Frederick Banting

Frederick Banting
Frederick Banting received the Nobel Price for Medicine in 1923 for his discovery of insulin as a treatment for diabetes. He was only thirty two year old.

The Nobel Price had only been introduced and awarded since 1901, and Banting was the first Canadian to receive one. As a result of his Nobel Price, he went from obscurity to world fame, from small town doctor to world renowned scientist and he became a national hero overnight.

The discovery of insulin was not vague esoteric or of questionable value to society. Its impact was clear, practical and immediate. There were literally millions of people all over the world who suffered from diabetes and who could previously only look forward to a life with a progressive, debilitating illness that usually led to an early death.

Frederick Banting was born in November 19, 1891 on a farm near Alliston, Ontario. He attended school in Alliston, where he had an average but undistinguished academic career but he excel at athleticism was good at art and was a hard working determined student.

After graduating from high school, Banting entered Divinity College to satisfy his parent’s wishes. He soon realized the medicine was his real interest and he transferred into the medical program.

When he graduated as a doctor in 1916, World War I was at its peak, and he felt compelled to do his part for his country. He enlisted on the Royal Canadian Army medial corps and was sent to Europe to work as a military surgeon in a rear field hospital.

After the war he served for a year as resident surgeon at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children. But for a young doctor just out of the army, earning a decent living was practical necessity. So Banting opened a small practice in London, Ontario.

He also lectured at the Medical school of the University of Western Ontario, and conducted research in neurophysiology under Dr. F.R Miller.

One day while Banting was preparing a lecture in the pancreas he read a paper by Moses Barron in a medical journal. The article described changes that occurred in the pancreatic juice when the pancreatic duct was blocked by gallstone.

Banting was intrigued by the possibility that something that occurred in this process might hold the secret to diabetes – a disease that had distressed Banting since school days, when young classmate slowly wasted away from the disease before his eyes and finally died in her teens.

He had the idea but neither a lab nor funds for the necessary research. Banting arranged meeting with Dr. John MacLeod of the University of Toronto to use facilities in the university.

The first human patient treated with insulin was a fourteen year old boy with severe juvenile diabetes. His discovery was remarkable and immediate. Other patients followed with the same impressive results.
Frederick Banting

Paleopathology

Paleopathology
One of our most appealing and persistent myths is that of the Golden Age, a time before the discovery of good and evil, when death and disease were unknown.

But scientific evidence – meager fragmentary and tantalizing though it often is – proves that disease is older than the human race.

Thus, understanding the pattern of disease and injury that afflicted our earliest ancestors requires the perspective of the paleopathologist.

Si Marc Armand Ruffer (1859-1917), one of the founders of paleopathology, defined it as the science o the disease that can be demonstrated in human and animal remains of ancient times.

Evidence form the study of fossils, stratigraphy, and molecular biology suggest that separation of the human line from that of the apes place in Africa some 5 million years ago.

It took several million years before large-brained, tool making modern human beings evolved.

Homo sapiens sapiens, the oldest human beings of morphologically modern character, appeared approximately 50,000 years ago.

The Paleolithic Era, or Old Stone Age, when the most important steps in cultural evolution occurred, coincides with geological epoch known as the Pleistocene, or Great Ice Age, which ended about 10,000 years ago with the last retreat of the glaciers.

Early humans were hunter gatherers, that are opportunistic omnivores, who learned to make tools, build shelters carry and share food and create uniquely human social structures.

Although Paleolithic technology is characterized by the manufacture of crude tools made of bone and chipped stones and the absence of pottery and metal objects, the people of this era produced the dramatic cave painting at Lascaux, France and Altamira, Spain.

Presumably, they also produced useful inventions that were fully biodegradable and left no traces in the fossil record.

Indeed, during the 19603 feminist challenged prevailing about the importance of hunting as a source of food among gatherers; the vegetables an small animals gathered by women probably constituted the more reliable component of the Paleolithic diet.

Moreover because women were often burdened by carrying infants, they probably invented disposable digging sticks and biodegradable bags or basket in which to carry and store food.
Paleopathology

Trephination of the skull

Trephination of the skull
Undoubtedly the most extraordinary story in the history of surgery is that, long before man could read or write, as long ago as 10,000 BC, surgeons were performing the operation of trephination or trepanning – boring or cutting out rings or squares of bones from skull – and just as remarkably, their patients usually recovered from the procedure.

Although the word ‘trepanation’ and trephination’ today are interchangeable in common practice, trepanation comes form the Greek trypanon, meaning a borer, while trephination is or more recent French origin and indicates an instrument revolving around a central spike.

Trepanation thus connotes scraping or cutting, while trephination describes drilling the skull, as in modern neurosurgical operations.

Different techniques of trepanation in ancient times, and in recent primitive communities, involved scraping away bone, making a circular groove so that a central core of the bone would loosen, boring and cutting away the bone, or making rectangular interesting incisions in the skull.

This story begins in 1865 when a general practitioner Dr Prunires, who was also an amateur archeologist, discovered in a prehistoric stone tomb in Central French a skull which bore a large artificial opening on its posterior aspect.

With it, he found a number of irregular pieces of bone which might have been cut from another skull.

He postulated that the skull had been perforated so that it might be used as a drinking cup.

Soon after this, a number of other holed skulls were found in other parts of France and Professor Paul Broca (1824-1880), a distinguished French physician, suggested that these opening were the result of an operation of trepanation and that the instrument employed was a flint scraper.

Broca suggested that survivors of operation were endowed with mythical powers and that, when they died, portions of their skull, especially those that included a part of the edge of the artificial opening, were in great demand as charms.

Following these discoveries, thousands of such specimens have been discovered from many parts of the world: the United Kingdom, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Poland, the Danube Basin, North Africa, Palestine, the Caucasus, all down the Western coastline of the Americas and especially in Peru, where more than 10,000 specimens have been excavated.
Trephination of the skull