By Brooks Hudson from Points History Blog: Defunding the police triumphed at the polls, even if we do not call it that. And it was bipartisan. By defunding, I mean Washington D.C. voting to decriminalize psilocybin, Oregon voters approving two… Read More ›
From Dailyhistory.org: When Christiaan Barnard performed the first heart transplant in 1967, it was initially seen as a remarkable scientific achievement, but overtime both the medical community and the general public were forced to re-evaluate heart transplants. The medical community… Read More ›
From Andrew Dickson at The New Yorker: Alexandra Lord, a curator at the National Museum of American History, in Washington, D.C., started to get worried in February. She was deep into planning a major exhibition called “In Sickness and in… Read More ›
From Dailyhistory.org The Covid-19 pandemic is not the first time in the United States that public health officials encouraged people to wear masks to limit the spread of a deadly virus. In the United States, a surprising number of Americans… Read More ›
In the 19th century, physicians lobbied state legislatures throughout the United States to pass medical licensing laws. Some doctors were more successful than others in passing these laws. Starting in 1870s, states began to slowly adopt medical licensing laws. In… Read More ›
By R.J. Knight on Nursingclio.org In 2016, a statue of Jamaican-born nurse and businesswoman Mary Seacole was erected outside St Thomas’ Hospital in London. Seacole’s contribution to the war effort in the Crimea and to British life is well-known. Yet, the… Read More ›
From The Conversation by Philippa Marty: Impersonation of doctors is a modern phenomenon. It grew out of Western medicine’s drive towards professionalism in the 19th century, which ran alongside the explosion of scientific medical research. Before this, doctors would be trained… Read More ›
From Smithsonian.com by Brigit Katz: It has been said that Johann “Hans” Asperger, the pioneering Austrian physician who first described the profile of distinct psychological characteristics that later became known as Asperger syndrome in a workship in 1938, resisted the… Read More ›
From JSTOR Daily by James MacDonald: In 1993, in the four corners region of New Mexico, young healthy people began suffering generic flu-like symptoms. Within an eight-week period, ten people had died, their lungs filled with fluid. Many of the… Read More ›
In the United States during the second half of the Nineteenth Century, states passed a series of laws that slowly established a medical licensing system.[1] Elite Regular, Homeopathic and Eclectic worked to together to eliminate medical practices that they found ridiculous…. Read More ›
From The Washington Post by Alexander Poster: Imagine a covert plan to weaken the United States, not through military sabotage or stealing state secrets, but simply through the manipulation of the news media. The plan involves foreign agents who write… Read More ›
From Nursing Clio by Peter Sleeth: While Florence Nightingale is legendary in the history of nursing because of her foundational role in the creation of Western healthcare systems, she was not the only important woman in this history. It is perhaps… Read More ›
From the Recipes Project by Ida Milne: This season’s higher than normal influenza cases has inevitably drawn comparisons with the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, the worst in modern history. It killed more than 40 million people, according to the World Health… Read More ›
From Nursing Clio by Rocio Gomez: By tucking themselves away in the corners of beds and the folds of clothes, insects have long evolved alongside humans. Mites, ticks, fleas, bedbugs, lice—they all feast happily on blood, leaving humans with the… Read More ›
Birth is a universal experience for humanity and therefore, so is conception. This makes the issue of contraception one which stretched back into antiquity. While this topic is frequently in modern news, the historic practices of contraception and the specific… Read More ›
From History extra by Laura Spinney On 28 September 1918, a Spanish newspaper gave its readers a short lesson on influenza. “The agent responsible for this infection,” it explained, “is the Pfeiffer’s bacillus, which is extremely tiny and visible only… Read More ›
From Nursing Clio by Deborah Levine: In early January, President Trump had a physical exam at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, a periodic rite for US presidents in the modern era. The results were made public a few days later, with fevered… Read More ›
Medicine and public health lost a luminary 25 years ago this week with the death of Dr. Albert Sabin. During his life, Sabin became a household name, famous the world over for his development of the oral polio vaccine. He… Read More ›
While the simple answer might be 1973 with the Roe v. Wade decision, the history of abortion’s decriminalization occurred on a state-by-state basis—much like its criminalization. In colonial America, abortion was dealt with in a manner according to English common law. Abortion… Read More ›
From Nursing Clio by Jacqueline Antonovich In 1879 the famous showman, P.T. Barnum joked that, “Coloradoans are the most disappointed people I ever saw. Two-thirds of them come here to die and they can’t do it.”1 Barnum was referring to Colorado’s… Read More ›