Dear Reader,

Everyone probably knows that cocaine is bad for your health. In the 1800s the people in Victoria did not exactly know that cocaine was dangerous. Actually cocaine and other modern drugs were considered medicinal back then. Back then alot of substances were used as medicines. These medicines were called Patent Medicines. Patent medicines required no prescription which meant they were For sale by all druggists.

By the 1860s the germ theory was born, but not widely accepted, but explained the cause of disease. The first anesthetics , chloroform and ether, was then available making surgery alot safer than life threatening. Then there was another theory by a Roman physician named Galen. His theory was about the four humors. The four humors were blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Galen said that the four humors determined your temperature and your health. A person with to much blood was called Sanguine, a person with to much phlegm was called Phlegmatic, with too much black bile was called Melancholic, and if they had too much yellow bile, they were referred to as Choleric or Bilious. He thought that too much or not enough would cause an illness, and could be cured by balancing out all four humors.

Women started stepping out of the box by becoming doctors and nurses. They did not follow  the restrictions put on them by society, which said they could not have a medical profession. In 1830 there were no trained nurses in Britain. By 1880 there were over 7,000 female nurses in Britain. Thanks go out to Sophia Jex-Blake, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, and Elizabeth Blackwell for their struggles to allow women to train as doctors and nurses.

There were many more advances in the 19th century than the past 2,000 years. Diphtheria was a disease that often killed people. It wasn't untill 1891 that the first cure was available. It was an anti-toxin that was used to cure diphtheria.

Do you know who Walter Reed is? He was an 1869 graduate at University of Virginia.
He was asked to join the Army Medical Corps in 1875. After he was an army surgeon he was assigned to Fort McHenry in 1890. He was to be in a seven month pathology and bacteriology course at Johns Hopkins hospital. There he worked with Dr.William Welch in pathology of typhoid fever, and helped identify hog cholera bacillus.

General George Miller Sternberg was very inpressed with Reed`s work at the hospital. In 1893 he made Reed the Proffessor of Clinical and Sanitary Microscopy at the Army Medical School in Washington, with an appointment as curator of the Army Medical Museum. One of his first projects in Washington was a work together project with Sternberg on a study about a smallpox vaccine. In 1895, he studied a large case of malaria close to Washington. He saw that the case that made malaria spread were the marshlands , then he found that mosquitoes carried the disease.

A Canadian named James Carroll enrolled to University of Maryland.There he got his M.D. in 1891.Later on that year he started post-graduate work in Bacteriology at Johns Hopkins Hospital.There he studied Dr.William Welch and and assisted Major Walter Reed in the pathologylaboratories. In 1895 General Sternburg put Carroll on the medical faculty of the ArmyMedical Museum. There Carroll and Reed worked together in bacteriology research at the museum.

Abbie


Thanks to:  

hsc.virginia.edu/hs-library/historical/yelfev/pan6.html (Date visited 11/20/03)
web.uvic.ca/vv/student/medicine/medicine19c.htm   (Date visited 11/20/03)