In 1809, Nicolas Appert, a French confectioner and brewer, observed that food cooked inside a jar did not spoil unless the seals leaked, and developed a method of sealing food in glass jars.
In the West, Jenner is often called “the father of immunology”, and his work is said to have “saved more lives than the work of any other human”.
Hanaoka Seishū was a Japanese of the Edo period with a knowledge of Chinese herbal medicine, as well as Western surgical techniques he had learned through Rangaku.
Cullen used a pump to create a partial vacuum over a container of diethyl ether, which then boiled, absorbing heat from the surrounding air.
Perhaps the first written record we have of a mother and baby surviving a cesarean section comes from Switzerland in 1500 when sow gelder, Jacob Nufer, performed the operation on his wife. The mother lived and subsequently gave birth normally to five children, including twins. The cesarean baby lived to be 77 years old.
The Canon of Medicine is an encyclopedia of medicine compiled by Persian physician-philosopher Ibn Sina. It presents an overview of the contemporary medical knowledge of the medieval Islamic world.
The first documented use of toilet paper in human history dates back to the 6th century C.E., in early medieval China.
The Hippocratic Oath is one of the oldest and most widely known codes of ethics.
The Sushruta Samhita is one of the most important treatises on medicine and herbalism to survive from the ancient world.
Imhotep was an Egyptian chancellor to the Pharaoh Djoser, possible architect of Djoser’s step pyramid, and high priest of the sun god Ra at Heliopolis. Very little is known of Imhotep as a historical figure, but in the 3,000 years following his death, he was gradually glorified and deified. In his Pulitzer-prize winning “biography” of cancer – The Emperor of All Maladies – Siddhartha Mukherjee cites the oldest identified written diagnosis of cancer to Imhotep.
