Schola Medica Salernitana: The world's first medical school

Salerno became the capital of an independent Longobard principality in 839 and the capital of the Norman duchy of Apulia in 1077. After1127 the capital of the now Norman kingdom was moved to Palermo but Salerno remained the most important city of the continental part of the kingdom.

The Salernitana School in the south Italian city of Salerno was the first medical school that provided the most important source of medical knowledge in Western Europe at the time.

The school, which found its original base in the dispensary of a monastery founded in the ninth century, achieved it utmost spender between the tenth and thirteenth centuries during which its fame began to spread throughout the region.

According to legend, the school was founded by four physicians, an Arab, a Jew, a Greek and a Latin. Although this is only a legend, it is significant as an expression of the notion that medicine transcends all cultural and ethnic barriers.  In the tenth century the place was certainly famous for the skill of its physicians; while in the first half of the twelfth century the school is described by Ordericus Vitalis as ‘existing from ancient times’.

There are some traces of the study or at least the practice of medicine here as early as the ninth century. They may have been physicians participating in Salerno before the school was founded. In the city in fact there was a hospital or hospice (St. Maximus) founded in 820 by a cleric, Adelmo.

Salernitan School drew students and physicians from many countries and had women as students and on its teaching staff.

It was given a great support in 1224 by Frederick II of Sicily who decreed that all those practicing medicine required the approval of the school.

The success of the Salernitana School encouraged the creation of other schools with simailri methods; the most famous of these were in Bologna, Padua, Pisa, and Naples in Italy and Montpellier and Paris in France.
Schola Medica Salernitana: The world's first medical school

Merck KGaA (Germany)

The parent firm of Merck KGaA was founded in Darmstadt over 450 years ago, was forced to split into two parts in 1916.

One part, Merck KGaA, is still controlled by the founding family which continues to serve as the major and largest shareholder. The other part, Merck & Co., is a publicly traded corporation on Wall Street. This US subsidiary was expropriated in 1917 and has been an independent company ever since.

Merck is a global pharmaceutical and chemical company that was founded in 1668. The pharmacy was passed down through generations of the family, and in 1827 Heindrich Emanuel Merck expanded the apothecary to include chemical and research operations.

From these humble beginnings, the pharmaceuticals giant was born, eventually pioneering the manufacture of morphine, cocaine and MDMA (ecstasy). The pharmaceutical division includes generic and prescription products the latter being mainly focused on oncology, cardiology and more recently reproductive health following the acquisition of Serono in 2007.

In 1668 Freidrich Jacob Merck acquired the Angel Pharmacy in Darmstadt. Later in 1827, Heinrich Emmanuel Merci began industrial scale production of alkaloids, plant extracts and other chemical.

Currently, the Company diversifies its activities into four business divisions: Merck Serono; Consumer Health; Merck Millipore, and Performance Materials. Within the Merck Serono division, the Company focuses on therapeutic areas and prescription drugs of chemical and biotechnological origin.
Merck KGaA (Germany)

History of yellow fever

These diseases are produced by invisible germs floating in the atmosphere, which, taken into the blood though the lungs, are afterward propagated by the excreta and invisible emanations of the patients. The yellow fever virion targets the cells of the immune system (lymph nodes, spleen, and bone marrow) as well as the cells of the liver, kidneys and digestive tracts.

Yellow fever in its history has been so intimately connected with the old African slaves trade in its rise and decline, both as to time and place, not only at the ports of debarkation in Westerns but also on the ports of the Eastern Hemisphere where the disease prevailed so violent.

The yellow fever is claimed by some to have originated and it have prevailed epidemically in Africa, through Cortez found in prevailing in Mexico, to whose people it was known by the name of matzlazahuatl; and the Indian of San Domingo and other West Indians were decimated by it before and soon after the discovery of America.

The first authentic appearance of yellow fever was in 1647, shortly after the first arrivals of slave ships in the West Indies a terrible epidemic occurring at Bridgetown, Barbados, an English possession and settlement.

Its first appearances in the United States were at Boston in 1693, in Philadelphia and Charleston, South Carolina in 1699 and in New York in 1702.

By June 1794 British landed about 4000 troops on Saint Domingue, and in that summer a yellow fever epidemic began. Two newly arrived British regiments suffered over 40 percent mortality in three months.

The first attempts at immunization against yellow fever were made by Carlos J Finlay, a Cuban physician who first proposed, in 1881, that the disease caused by an unidentified ‘germ’ was transmitted by mosquitoes.

Careful human experimentation first indicated that mosquitoes passed the ‘invisible’ agent one person to another.

In 1900, Walter Reed and his colleagues accomplished this by injecting the blood of yellow fever victims into healthy people. These investigations paved the way for the discovery of the yellow fever virus and its isolation from mosquitoes.

In the mid-1930s, Max Theiler and Hugo Smith from Rockefeller Institute in New York City developed a safe and effective yellow fever vaccine. He succeeded where many had failed before him.
History of yellow fever

History of Mayo Clinic

The Mayo Clinic has its root in the Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln appointed American surgeon William James Mayo as examining surgeon or the Union enrollment boards for the First Minnesota District on April24, 1863.

Shortly after 1880, William James Mayo formed the first group practice, which became the now well-known Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

William James Mayo received his MD degree in 1883 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and then engaged at Rochester in the private practice of medicine and surgery with his father and after with his younger brother Charles Horace Mayo.

Charlie was a surgical genius and with his brother and the clinic administrator, William James, he had helped build the Clink’s reputation until, despite the town’s population of barely 20,000, it had become one of the most sought after medical referral centers in all of American.

Mayo clinic offered advanced medical and surgical care, to those who could pay or who had private insurance.

The clinic began to grow in size in the early 1900s, when many young physicians began to apply for positions as interns and assistants.

In 1915 the Mayos opened the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine and in 1972 the Mayo Medical School opened.

In 1986 the Mayo Clinic merged with the nearby St. Mary’s Hospital and Rochester Methodist Hospital.
History of Mayo Clinic

The origin of diabetes name

The modern medical name for diabetes is diabetes mellitus. The first reference of diabetes was written in Ebers Papyrus by Egyptians physicians during 1500 BC.

In very ancient times the Greeks knew this disease. Aretaeus of Cappadocia in 2nd century declared, ‘Diabetes is a mysterious illness … where the flesh and limbs melt into urine’.

Doctors in ancient Greece and Rome named the disease. Fortunately, the way they tested for the condition – by tasting people’s urine. In this way, the Romans discovered that the urine of certain people was mellitus, the Latin word for sweet.

Diabetes means ‘passing through’ in Greek. The urine of people with diabetes contains sugar. It passes through the body quickly.

The Greek noticed that when people with sweet urine drank, the fluids came out in the urine almost as fast as they went in the month.

In 1776, Mathew Dobson from England determined that the sweet-tasting substance in the urine of diabetic individuals is sugar.
The origin of diabetes name

The origin of syphilis

The origin of syphilis
The origin of syphilis ( a treponematosis pullidum) is one of the most controversial problems on the history of infectious diseases.

Syphilis was first recognized as a distinct pathological entity in Europe following epidemics that developed around 1500 that is, shortly after the return of Columbus from his voyage of discovery.

The question is whether syphilis was indigenous to America and was brought to Europe by the sailors of Columbus, or whether it already existed although undiagnosed in the Old World.

Paleopathology is of limited help in the solution of this problem in spite of the fact that syphilis leaves its characteristics marks on the bones.

The difficulty is that there are three other treponematoses, which are nonsexually transmitted: yaws, a tropical disease cause by Treponema pertenue: pinta, endemic in tropical America, caused by Treponema carateum and bejel, a disease of the arid regions of Eurasia, caused by subspecies of Treponema pallidum.

The treponemas, the causative agents of these diseases, are morphological identical and have a common antigenic structure which differs only quantitatively.

In man, partial cross immunity exists between the various treponematoses, which suggest that the four treponemas are four different strains of the same specifies.

It has been suggested that the four treponematoses have a common origin and that they have acquired their individual identity though millennia of evolution.

According to this theory, the oldest disease would be pinta which would have existed in the world for at least 20,000 years and the other three would be derived from it; climatic circumstances, urban living, diet, etc. would have caused an increased virulence of syphilis toward the end of the Middle Ages, and by coincidence the first epidemic would have develop shortly after the return of Columbus.

Other hypothesis include those suggesting that the four treponematoses have always existed in their present form and that they effect various human populations according to physical environment and socio cultural status.

With alterations of the environment and changes in living conditions there would be a concomitant shift in the particular treponematosis affecting a given population.

For example, living in the humid climate of the jungles of South America would favor the development yaws whereas in dry climates yaws would tend to disappear and endemic syphilis would take over.

When hygienic and environmental conditions tend to eliminate other forms of transmission, only the sexual one is left and venereal syphilis prevail Of this is the case, the European epidemics around 1500 would not have been epidemics of a new disease but the recognition of syphilis as a clinical entity distinct from leprosy, with which it had been confused.

In the other words, venereal syphilis would have existed from time immemorial both in the New and the Old World.
The origin of syphilis