From disease eradication efforts to advances in vaccination and maternal health, this archive tracks real progress in public health. Stories here focus on what’s working — policies, interventions, and research that are improving and extending lives around the world.
The Hippocratic Oath, written sometime in the fourth or fifth century B.C.E. by an unknown author in the Greek medical tradition, bound physicians to their patients through a code of care, confidentiality, and restraint. Though the famous phrase “first, do no harm” came later, the spirit endured — shaping how societies have thought about medical duty for roughly 2,500 years.
Toilet paper first appears in the historical record around 589 C.E., when Chinese scholar Yan Zhitui mentioned, almost in passing, that he wouldn’t use paper bearing sacred texts for hygiene. The offhand tone suggests the practice was already ordinary. A small line in a personal essay, quietly marking one of the longest arcs in everyday human comfort.
The Suśrutasaṃhitā, a Sanskrit medical compendium likely completed between 300 and 500 C.E., catalogs more than 300 surgical procedures and 120 instruments, including a rhinoplasty technique European surgeons would independently rediscover centuries later. Built by many hands across generations, it stands as one of the foundational works of Ayurveda.
The Edwin Smith Papyrus, written around 2650 B.C.E., contains what historians recognize as the oldest known written diagnosis of cancer. In a surgical text methodically working through 48 cases, an Egyptian scribe described hard, cool tumors of the breast and offered an unflinching verdict: “There is none.” Naming a disease honestly, it turns out, is itself ancient medicine.
Cesarean birth survival entered medical memory around 1500 C.E., when a Swiss pig gelder named Jacob Nufer reportedly opened his wife’s abdomen after days of failed labor — and both lived. The story, written down 82 years later by a surgeon with an agenda, may be embellished, but it gave European medicine something powerful: proof that survival was even imaginable.
