Medicine & Health
Discover the human body, wellness, and the history of healing and care.
Some of the stories included
The 1854 Pump Handle That Ended a PlagueIn 1854, Dr. John Snow used a map of cholera deaths to trace an outbreak to a single London water pump, challenging dominant medical theories.
Frances Kelsey and ThalidomideThe FDA reviewer who refused to approve thalidomide in 1960, preventing a U.S. tragedy and changing drug laws forever.
The Placebo EffectWhy a sugar pill can ease real pain: discover the science of the placebo effect, from the 1950s to the brain's chemistry.
Varro's Ancient Germ TheoryAround 37 BCE the Roman scholar Varro wrote that tiny unseen creatures bred in swamps could cause disease, an idea that resembles modern germ theory.
HippocratesHippocrates of Cos, the Greek physician who taught that illness has natural causes and whose name is on medicine's most famous oath.
The History of SurgeryHow surgery went from Stone Age skull drilling to organ transplants: anatomy, anaesthesia, antiseptics, blood groups and the first kidney transplant.
Semmelweis and the Case for HandwashingIn 1847, a Vienna doctor showed that handwashing cut deaths in his maternity ward from over 18% to nearly 1%, but his peers rejected him.
Florence Nightingale’s War for Clean HospitalsFlorence Nightingale's work in the Crimean War hospitals at Scutari, and how she used statistics to show that most soldiers' deaths came from preventable disease, changing nursing and hospital sanitation.
Scurvy and the First Clinical TrialHow James Lind's 1747 test of six scurvy remedies on twelve sailors found that citrus worked, and why the navy took fifty years to act on it.
The Discovery of PenicillinHow Alexander Fleming's 1928 mould observation became a usable drug through the Oxford team's work and American mass production, in time for D-Day and the start of the antibiotic era.
Why Leprosy Is Now RareHow leprosy went from a feared curse to a curable disease after Gerhard Hansen identified its bacterium in 1873.
The Discovery of InsulinHow a team in Toronto discovered insulin in 1921 and turned type 1 diabetes from a death sentence into a treatable condition.
Phineas GageThe railway foreman who survived an iron rod through his skull in 1848, and what his case taught science about the brain's frontal lobes.
The Spanish Flu: History's Deadliest PandemicThe story of the H1N1 virus that killed up to 100 million people, more than the World War it coincided with.
The Discovery of Prions and Creutzfeldt-Jakob DiseaseHow scientists discovered prions, misfolded proteins with no genes that cause kuru, mad cow disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
The Tuskegee Syphilis StudyFor 40 years, a US government study withheld syphilis treatment from hundreds of Black men in Alabama, telling them they had 'bad blood'.
The First AnaestheticThe story of October 16, 1846, when dentist William Morton first publicly demonstrated ether and ended the agony of surgery.
To view more stories in this category, download the Chunks Microlearning app and start learning
Or get it straight away:
Download on iOS
Download on Android