Medicine's past is full of surprises. These tiles visit a gladiator school in ancient Pergamum, a Dorset farm, a Soho water pump and a Peoria fruit market. You will meet a singing teacher who watched his own vocal cords, a hospital cook who was the last person to catch smallpox naturally and a 600-pound heart machine, along with cures made from vipers and mummies and a few myths set straight.
Every tile in a History of Medicine game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Pioneers
nine stories
1The emperors' doctor trained on gladiators
On the tile: Galen157 CE
Before he served Roman emperors, Galen patched up gladiators. In 157 CE he returned home to Pergamum, in what is now Turkey, as chief physician to the gladiators kept by the high priest of Asia, a hard school in wounds and surgery. Dissecting human bodies was taboo, so he studied Barbary apes, pigs, sheep and goats, which led him into errors: his account of the human uterus is largely a dog's. Even so, his teachings dominated European medicine until the mid-1600s.
Galen taught that blood passes from the right side of the heart to the left through tiny openings in the wall between them. In the 1200s, Ibn al-Nafis, a physician born near Damascus who became chief of physicians in Egypt, disagreed. The wall had no pores, he wrote; blood reached the left side by traveling through the lungs. His commentary was forgotten until 1924, when an Egyptian doctor found a manuscript of it in the Prussian State Library in Berlin. In Europe, Michael Servetus described the same route in 1553.
In 1537, Ambroise Paré, a French army surgeon of about 27 with no formal qualifications, was treating gunshot wounds by the book. Gunpowder was thought to poison them, so they were scalded with oil as near boiling as possible. In northern Italy his oil ran out, and he used a salve of egg yolk, oil of roses and turpentine instead. Fearing those men would be dead by morning, he rose at first light. They had rested well; the men given oil were feverish and swollen. He resolved never to burn such wounds again.
4The African knowledge that fought Boston's smallpox
On the tile: Onesimus1721
When his congregation gave Boston minister Cotton Mather an enslaved African man he called Onesimus, Mather asked whether he had ever had smallpox. Yes and no, Onesimus answered: in West Africa he had undergone an operation that gave him a little of the disease and protected him for life. When smallpox struck Boston in 1721, Mather urged doctors to try the method. Only Zabdiel Boylston agreed. Six of the hundreds he inoculated died, under 3 percent, against about 14 percent in the wider epidemic. Critics threw a bomb through Mather's window.
5A Dorset farmer beat Jenner by more than 20 years
On the tile: Benjamin Jesty1774
More than 20 years before Edward Jenner's famous cowpox experiments, a Dorset farmer tried the idea on his own family. When smallpox reached Yetminster in 1774, Benjamin Jesty, who had caught cowpox himself years earlier, took his wife, Elizabeth, and two sons to a neighbor's farm and scratched fluid from a blister on a cow's udder into their arms. The boys did well; Elizabeth ran a high fever, then fully recovered. Neighbors reportedly jeered and pelted him at market. About 30 years later, a London vaccine institute honored him with a portrait.
In 1840s Vienna, mothers on the hospital ward run by doctors died of childbed fever at three times the rate of those on the midwives' ward. Ignaz Semmelweis found a clue in 1847, when a colleague cut during an autopsy died with the mothers' symptoms. Doctors, he reasoned, carried something from the autopsy room on their hands. He made them disinfect with chlorinated lime, and deaths on his ward plunged, by one count from over 18 percent to about 1 percent. Many colleagues scoffed, and his idea won acceptance only after his death in 1865.
Nearly 40 years before an American doctor operated on a patient breathing ether, a Japanese surgeon was operating on sleeping patients. Hanaoka Seishū, from a family of physicians in what is now Wakayama Prefecture, blended Chinese herbal medicine with Dutch surgical learning. He spent decades testing formulas on dogs before trying one on people, his wife among them. His mixture, tsūsensan, was made from plants such as datura. In 1804 he used it while performing a mastectomy on a 60-year-old woman, and he went on to perform more than 150 breast cancer operations.
When Rebecca Lee Crumpler graduated from Boston's New England Female Medical College in 1864, she became the first African American woman in the United States to earn an M.D. After the Civil War she went to Richmond, Virginia, to care for formerly enslaved people, working with the Freedmen's Bureau. In 1883 she published A Book of Medical Discourses, advice for women and children and one of the first medical books by an African American. No photograph of her is known, and her grave in Boston had no headstone until 2020, 125 years after her death.
Virginia Apgar trained as a surgeon at Columbia University, but her chief, Dr. Allen Whipple, steered her toward the new field of anesthesiology. Her research turned to childbirth, and in 1952 she presented a quick check of a newborn's health: color, heart rate, reflexes, muscle tone and breathing, each scored 0, 1 or 2. By the 1960s many hospitals around the world used the Apgar score, and students now remember it through her name: Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, Respiration. Off duty, she built her own violin, viola and cello.
On June 15, 1667, French physician Jean-Baptiste Denys transfused sheep's blood into a 15-year-old boy who had been bled so heavily for his health that he was suffering from blood loss. The boy survived, probably because very little of the animal blood got in. Early scientists thought an animal's qualities, such as a lamb's purity, might pass along in its blood. When a later patient died, Denys was tried and found not responsible, but a French court banned transfusion anyway. Human blood, it turned out, is often not even compatible with other human blood.
On June 6, 1822, a gun went off by accident in the American Fur Company store on Mackinac Island, Michigan, wounding a young French Canadian voyageur named Alexis St. Martin. Army surgeon William Beaumont kept him alive, but the wound healed with a permanent opening into his stomach. Beaumont went on to run more than 200 experiments, often holding food inside on a string that dangled out of the hole. His 1833 book showed that digestion in the stomach is a chemical process. St. Martin signed contracts allowing the experiments, but historians call them ethically questionable.
In the 1840s, people held ether frolics, inhaling the vapor for fun. Dr. Crawford Long of Jefferson, Georgia, noticed that he took falls and bumps at frolics without feeling pain. On March 30, 1842, he had James Venable, a fellow frolicker, inhale sulfuric ether and then removed a tumor from his neck as several witnesses watched. Venable felt no pain. Long waited until 1849 to publish, and by then a Boston dentist's public demonstration in 1846 had won most of the credit. March 30 is now National Doctors' Day in the United States.
On March 24, 1882, Robert Koch announced in Berlin that he had identified the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, a disease blamed for an estimated one in seven deaths in Germany. The date is now World Tuberculosis Day. Eight years later, at a medical congress in Berlin, Koch announced something bolder: a cure, a secret remedy called tuberculin. Patients traveled from all over Europe to get it, but it could not cure the disease, and within months he had to reveal the recipe. He still won the 1905 Nobel Prize for his discovery.
In 1881, Cuban physician Carlos Finlay proposed that yellow fever was spread by mosquitoes. He knew he faced an uphill fight, writing that only "an absolutely incontrovertible demonstration" would win over his colleagues, and his own experiments were not conclusive enough. It took 19 years. In 1900, a U.S. Army commission led by Walter Reed tested the idea in Cuba with volunteers, and one member, Dr. Jesse Lazear, caught yellow fever and died. Their experiments provided strong proof that the Cuban doctor had been right.
On July 4, 1885, a rabid dog bit nine-year-old Joseph Meister of Alsace 14 times. His mother took him to Paris to see Louis Pasteur, who had been vaccinating dogs against rabies. Pasteur's doctorate was in chemistry and physics, not medicine, so physician Jacques-Joseph Grancher gave the treatment, starting July 6: 13 injections over 10 days. The boy survived, and people bitten by rabid animals soon came to Paris from across France and abroad. Meister later worked as a concierge at the Pasteur Institute.
The word vitamin began with a guess that turned out to be wrong. Beriberi, a disease of weakness, spread in Asia after mechanized mills began turning out polished white rice. A Dutch physician in the East Indies noticed that chickens fed polished rice got sick but recovered when given the rice polishings. Working in London, Polish-born biochemist Casimir Funk concluded that the trouble was something missing from polished rice, not a poison in it. In 1912 he guessed that such vital substances were amines and called them "vitamines." Many were not, so the final "e" was dropped.
In January 1922, Leonard Thompson, a 14-year-old dying of type 1 diabetes, became the first person to receive an injection of insulin. The first extract lowered his dangerously high blood sugar but caused an abscess. Biochemist James Collip worked day and night to purify it, and a second injection on January 23 brought the boy's blood sugar close to normal. That December, Frederick Banting, Charles Best and Collip signed their Canadian patent for insulin over to the University of Toronto for a token $1.
During World War II, a U.S. Department of Agriculture lab in Peoria, Illinois, searched for a mold that could make penicillin in bulk. The Army collected thousands of samples, but the winner grew on a cantaloupe from a Peoria market. The story goes that lab technician Mary Hunt found it and became known as "Moldy Mary." Nobody is sure; the lab's culture chief, Kenneth Raper, later credited an unnamed local woman. The strain became the parent of commercial penicillin molds, and in 2021 Illinois named it the official state microbe.
1A 3,000-year-old wooden toe that helped its owner walk
On the tile: Cairo toec. 950-710 BC
About 3,000 years ago, a craftsman in Egypt made a big toe of wood and leather, in three parts, for a woman believed to be a priest's daughter. Found on her remains in a tomb near Luxor and now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, it dates to between 950 and 710 BC and was refitted several times to match her foot. It is likely among the earliest practical prostheses ever found. When two volunteers missing a big toe tried a replica with an Egyptian-style sandal, they walked better and found it comfortable.
The earliest eyeglasses, made in northern Italy in the 1200s, had no arms. Two mounted lenses were riveted together at the handles and clamped onto the nose, so wearers had to keep still and often held them in place. In a 1306 sermon, the friar Giordano of Pisa said the art of making them had been discovered less than 20 years before. Arms, called temples, came in the 1700s and are credited to London optician Edward Scarlett. They gripped the sides of the head rather than the ears, which were often hidden under powdered wigs.
The Chamberlens, a Huguenot family who fled France for England, became successful obstetricians; one attended Queen Henrietta Maria. Their success rested on a secret: forceps, a tool for delivering a baby in a difficult labor. They carried it in a gilded chest, which legend says took two men to lift, and used it only after clearing the room and blindfolding the mother. The secret held for nearly a century. It even survived Hugh Chamberlen's 1670 trip to Paris to sell it, when a test case failed. The original forceps turned up in 1813, hidden under the floorboards of the family's old home.
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was a cloth merchant in Delft who had no university degree and knew no language but Dutch. Yet he made more than 500 simple single-lens microscopes, and some magnified far more than the compound microscopes of his day. On September 17, 1683, he wrote to the Royal Society in London about the white matter from between his teeth. Under his lens it teemed with tiny moving creatures he called animalcules. They were among the first living bacteria ever recorded.
In 1816, at the Hôpital Necker in Paris, Dr. René Laennec had an awkward problem. Doctors listened to the heart with an ear on the chest, which was hard with heavier patients and improper with women. He recalled a children's game: one child tapped a long stick with a pin while another listened at the far end. He rolled paper into a tube, put it to his patient's chest and found it worked well. He settled on a hollow wooden cylinder about a foot long and named it the stethoscope, from the Greek for chest.
A singing teacher, not a doctor, found how to watch the voice box at work. Manuel García, whose pupils included Jenny Lind, had long wished to see a healthy glottis in action. One September day in 1854, in the Palais Royal garden in Paris, he saw sunlight flashing on windows and pictured two mirrors. He bought a small dentist's mirror for six francs, warmed it, held it at the back of his throat and bounced sunlight onto it with a hand mirror. There was his glottis. He lived to celebrate his 100th birthday.
Rubber surgical gloves caught on in America to protect a nurse's hands, not patients. In the winter of 1889 to 1890, the nurse in charge of William Halsted's operating room at Johns Hopkins, Caroline Hampton, developed dermatitis from the mercuric chloride used to disinfect hands. Halsted asked the Goodyear Rubber Company to make two pairs of thin rubber gloves. They protected her hands, and some junior surgeons began wearing them too, though it was years before most doctors saw that gloves could also slow the spread of infection. Hampton later married Halsted.
In 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen, a physics professor at the University of Würzburg, noticed rays escaping a covered tube and reaching a screen several feet away. He shut himself in his lab for weeks to study them. On December 22, he placed his wife Anna Bertha's hand in their path, and the plate showed her bones and wedding ring. She reportedly exclaimed, "I have seen my death." Within weeks of his report, X-rays were a sensation, and carnivals offered pictures of bones. From the 1920s, shoe stores used X-ray machines to fit feet. In 1901 Röntgen won the first Nobel Prize in physics.
Willem Einthoven's electrocardiograph was hardly portable. Built around a string galvanometer the Dutch physiologist invented in 1901, it weighed about 600 pounds, filled two rooms and took five people to run. Patients soaked their arms and legs in vats of salt solution to connect them to it. Einthoven also named the heartbeat's waves P, Q, R, S and T, labels still in use. When he won the 1924 Nobel Prize, he sought out his old lab assistant to share the money, learned he had died, and gave half to the assistant's two sisters.
For centuries, people trusted a cure-all called theriac. Used since the first century AD, often as an antidote to poison, it was a thick syrup with more than 60 ingredients in some recipes, among them opium, cinnamon, honey and viper flesh. Cities such as Venice, Montpellier and Toulouse made it under official supervision to keep fakes off the market. A pewter pot from Venice dated 1603, its lid inscribed for a shop at the sign of the golden head, still holds a drop of the original. Theriac stayed in use through the 1700s.
Call someone sanguine, phlegmatic or melancholic and you are speaking the language of ancient medicine. Following Greek thinkers such as Hippocrates and Galen, physicians taught that four bodily fluids, blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm, shaped a person's temperament, and that too much or too little of one brought sickness. Each fluid was paired with a temperament: blood the sanguine, phlegm the phlegmatic, yellow bile the choleric and black bile the melancholic. The theory ruled European medicine until at least the 1700s and runs all through Shakespeare's plays.
For several hundred years, peaking in the 1500s and 1600s, many Europeans, royalty included, swallowed remedies made from human remains. Mummies were taken from Egyptian tombs and crumbled into tinctures meant to stop internal bleeding, and powdered skull was prescribed for head ailments. England's King Charles II took "The King's Drops," a tincture of skull in alcohol. The practice dwindled in the 1700s, yet mummy was still sold as medicine in a German medical catalog at the start of the 20th century.
The story goes that in the 1630s the Countess of Chinchón, wife of Spain's viceroy of Peru, was cured of a fever by the bark of a South American tree, named cinchona after her, minus an "h" lost to an early error. Historians largely reject the tale. Jesuit missionaries did learn of the bark from native people, and by 1650 Jesuit colleges in Europe used it, though some scorned it as "Popish powder." From the 1600s to the 1940s, according to Kew Gardens, the bark and its quinine were the most effective treatment for malaria.
On May 20, 1747, aboard the warship Salisbury, surgeon James Lind gave 12 sailors with scurvy six different remedies, two men per remedy, from cider to sea water. The pair given oranges and lemons recovered fastest; one was fit for duty in six days. The Navy did not act for decades, and Lind muddied his own result: to keep juice on long voyages, he advised concentrating it over near-boiling heat for hours into a syrup called a rob, and heat destroys much of its vitamin C. Only in 1795 did the Navy order a daily ration of lemon juice.
In the early 1800s a craze for leeches gripped Europe and North America. French physician François-Joseph-Victor Broussais taught that illness sprang from inflammation, and at his Paris military hospital the standard was 30 leeches for each new patient, whatever the diagnosis. At the height of the fad, France imported more than 30 million leeches in a single year, and leech-shaped embroidery decorated dresses. The craze faded, but the leech came back: surgeons found it kept blood flowing in reattached fingers and ears, and in 2004 the FDA approved medicinal leeches for reconstructive and plastic surgery.
7Real snake oil, and the fake that made it a byword
On the tile: Snake oil1893
Snake oil means fraud today, but it started as a genuine remedy. In the 1800s, Chinese laborers building the transcontinental railroad shared oil from Chinese water snakes with fellow workers, and according to Nate Pedersen, co-author of a history of quack cures, it was an effective anti-inflammatory. Then, at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Clark Stanley, the self-styled Rattlesnake King, boiled a rattlesnake on stage and sold his own liniment. It turned out to contain no snake oil at all, just mineral oil, beef fat, red pepper and turpentine.
Many people believe the cesarean section is named for Julius Caesar, supposedly born that way. It is unlikely. In ancient Rome the operation was done only when the mother was dead or dying, and Caesar's mother, Aurelia, is said to have lived to hear of her son's invasion of Britain. Nobody is sure where the word comes from. It may trace to a Roman law requiring the operation when a mother died in childbirth, or to a Latin verb meaning "to cut." Saving the mother as well only became realistic in the 1800s.
9The beaked plague mask came long after the Black Death
On the tile: Plague doctor1619Myth busted
The beaked plague doctor is often pictured at the Black Death of the 1340s, but the costume appeared about three centuries later. Its first known description comes from Charles de Lorme, physician to France's King Louis XIII, who wrote that during a 1619 plague outbreak in Paris he designed an outfit of goat leather: long coat, hat and gloves. The mask's beak, about half a foot long, was filled with perfume, since doctors believed plague spread through poisoned air. Even then few doctors wore it, though it lives on as a Venice Carnival costume.