No individual was more instrumental in warning people about the health risks and potential dangers of the industrial workplace than Alice Hamilton.
At 7:20 p.m. on the evening of Aug. 2, 1923, President Warren G. Harding’s wife, Florence, was reading the “Saturday Evening Post” to him in the presidential suite of San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. The article in question was about Mr.
Rosalyn S. Yalow was a giant of medicine. A Nobel laureate and medical physicist, Yalow co-discovered the radioimmunoassay, an exquisitely sensitive means of using “radioactive tracers” to measure hormones in the bloodstream.
When Cole Porter died of kidney failure at age 73 on Oct. 15, 1964, only his closest friends knew the extent of the physical and mental anguish he had endured for 27 years. Against all clinical odds, even if only…
On this date in 1850, a prickly Hungarian obstetrician named Ignaz Semmelweis stepped up to the podium of the Vienna Medical Society’s lecture hall to give his fellow doctors advice, which could be summed up in three little words: wash…
The macabre details of Abraham Lincoln’s final hours were described in a report written by a 23-year-old Army captain named Charles A. Leale, a doctor who was at Ford's Theatre the night the president was assassinated.
Robert Koch’s greatest evening unfolded 133 years ago today, when he solved the riddle that had plagued doctors for centuries: what, exactly, caused tuberculosis?…
Feb. 7 marks the 130th birthday of Sinclair Lewis, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930. At first glance, one might ask what does an American novelist have to do with a column devoted to medical discoveries and…
When the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen’s announced his discovery of the x-ray in December of 1895, he was lauded on the front page of just about every newspaper in the world. Indeed, many journalists called this phenomenon “X-Ray…
It was a house call no physician would relish. On Dec. 14, 1799, three doctors were summoned to Mount Vernon in Fairfax County, Virginia to attend to a critically ill, 67-year-old man who happened to be known as “the father…
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