Past Great Discoveries
Chronology of selected important events in medicine and biology
For context, some non-medical events are shown:
Year |
Event |
| c.3000 BC | Writing invented |
| 420 BC | Hippocrates of Cos active |
| 129 | Birth of Galen Pergamum (his first works printed in Latin in 1490) |
| 1037 | Death of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), author of Canon of Medicine |
| 1123 | St Bartholomew’s Hospital founded in London |
| 1347 | Black Death begins (ends 1352) |
| c.1455 | Gutenberg’s Bible printed at Mainz |
| 1519 | Megellan begins his circumnavigation of the world (to 1522) |
| 1543 | Nicolaus Copernicus writes of a Sun-centred planetary system; Andreas Vesalius publishes his great work on human anatomy, De Humani Corporis Fabrica |
| 1628 | William Harvey writes on the circulation of the blood |
| 1677 | Cinchona bark (source of quinine) included in the London Pharmacopoeia as a fever treatment |
| 1747 | James Lind discovers that citrus fruits cure scurvy |
| 1766 | Albrecht von Haller shows that nervous stimulation controls muscular action |
| 1774 | Joseph Priestly discovers oxygen; Franz Mesmer uses hypnosis as a medical treatment |
| 1785 | William Withering introduces digitalis (from the foxglove) to cure dropsy |
| 1796 | First vaccination against smallpox by Edward Jenner |
| 1799 | Bichat published Treatise on Membranes, viewed tissues as basic building blocks and prime pathological sites. |
| 1816 | Stethoscope invented by Rene Laennec |
| 1832 | Hodgkin describes cancer of the lymph nodes |
| 1844 | Horace Wells uses nitrous oxide to pull one of his own teeth painlessly |
| 1846 | Eduard Seguin first description of what is now called Down’s syndrome. (In 1959 it was discovered that Down’s children had 3 copies of chromosome 21.) |
| 1858 | Rudolf Virchow in Cellularpathologie demonstrated that every cell was the product of another cell and concluded that diseases were the result of disturbances in cellular structures. |
| 1859 | Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species |
| 1866 | Johann Gregor Mendel the founder of genetics published the paper in which he formulated what is now known as Mendel’s law. |
| 1869 | Friedrich Miesher discovered what was later to be known as nucleic acid. |
| 1874 | Louis Pasteur suggests placing instruments in boiling water to sterilize them. |
| 1876 | Robert Koch identifies the anthrax bacillus (Louis Pasteur devises a vaccine in 1881). |
| 1895 | Wilhelm Rontgen discovers X-rays |
| 1896 | Antoine Becquerel discovers radiation. |
| 1897 | Ronald Ross locates the malaria parasite in the Anopheles mosquito. |
| 1899 | Aspirin introduced. |
| 1900 | Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. |
| 1910 | Paul Ehrlich announces his discovery of Salvarsan for syphilis – the beginning of modern chemotherapy. Sickle cell disease first reported by J B Herrick (in 1949 Linus Pauling identified defect in hemaglobin in sickle cell anemia). |
| 1916 | Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. |
| 1918 | End of First World War; start of influenza pandemic. |
| 1919 | Ernest Rutherford splits the atom. |
| 1921 | F.G. Banting and C.H. Best isolate insulin. |
| 1928 | Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin in a mould (Howard Florey and Ernst Chain develop penicillin as an antibiotic in 1940). |
| 1943 | Wilhelm Kolff develops first kidney dialysis machine. |
| 1948 | National Health Service formed in Britain. |
| 1951 | John Gibbon develops heart-lung machine and operates successfully in 1953. |
| 1953 | James Watson and Francis Crick determine the double-helix structure of DNA. |
| 1957 | Albert Sabin develops a live polo vaccine. |
| 1967 | Christiaan Barnard performs human heart transplant. |
|
1969 |
Neil Armstrong lands on the moon; Patrick Steptoe and Robert. Edwards announce the fertilization of human eggs outside the body (first ‘test tube’ baby born in England in 1978). |
| 1977 | Fred Sanger developed the chain termination (dideoxy) method for sequencing DNA |
| 1979 | World declared free of smallpox. |
| 1981 | AIDS first recognised by US Centres for Disease Control. |
| 1986 | Human Genome Project set up. |
| 1989 | Alec Jeffreys coined the term DNA fingerprinting and was the first to use DNA differences in paternity, immigration and murder cases. |
| 1990 | Drs Sulston and Coulson in collaboration with Dr. Waterston (Washington University, USA) began pilot study of the genomic sequence of the worm (C. elegans). |
| 2000 | First draft of the human genome announced in June. |
Information from:
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine. Edited by Roy Porter Imprint Cambridge (Eng.) New York : Cambridge University Press, 1996.
- The Oxford Medical Companion edited by John Walton, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 589. Additional information provided
