Modern history of chicken pox

Muhammad Ibn Zakariya Razi, also known as Razi, collected some of the first known information on chickenpox and noted the differences between the measles and small pox. Giovanni Filippo (1510-1580) of Palermo gave the first description Chicken Pox. In 1600s, English Physician named Richard Morton mistook this disease with small pox he thought it was a milder form of smallpox.

It's believed the disease was brought to the Americas in the 15th century by European explorers and settlers. Once on the continent, it (and other diseases) spread among Native Americans since Indigenous people had not previously been exposed to the virus.

In 1767, English physician William Heberden demonstrated that small pox was different from chicken pox. He showed that chickenpox is different from the more deadly disease, smallpox. He also showed that once a person has had chickenpox, that person usually never gets it again.

In modern times, the scientists who first described the chickenpox were E.Paschen, 1919; EE Tyzzer, 1906; von Bokay 1909. Paschen described elementary bodies in smears of vesicles obtained from patients with varicella while Ernest Tyzzer developed a bedside test to distinguish smallpox from chickenpox based on the presence of multinucleated cells in varicella lesions that were not found in smallpox. In 1888, von Bókay of Budapest reported the relationship between herpes zoster and chickenpox. He was first pointed out when he reported cases of the latter disease in members of two families after episodes of herpes zoster in other members.

Prior to 1995, when the chickenpox vaccine was introduced, nearly all U.S. children got infected with chickenpox by age 10. Although usually mild, rare complications resulted in more than 10,000 hospitalizations and 100 deaths per year.

In the 1950s, scientists isolated the varicella-zoster virus for the first time, paving the way for efforts to vaccinate against chickenpox and shingles. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first chickenpox vaccine in 1995 and the first shingles vaccine in 2006.
Modern history of chicken pox

History of diabetes

The first evidence of diabetes was recorded in the Egyptian Papyrus written in 1500 Bc and was discovered by Egyptologist Georg Ebers in Ad 1862 during the excavation of an ancient grave in Thebes.

It was within this document that a condition of "too great emptying of urine" was noted, perhaps a reference to the syndrome of diabetes.

Madhumeh (honey urine) was graphically described as a common disease by more than one Indian physician, notably Charaka (c AD 150).

Diabetes has also been recognized in China for thousands of years, where it is attributed to yin deficiency and treated with an integrated approach that involves more than lowering blood glucose.

Aretaeus of Cappadocia, a Greek physician who practiced in Rome and Alexandria in the second century AD, was the first to distinguish between what we now call diabetes mellitus and diabetes insipidus. In his work On the Causes and Indications of Acute and Chronic Diseases, he gave detailed account of diabetes mellitus and made several astute observations, noting, for example, that the onset of diabetes commonly follows acute illness, injury, or emotional stress.

Avicenna (A 980-1037), a famous Arab physician in Iran, clearly described diabetes mellitus and the “residue of honey” in the urine.

Willis in 1673 was the first doctor in modern Europe to describe, however briefly, that diabetic urine tasted ‘wonderfully sweet as if imbue with honey or sugar”.

Mathew Dobson

In 1774, Mathew Dobson, a physical practicing in Liverpool, discovered that the blood as well as the urine in diabetes, contains sugar, and from this observation he justly confirmed that the saccharine matter found in the urine is not formed in but only excreted by the kidneys.

William Prout (1785–1850) was the first to describe diabetic coma and Wilhelm Petters in 1857 demonstrated the presence of acetone in the urine of patients with diabetes. Adolf Kussmaul (1822–1902) proposed that acetonemia was the cause of diabetic coma.

Dr. Frederick Banting and his team used insulin to successfully treat a diabetic patient in 1922.
History of diabetes

History of modern dermatology

The Hebrew Bible of 2700 years ago describes dermatologic diseases and therapies, suggesting that disorders were of divine inflection. Avicenna (980-1037) a Persian scholar in his book The Canon of Medicine laid stress on the pores of skin as a route to eliminate the excess of humours for cure of diseases.

After the crusade wars (1095-1291), nee nursing and hospital orders were developed. The order of Lazarus, which was devoted to the care of the lepers, was found at the beginning of the 12th century. The first book committed to skin diseases was published in 1572 in Venice. It reported the oral lessons of Italian physician, Girolamo Mercuriali (1530-1606).

In A Treatise of Diseases Incident to the Skin, written in English and published in 1714, Daniel Turner (1667-1741) mentions crust and scabies in infants.

Robert Willan (1757-1812)

Robert Willan (1757-1812) and his talented pupil Thomas Bateman (1778-1821) created clinical dermatology by giving precise description of elementary lesions, a concept created in 1776 by Joseph Plenck (1735-1807). Joseph Plenck the Viennese protodermatologist is considered to be the forerunner of modern European dermatology. Plenck introduced the systematization of dermatovenereological diseases, based on their paradigmatic differences.

Dermatology in the United States began in the 1830s with Henry Daggett Bulkley and Noah Worcester.

Henry Daggett Bulkley (1804-1872) a Yale graduate in return from Paris, established the first dispensary for the treatment of skin and venereal diseases, the Broome Street Infirmary for Skin disease. He also developed and presented the first series of lectures on dermatology in North America.

Noah Worcester (1812-1847) a Dartmouth graduate after studying in the Parisian clinics joined the faculty of the newly founded Medical School of Ohio. Dr Noah Worcester wrote the first American dermatology textbook on skin diseases in 1845, Disease of the Skin.
History of modern dermatology

History of immunology in modern era

John Fewster (1738-1824), a surgeon in Gloucestershire, England observed that a person who had been naturally exposed to cowpox, a viral disease of cattle related to smallpox, did not exhibit the normal mild case from smallpox when variolated.

He presented his observation to London Mdical Society in 1765 but never investigated further.

In 1798, Edward Jenner (1749-1823) inoculated a young man by named James Phipps with material obtained from a cowpox lesion. The results were conclusive but were met with great resistance by the Church.

It is the first demonstration of vaccination (smallpox vaccination). Jenner was a physician who practiced in the rural English countryside. As a country doctor, he was familiar with the ancient and unsafe technique of variolation – the administration of biological matter from smallpox sufferers to create immunity among those who survive the procedure.

One of which was that milkmaids who had caught cowpox never became infected with the more serious smallpox. Jenner suspected there to be a connection between the fact that milkmaids were commonly known to get cowpox, but not smallpox. That’s why he decided to try this theory by pacing the scab from a cowpox lesion into a cut made in arm of a young man James Phipps.

Élie Metchnikoff

Modern immunology begins with the research of Metchnikoff (1845-1916), who discovered the phenomenon of phagocytosis in starfish and extrapolated it to macrophages in humans as cells that engulf infections agents; this was the beginning of cellular immunology.

In 1840 the first modern proposal of the germ theory of disease was proposed Jakob Henle. He was a German physician, pathologist and anatomist. He is credited with the discovery of the loop of Henle in the kidney. Paul Ehrlich investigated the formation of antibodies recognized later as protein that destroyed infectious agents.

Ehrlich predicted autoimmunity calling it “horror autotoxicus”. He is the one coined the term of “chemotherapy”.

Louis Pasteur played a pivotal role in the evolution of the science. While Pasteur's work at the Pasteur Institute in Paris was concerned with bacterial infectious disease, he was most concerned with the prevention of diseases that bacteria caused and how the human body was changed subsequent to infection so as to resist further insults. Louis Pasteur became the first experimental immunologist.

Around 1960, it was appreciated that lymphocytes are the cells that mediate the immune reactions and experimentation moved for the first time from in vivo to in vitro, which allowed one to manipulate and investigate an immune reaction of cell population. Kendall A. Smith in 1983 discovered of the first interleukins 1 and 2.
History of immunology in modern era

Leprosy in modern history

Leprosy is also known as Hansen’s disease or neurodermatitis and is caused by a rod-shaped bacterium Mycobacterium leprae, that is spread in droplets of nasal mucus.

According to historical and archeological evidence leprosy was first spread to the Middle East in the days of Alexander the Great, during the years 324-325 BC, and was not known before.

The Greek word lepra was most likely used to mean a variety of severe skin diseases. Greek medical writings later than the third century BC provide the earliest clinical references to modern leprosy.

In medieval Europe, leprosy patients had to carry a ‘clapper’ to warn others that a person with leprosy was approaching. Even as late as 1913, state Senator G.E Willet of Montana was forced to give up his seat after he was diagnosed with leprosy.

In the 1870s, Armauer Hansen discovered microbe that causes the affliction and treatments were eventually developed. A prominent dermatologist in Norway, Daniel Cornelius Danielsen, wrote the first extensive description of leop0rsy, it was this description that Hansen used 20 year later as the basis for his studies of leprosy.

In the 1980s, a set of drugs was discovered that together can stop the progress of the disease. Today, 75% of all cases of leprosy occur in South East Asia, primarily in India.
Leprosy in modern history