and most prestigious veterinary schools in the world.

Claude Bourgelat

UK's first college for veterinary surgeons opened with just four students in St Pancras Fields, in London's Camden Town in 1792.

In the United States, the first schools were established in the early 19th century in Boston, New York and Philadelphia.

In 1996 Synbiotics Corporation of Rancho Bernardo, California, became the first U.S. company to extend group health-care coverage to its 60 employees' family pets, including dogs, cats, and horses.

FAMOUS VETS

John Dunlop studied to be a veterinary surgeon at the University of Edinburgh's Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, graduating in 1860. In 1867, he moved to Ireland where he established Downe Veterinary Clinic in Downpatrick with his brother James Dunlop before moving to a practice in 38-42 May Street, Belfast.

Dunlop was a flourishing veterinary surgeon when in 1888 he obtained patents on a pneumatic tire for bicycles.

Aleen Isobel Cust (February 7, 1868 –January 29, 1937) was the first female veterinary surgeon to be recognised by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in Ireland and the United Kingdom.

Following the death of her father in 1878, Cust's guardian encouraged her to pursue an education and funded her attendance at the New Edinburgh Veterinary College.  As her mother was acting as a Woman of the Bedchamber to Queen Victoria, Cust enrolled under the name A.I. Custance to avoid any embarrassment for her family.

Cust completed her veterinary studies in 1897, but was denied permission to sit the final examination and consequently not be admitted as a member of Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS). She nevertheless went on to practice in County Roscommon with William Augustine Byrne MRCVS. Later, she volunteered at the front lines of World War II treating horses

The Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in London did not recognize Cust's right to practice in her own right in Britain until 1922 following the enactment of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919.

Aleen Isobel Cust

Suzanne Morrow (nee Francis), was part of the first Canadian figure skating pair to win both Olympic and World medals. She was also the first ice skater to perform the modern day ‘death spiral’ in an international competition. Morrow graduated veterinary school in 1952 and served as a vet until her retirement 43 years later.

James Herriot was the nom de plume of James Alfred Wight (October 3, 1916 – February 23, 1995), an English veterinary surgeon and writer, who used his many years of experiences as a vet in the Yorkshire Dales to write a series of books each consisting of stories about animals and their owners. He is best known for these semi-autobiographical works, beginning with If Only They Could Talk in 1970, which spawned a series of movies and television series.

Below is part of the BBC television set for All Creatures Great and Small on permanent display at the World of James Herriot museum in Thirsk, North Yorkshire.

Peter Ostrum, who played Charlie in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, never took another film role and instead found a career as a vet. He did not speak publicly about the movie for nearly twenty years, and for several years even his wife did not know about his role.

Laura Muir is a Scottish middle distance runner and a qualified vet. She juggled her veterinary medicine studies at the University of Glasgow and placements with her athletics training before passing her final exams in 2018.

FUN VETERINARY SCIENCE FACTS

Overweight pets can suffer from arthritis, diabetes, hypertension and many other problems.

Veterinarians say obesity is the most common health problem they see in pet parrots today.

Petting a dog lowers blood pressure and reduces stress.

Canned pumpkin is often recommended by veterinarians as a dietary supplement for dogs and cats that are experiencing certain digestive ailments such as constipation, diarrhoea, or hairballs. The high fiber content helps to aid proper digestion.

Cats will usually stop purring when they hear water running.  This is a trick used by veterinarians who need the cat to stop purring long enough to hear their heart and lungs.

Spayed females live around 40% longer and neutered males live over 60% longer than cats that haven’t had the procedure.

Veterinarians kill themselves at approx. three times the general population, due in part to online trolling and threats from pet owners who blame them for the death of a pet, and easy access to lethal medicines

Source Compton's Encyclopedia

Variolation

Variolation is a method of inoculation against smallpox by deliberately causing a mild case of smallpox using material from a person with the same disease. (Variola is the medical name for smallpox.)

Variolation was first used in China in the fifteenth century. They implemented a method of "nasal insufflation" administered by blowing powdered smallpox material, usually scabs, up the nostrils. Variolation spread to the Ottoman Empire around 1670.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was the beautiful wife of Edward Montagu, the British ambassador to Turkey from 1716 to 1718. She contracted smallpox, which pockmarked her face, and as a result she became interested in the inoculation methods that the Turks used to deal with the disease. While there, she had the practice conducted on her five-year-old son, Edward Montagu. On her return to England, Lady Montagu had her four-year-old daughter inoculated in the presence of physicians of the royal court in 1721. Both variolations proved successful.

Lady Montagu in Turkish dress.

The following year, Caroline  of Ansbach, the  wife of King George II, no doubt alarmed by the prevalence of smallpox in London at the time, trialed six prisoners with variolation in return for commuting their death sentences. When this was successful, she inoculated her own children, popularising the process.

Variolation became a common procedure once it was observed how smallpox deaths in London amongst those who had been inoculated were a great deal less frequent than amongst those who had not been inoculated.

France was the last European country to embrace variolation. It was not until an outbreak of smallpox in Paris in 1752 nearly killed the heir to the French throne that the public embraced the practice after seeing the prince variolated. However, after an epidemic was traced back to an inoculation, variolation was banned within city limits. These conditions caused physicians to move just outside the cities and continue to practice variolation in the suburbs.

At the turn of the 18th century, African tribes were already carrying out variolation by means of the tribal doctor who would transfer fluid from the smallpox spots of an infected person to a non-infected person. Meanwhile in Massachusetts, the Reverend Cotton Mather, a Puritan minister who was interested in science was told about variolation in 1706 by his African slave Onesimus. He applied the technique to a son and several servants, thus becoming the first person in North America to practice inoculation.

Opponents to this method were concerned it would cause the rapid spread of smallpox and after Mather inoculated his own son, a bomb was thrown through his window.

George Washington the commander in chief of the continental army during the War of Independence had his entire army inoculated in 1777, a controversial decision, as few doctors at the time believed in variolation.

The term variolation refers solely to inoculation with smallpox virus. The latter term was first used in 1800 soon after Edward Jenner introduced the smallpox vaccine derived from cowpox, an animal disease distinct from smallpox. The term variolation was then used from the 19th century to avoid confusion with vaccination.

Edward Jenner's cowpox had a very low death rate and was also more effective than variolation. Also, unlike a variolated person, a vaccinated person could not spread smallpox to others. Moreover, his vaccine seldom left a rash.

Below are Watercolour drawings showing variolation on versos and cowpox inoculation (vaccination) on fourteenth day smallpox (left) and cowpox (right).

Variolation began to be replaced by this new vaccine, and was eventually outlawed in England in 1840.

Vaccine

A vaccine is a modified preparation of viruses, or bacteria. It is introduced into the body either orally or by a hypodermic syringe to induce the general reaction which produces immunity.

HISTORY

In 1767, a smallpox epidemic in Siberia wiped out thousands of people. The French philosopher Voltaire suggested to the Russian Czar Catherine II that she summon the Quaker doctor Thomas Dimsdale to inoculate her and her son against smallpox. He inoculated them successfully and as word spread the Russian peasants began requesting vaccinations for themselves and their children. The parents of the first child patient were ordered by Catherine to re-Christian him "Vaccinoff".

English country doctor Edward Jenner first successfully inoculated an 8-year-old child with cowpox virus to produce immunity to smallpox in 1796. Two years later, 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."

Dr Edward Jenner performing his first vaccination. Painting by Ernest Board (early 20th century).

By the early 1800s Edward Jenner's cowpox vaccination had spread to most of Europe. Bavaria declared vaccination mandatory in 1807, and Denmark did the same three years later.

One of the first original American advocates for inoculation against severe disease was a slave named Onesimus. Before being forcibly brought to Boston in 1706, Onesimus lived in West Africa, where inoculation was a common practice. There, he had been deliberately infected with a small amount of smallpox to make him immune from a more severe version.

Onesimus told his owner, the New England Puritan minister Cotton Mather, about the practice. Mather was keenly interested in science, and after a smallpox outbreak began in Boston in 1721, Mather used this knowledge to advocate for inoculation in the population.

Benjamin Waterhouse was the first American physician to use this new treatment. However, several Boston clergymen and devout physicians formed a society that opposed vaccination. Some Christians objected to it in no certain terms as they believed that vaccination takes away the power of life and death from God.

In 1853, 30 years after Jenner’s death, a law was passed in England saying that every child had to be vaccinated against smallpox. By 1871, infant vaccination was compulsory and parents refusing to have their child vaccinated were fined and imprisoned if the fines were not paid.

An 1802 caricature by James Gillray depicting the early controversy surrounding Jenner's vaccination theory

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

During the Franco-Prussian war of the 1870s, more than 23,000 French soldiers died of smallpox. But the Prussians vaccinated their soldiers — and only 297 died.

A second generation of vaccines was introduced in the 1880s by Louis Pasteur who developed vaccines for chicken cholera and anthrax. The difference between the smallpox vaccination and anthrax or chicken cholera vaccinations was that the latter two disease organisms had been artificially weakened, so a naturally weak form of the disease organism did not need to be found. Pasteur's discovery revolutionized work in infectious diseases.

Pasteur later developed a vaccine against rabies after five years of investigation.

In 1896, a bubоnіc plаgue epіdеmic struck Bombay, and the government asked Waldemar Haffkine, developer of the first chоlera vаccіne, to help. After three months of persistent work (one assistant had a nervous breakdown and two others quit), a vаccіne was ready, with Haffkine tеsting it on himself first.

The first polio vaccine was developed by Dr Jonas Salk  at the University of Pittsburgh and came into use in 1955. Salk declined to patent his polio vaccine as he believed it belonged to the world.

Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh where he developed the first polio vaccine.

The first mass-produced disposable syringe and needle was developed for Dr. Jonas Salk's mass administration of his new polio vaccine for one million American children.

The oral polio vaccine was developed by Albert Sabin and came into commercial use six years later.

The two vaccines have reduced the number of cases of polio reported each year worldwide from an estimated 350,000 in 1988 to 22 in 2017.

The last natural case of smallpox was discovered in Somalia on October 26, 1977. The World Health Authority considers October 26th to be the anniversary of the eradication of smallpox, the most spectacular success of vaccination the world has known.

After the coronavirus was detected in December 2019,  the genetic sequence of COVID‑19 was published on January 11, 2020, triggering an urgent international response to prepare for an outbreak and hasten development of a preventive vaccine. By December 2020, Tozinameran, the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, had become the first COVID-19 vaccine to be approved for national use. Before Covid-19, the record for the fastest vaccine development — for mumps — was four years. Most vaccines have required more than a decade of research and experimentation.

FUN VACCINE FACTS

Vaccines have helped reduce measles deaths globally by 78% between 2000 and 2008. In sub-Saharan Africa, deaths dropped by 92% in the same period.

Every dollar spent on the rubella, measles, and mumps vaccine saves the U.S. $23.30 in medical costs, according to CDC data.

1.5 million children die every year from diseases preventable by vaccines according to the World Health Organization.

In the Canadian provinces of Ontario, New Brunswick and Manitoba, it's illegal for non-vaccinated children to attend public school services.

Eight of the fifteen vaccines that are routinely recommended today were developed by an American microbiologist named Maurice Hilleman (August 30, 1919 – April 11, 2005). They are the ones those for measles, mumps, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, chickenpox, meningitis, pneumonia and Haemophilus influenzae bacteria.

Vaccinations don't work on octopuses.

Source New York Times

Thermometer

A thermometer is an instrument used to measure temperature. 

Galilei Galileo built the first thermoscope in the late sixteenth century. A primitive gas thermometer, the thermoscope used a well known principal that air expands as it is heated. He used water in a thin glass tube with a bulb on top with markings etched on to the glass tube.

Ferdinando II de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany (1610–1670), devised the first sealed thermometer in 1654 dependent on the expansion of a liquid, and independent of air pressure. It was the forerunner of the common mercury thermometers of today.

These 1600's thermometers were filled with brandy instead of mercury. Apparently they were accurate enough. 

The picture below shows fifty-degree thermometers from the mid-17th century on exhibit at the Museo Galileo with black dots representing single degrees and white represented 10-degree increments; used to measure atmospheric temperatures. 

By Museo Galileo - Own work

In 1714 Dutch scientist and inventor Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit constructed the first sealed-in-glass thermometer, using mercury instead of alcohol and water mixtures. He discovered a method for cleaning mercury so that it would not stick to a glass tube, which enabled him to use this element rather than alcohol, which gave less accurate results.

Fahrenheit also devised a method for measuring temperature, which is named after him.

On May 19, 1743 French physicist Jean-Pierre Christin published the design of a mercury thermometer with the centigrade scale, with 0 representing the freezing point of water and 100 its boiling point.

Thermometer of Lyon (1743). By Science Museum of London 

English physician Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt (1836 – 1925) is generally considered the model for the Middlemarch character Dr Lydgate. Allbutt is best known for reducing the then foot long thermometer to a more manageable size. 

Ethanol, a flammable, colorless chemical compound, is the active fluid in modern (post-mercury) thermometers. It is also one of the alcohols that is most often found in alcoholic drinks, a solvent, an antiseptic and a fuel.

Another type is a digital thermometer, which uses electronics to measure temperature.

The world's smallest thermometer, which is 20,000 times smaller than a hair, is made of DNA, and is used to see temperature changes in cells.

The original purpose of the hood ornament on a car, before they were artistic and ornate, was a visible thermometer for the motor vehicle's coolant.

Syringe

A syringe is an instrument for injecting or extracting liquids or gases. It consists of a sliding plunger that fits tightly in a precise cylindrical tube. The plunger can be pulled and pushed inside the tube, letting the syringe draw in or expel the fluid through an orifice at the open end of the tube.

Pixiebay

The word "syringe" is derived from the Greek syrinx, meaning "Pan flute", "tube").

The syringe itself has been known since ancient times. One of the innovative and delicate eye surgery techniques used by the Romans was the removal of cataracts by couching. This involved using a sophisticated thin needle syringe to remove the clouding.

During the 1st century AD Aulus Cornelius Celsus mentions the use of piston syringes to treat medical complications in his De Medicina.

De medicina

In the 9th century an Egyptian surgeon used a glass suction tube to remove cataracts from a patient.

The Irish physician Francis Rynd invented the first syringe with a hollow needle in 1844. He used it to inject a sedative to treat neuralgia, revolutionizing medicine with a single push of a plunger.

Scottish doctor Alexander Wood (December 10, 1817 –February 26, 1884), invented in 1853 a hypodermic syringe with a needle fine enough to pierce the skin. Wood's innovation allowed drugs to be administered intravenously without the patient's skin having to be cut first. It is said he found inspiration in the sting of a honeybee.

The hypodermic syringe was a breakthrough in anesthetics and was originally, mainly used for giving injections of morphine as a painkiller. Doctors believed that morphine is not addictive if it bypasses the digestive tract and the needle Wood perfected allowed the drug to be injected directly into the blood stream, thus avoiding the stomach.

There is a story in circulation that Wood's wife, Rebecca Massey, was an intravenous morphine addict and was the first person the over dose from a morphine injection. However, according to her gravestone in Dean Cemetery in Edinburgh, she outlived her husband and died on February 6, 1895.

Alexander Wood

After the initial failure of his opera William Tell, Gioachino Rossini gave up composing and decided to concentrate on cooking. He produced some inventive recipes and devised a way of stuffing macaroni with foie gras by means of a silver syringe.

In 1954, Becton, Dickinson and Company created the first mass-produced disposable syringe and needle. It was developed for Dr. Jonas Salk's mass administration of the new Salk polio vaccine for one million American children.

Phil Brooks was an African-American inventor from Kansas who received a patent for a Disposable Syringe on April 9, 1974. The disposable syringe that he invented was designed to be easier and safer to use than previous models. The patent number for his invention was indeed U.S. Patent 3,802,434.

Source Thought

Surgery

HISTORY

Surgery was practiced in ancient Egypt including setting and splintering broken bones. As anesthesia was little known, the patient was sometimes rendered unconscious by means of a blow on the head.

A 3600-year-old ancient Egyptian papyrus is the oldest known surgical text and contains the earliest recorded use of the word “brain” and suggests using raw meat to stop bleeding.

Ancient Egypt produced the world's first prosthetic limb, a toe composed of leather, wood and thread dated between 950 and 710 B.C.

The first recorded successful operation to remove an appendix was on December 6, 1735, at St. George’s Hospital in London, when French surgeon Claudius Amyand took out a perforated appendix from an 11-year-old boy, Hanvil Andersen. The organ had apparently been perforated by a pin he had swallowed. The patient made a recovery and was discharged a month later. 

An operation in 1753, painted by Gaspare Traversi.

American physician Ephraim McDowell performed the world's first removal of an ovarian tumor on December 25, 1809.  The tumor McDowell removed weighed 22.5 pounds (10.2 kg). The whole procedure took 25 minutes and the patient, Mrs Crawford, made an uncomplicated recovery. She returned to her home in Green County, Kentucky, 25 days after the operation and lived another 32 years. 

John Adams' daughter, Abigail "Nabby" Adams Smith, underwent a gruelling mastectomy on October 8, 1811 to treat breast cancer. The surgeon: Dr. John Warren, a prominent Boston physician, employed tools like a large fork with sharpened prongs, a wooden-handled razor, and a heated iron spatula for cauterization. No anaesthesia was available. Nabby endured the excruciating pain without any form of painkillers.

French surgeon René Leriche first started wearing blue scrubs during surgery in 1914 because he discovered it reduced eye strain for doctors working endless hours during World War I. "Ciel Blue" became standard once surgery was videotaped in the 1970s and white scrubs conflicted with the white lights.

In 1929, German doctor Werner Forssmann performed on himself the first human cardiac catheterization, which is the insertion of a catheter into a chamber or vessel of the heart. After ignoring his boss and tricking a nurse into helping him, he inserted a catheter into his right arm before calmly walking to the x-ray department. Forsmann was later awarded with the Nobel Prize.

The first human kidney transplant was performed by Dr. Richard Lawler in Illinois on June 17, 1950. The patient was Ruth Tucker, a 44-year-old woman with polycystic kidney disease.

Dr Richard H Lawler

James Brett Jnr. underwent successful hip surgery in Houston in 1960. He was 111 years old, the oldest surgical patient on record.

The first ulnar collateral ligament replacement surgery (Tommy John surgery) was performed by Dr. Frank Jobe on baseball player Tommy John on September 25 1974.
The operation, which replaced the ligament in the elbow of John's pitching arm with a tendon from his right forearm was a success. John returned to the Dodgers in 1976. His 10–10 record that year was considered "miraculous", and John went on to pitch until 1989. 

Britain's first heart and lung transplant operation was successfully carried out on Swedish journalist Lars Ljunberg at Harefield Hospital, North-West London on December 6, 1983. He did pass away 13 days later, but that was as a result of the pulmonary hypertension from which he had been suffering before surgery.

Mrs Davina Thompson created medical history on December 17, 1986 when she was given a new heart, lungs and liver. She underwent surgery for seven hours at Papworth Hospital, Cambridge, UK, for seven hours by a team of 15 headed by chest surgeon Mr John Wallwork and Professor Sir Roy Calne. Mrs Thompson died at the age of 47 on 13 August 1998.

Two doctors, Angus Wallace and Tom Wong, saved a woman’s life on an airplane in 1995 by performing mid-air surgery on her with a coat hanger and silverware. They also used cognac to sterilize the equipment. The flight from Hong Kong-London couldn’t land for help, as the increase in air pressure could kill her. 

RECORDS

The longest surgery to date was a 96-hour marathon between February 4 to February 8, 1951 to remove a 300-lb ovarian cyst from Gertrude Levandowski of Burnips, Michigan at a Chicago hospital. Levandowski weighed 616 pounds before the surgery and had a girth of 9 feet. After the growth was removed, the 58-year-old weighed a more manageable 308 pounds.

James Brett Jnr. underwent successful hip surgery in Houston in 1960. He was 111 years old, the oldest surgical patient on record.

Kidneys are the most transplanted organ, with over 17,000 kidney transplants happening in the U.S. every year.

FUN SURGERY FACTS

A study in the 1990s found that patients are three times more likely to survive after surgery if they can draw strength from their religious beliefs than those who have no personal faith. The study included 232 patients who had a bypass or other heart surgery.

One in every 112,994 surgeries is performed on the wrong person or body part.

Surgeons repairing a ruptured Achilles tendon on a man

The game Operation has inspired a real-life buzzer for operating rooms that goes off if a surgeon touches a nerve with a probe.

 "The Great Impostor" Ferdinand Demara, masqueraded as Cyr, working as a trauma surgeon aboard HMCS Cayuga, a Royal Canadian Navy destroyer, during the Korean War. After being forced to perform surgery on 16 people, he speed-read a textbook on general surgery and was able to successfully perform all the surgeries without anyone dying.

Actor Noah Wyle, after simulating the procedure for over a decade as Dr. John Carter in TV's ER, successfully inserted a working I.V. into a fallen crew member on set.

UK surgeon Simon Bramhall marked his initials with an argon beam on the livers of two of his patients on February 9 and August 21, 2013. A colleague saw “SB” on a liver during a follow-up surgery. The marks aren't believed to be harmful to the liver but Bramhall pleaded guilty to assault and he was struck off the medical register.

Operation theaters are called such because they literally were theaters, built in a gallery style for public observation. Operations used to be advertised in newspapers and it was not unknown for an operation to be cancelled because public demand was such that a larger theater had to be found.

In 2015, the waiting time for organ transplants in America decreased for the first time in 25 years — and it's been decreasing ever since. The reason, however, is the massive increase in drug overdose deaths.

More than 60% of hearts and lungs collected for transplants each year are thrown away because they can't be kept on ice for more than four hours.painkillers

Sunglasses

The first sunglasses date back to the prehistoric Inuits, who wore a piece of flattened walrus ivory over their eyes. It contained narrow slits to look through, which blocked harmful rays of the sun reflecting off the ice.

The Roman Emperor Nero looked at the arena through a concave emerald during gladiatorial fights to eliminate the glare of the sun and his nearsightedness. Those may have been the first sunglasses in history.

Sunglasses made of rock crystal are supposed to have been first demonstrated in China, during the Ming dynasty. They were popular with judges who believe that the glasses hid what they were thinking. 

One of the earliest surviving depictions of a person wearing sunglasses is of the scientist Antoine Lavoisier in 1772. The picture below shows Lavoisier conducting an experiment related to combustion generated by amplified sun light.

Sunglasses as we know them started to become widespread in the 1920s, especially among movie stars. 

Inexpensive mass-produced sunglasses made from celluloid were first produced by Sam Foster in 1929. The first pair of Foster Grants were sold at Woolworths on the Atlantic City Boardwalk and Foster soon found a ready market on Atlantic City beaches They also become popular especially with aviators.

After leaving his thick eyeglasses on an airplane in 1963, while on tour with the Beatles, the singer Roy Orbison was forced to wear his prescription Wayfarer sunglasses on stage and found that he preferred them. They became part of his image and the (prescription) sunglasses indoors look was born.

Roy Orbison By Jac. de Nijs / Anefo - Nationaal Archief, 

In the 1970 Western film A Man called Horse starring Richard Harris, during a raid on the Red Indian Yellow Hands Camp, one of the braves can be seen wearing sunglasses. 

Business for Ray-Ban sunglasses was tanking in the 70s, so the company signed a product placement deal for 60 films. Risky Business, Top Gun, and Rain Man all had Tom Cruise wearing Wayfarers and Aviators, and sales went through the roof.

After the film Top Gun came out, sales of Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses increased by 40%.

The Ray-Ban Predator 2 sunglasses worn by the original Men In Black tripled in sales to five million after the movie's 1997 release.

In 2011, police in Vietnam were banned from wearing black sunglasses on duty.

Cartier sunglasses (which retail for $2650 upwards) are a status symbol in Detroit. The Police in the city estimate there have been nine murders, seventeen non fatal shootings, and 2,158 robberies related to the glasses between 2012 and 2016.

U2's Bono is almost never seen in public without sunglasses, as he suffers from glaucoma and is sensitive to light.

Xiamen, China, is the world's largest producer of sunglasses, with its port exporting 120 million pairs each year. 

Pixiebay

An average of 210 pairs of sunglasses are turned in everyday at Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom.