In our life, very often a person is faced with well-known and not very interesting facts. There is a lot of such information about medicine. Interest in medical facts always attracts attention, because this is the industry that concerns each of us. The following is a list of interesting facts from the world of medicine: history, discoveries and modern achievements.
1. History is a stubborn thing
The doctor is a respected profession. At all times, healers were valued very highly. But medical errors both then and today are very expensive. For example, in Ancient Babylon, if a doctor made a mistake, his hands were chopped off. Today it is wildness, and we all hope that our family doctor studied well at the medical university.
An interesting fact from the history of medicine is associated with plastic surgery, which is popular today. The doctors of India were the first to master this industry in the 6th century BC. It was they who restored the noses, which in those days were chopped off by criminals.
Anesthesia also came to us from antiquity. And the discoverer here is the Chinese healer Hua Tuo, who lived in the second century AD. His anesthetic - ma fei san - is a mixture of wine and hemp.
2. War and medicine
The most interesting fact about military medicine is connected with the name of the Russian doctor, creator of field surgery and founder of the Red Cross Nikolai Pirogov (1810-1881). It was he who, having first experienced on himself, used ether anesthesia during the Caucasian War in 1847. He first imposed a cast and introduced the principles of sorting the wounded, which allowed hundreds of soldiers to save the lives of war.
And Pirogov also belongs to the idea of ​​attracting women as sisters of mercy during the period of hostilities.
3. Cleanliness is the key to health
Today, the sterility of medical instruments is not surprising, but is the norm. You will be surprised, but the idea to wash hands and handle instruments with sterile solutions came to the mind of the obstetrician from Hungary Ignaz Semmelweis in the 19th century. He noticed that in one hospital, many more women died from postpartum sepsis than in others. It was in this institution that the help to women in labor was provided by students who worked with corpses.
His idea of ​​support did not find, and he was even fired from the hospital. A tragic coincidence - the doctor himself died of sepsis. However, he remained in the history of medicine as the founder of the principles of asepsis and hygiene.
4. Confusion with symbols
An interesting fact about medicine is its two different logos. Everyone knows the symbol of medicine - a snake entwining a staff or a cup. This is a symbol of Asclepius, the god of healing in ancient Greece. According to legend, Asclepius went to King Midas to resurrect his son Glaucus. On the way, a snake encircled his staff, and he killed her. But then another snake entwined a staff with grass in its mouth and resurrected the first. It was with this herb that Asclepius began to resurrect the dead.
But the two snakes entwining the goblet are a symbol of the god of commerce Hermes. However, many medical organizations and societies have just such a symbol on their logos. And the blame for this is the medical service of the U.S. Army, which placed the Hermes rod on its logo in 1902. Oversight or mistake - no one knows, but since then there has been confusion.
5. Bedlam and psychiatry
In the modern sense, bedlam is a synonym for disorder and chaos. But here is an interesting fact about medicine of the 16th century. It was then that a psychiatric hospital, the Betlema Royal Hospital, was opened in London. Its abbreviated name - Bedlam - first became a household name for insane asylums, and then it became a synonym for chaos.
The development of psychiatry as a branch of medicine is rich in interesting facts. The human brain has been studied by 10%, and the psyche is still fraught with many puzzles. For example, today there is no clear explanation for the appearance of the Stockholm syndrome (hostages justify terrorists) and Lim syndrome (terrorists show empathy for hostages).
6. Placebo Effect
The most mysterious and interesting fact about medicine is the work of a placebo. This strange effect on the patient’s well-being with a lack of medicinal properties (dummy), but his faith in their effectiveness, came to us from the Middle Ages. It was then that the doctors noticed that for some people even the simple attention from the side of medicine already had a positive effect.
Centuries have passed since then, but even today the placebo effect has no explanation. Thousands of experiments were performed, millions of studies were carried out, but, apparently, human faith, like in the Middle Ages, is able to work miracles.
An interesting fact is that the placebo effect is also observed in animals. A group of dogs with epilepsy was given a placebo instead of pills, and 4 out of 5 animals showed improvement. This is due to the habits of animals or the fact that dogs feel good about the expectations of their owners, remains to be seen.
7. Neatness is not always good
It was thanks to the lack of neatness that Alexander Fleming (1881-1955), in whose laboratory there was no order, antibiotics entered the medicine. In a forgotten scientist Petri dish with a colony of staphylococci, mold fungi grew in a few days, which completely suppressed the vital activity of bacteria. So penicillin was discovered - the first antimicrobial drug in the world. This interesting fact is the history of medicine and its discoveries that turned the world upside down.
Modern medicine has an arsenal of thousands of antibiotics that are obtained from fungi, plants, animals, bacteria. The cost of their production has become much cheaper, and the availability - mass. And it is not antibiotic treatment that comes to the fore, but their rational use - rational antibiotic therapy.
8. The strangest drugs
19th Century Analgesic Syrups Contained Morphine. But back in 1863, wine Angelo Mariani became widespread in Europe. This Italian chemist invented a tonic of wine and coca leaves. Therefore, pharmacist John Pemberton, the inventor of Coca-Cola, is far from the first to use the narcotic component to improve the well-being of patients.
And the world-famous psychologist Sigmund Freud generally recommended cocaine to patients as a cure for depression and alcoholism.
You will be surprised, but back in 1971, heroin was sold in German pharmacies as a cough medicine. It was introduced by Bayer AG.
9. Fighting an unwanted pregnancy
The prototype of a condom can be found for the first time in Ancient Egypt. It was the core of papyrus soaked in sour milk and crocodile excrement.
In addition, crocodile excrement was introduced into the vagina, where they softened and were believed to prevent conception. For the same purpose, sea sponges, lemon halves and elephant excrement were used.
And a few more facts.
Interesting data from the field of medicine about the human body are amazing. Here are just a few:
- Gastric juice is quite capable of dissolving coins from an ordinary alloy.
- Blue-eyed people are more sensitive to pain.
- Over the course of a lifetime, our body produces an amount of saliva that can fill two large pools.
- With a kiss, a person loses up to 6.4 calories per minute, but also acquires up to 278 bacteria.
- Throughout life, our body produces up to 450 kilograms of red blood cells. And if the lawn is lined with red blood cells of the body, then it will have an area of ​​up to 3.8 thousand square meters.
- There are many bacteria in our intestines that help us break down complex carbohydrates and produce some vitamins for us. If you put them together, they will fill a large coffee cup.