History and discovery of lymphatic filariasis

Lymphatic filariasis is an ancient parasitic disease. Filariasis was the first human disease described in which transmission through the skin was cause by the bites of arthropods. The earliest evidence of lymphatic filariasis comes from Egypt, with a statue of Pharaoh Mentuhotep II (2055–2004 BC) depicting swollen limbs, which are characteristic of the disease.

The earliest written record of elephantiasis comes from the Ebers Papyrus (1550 BC) in Egypt. The Greek medical writer, Celsus (30 BC 50 AD), also wrote about elephantiasis, the term as used then referring to both lymphatic filariasis and leprosy.

Doctor O. Wucherer (1868) found the embryonic filarial worms in the urine of a patient in Bahia, Brazil. T. R. Lewis (1872), working in India, observed the embryos in the urine and also in the blood, and Joseph Bancroft (1878) in Brisbane, Australia first described the adult worm. The observed species was later named after Bancroft, Wuchereria bancrofti.

The momentous discovery of the role of the mosquito in transmitting the disease was made by the Scotsman Patrick Mansion while he was practicing medicine in the Far East with the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs. Manson was the first to look for an intermediate host for lymphatic filariasis microfilariae. In 1877, he was finally able to pinpoint the microfilariae in mosquitoes. In that disease he recognized the parasites in peripheral blood films and also in postmortems material.

Between 1878 and 1882, Dr. Manson found that the Culex quinquefasciatus was the intermediate host and vector of microfilariae, when he was studying the relationship between microfilariae and elephantiasis, thus supplying the missing link in the life cycle of the disease.
History and discovery of lymphatic filariasis

History of Immunology during ancient times

Immunology studies the relationship between the body systems, pathogens, and immunity. During the earlier period it was supposed that disease was due to a quantitative imbalance among the humors, and this belief led to widespread use of therapies that included bleeding, cupping, leeches and purgatives and expectorants of many types.

Primitive man knew about disease and its ravages. The Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh (2000 B.C. – Mesopotamian hero) records the presence of pestilence and disease.

The other writings from old dynasties of ancient Egypt, one finds even more descriptions of disease. They even can identify the disease. In those days, disease and pestilence was punishment rendering as a result of “bad deeds” or “evil thoughts”.

Even in the Old Testament is filled with pestilence that God wrought upon those who “crossed” him. From these writings, it is equally apparent that man knew that once he had been afflicted with disease, if he survived, he was normally not able to contract it again.

If throughout early history disease was considered as a punishment by the spirits or demons or goods for vice and sin, then being sparred the initial effects of a raging pestilence or other disease should automatically have been viewed as the inevitable result of having led a clean and pious life.

Thucydides (460 – 400 BC)

In 430 B.C. Thucydides remarked after an epidemic of typhus in Athens that:… none was ever attached by the disease a second time or with a fatal result.

King Mithridates VI of Pontus of Black Sea region who reigned from 132 to 63 BC and was known as a great enemy of the Roman Empire immunized himself against fungal toxin by administering small non-toxic amounts. He was the first known individual applying the principle of immunization.

 As early as 1 A.D, the ancient Roman Celsus documented in De Medicina the heat swelling, pain and redness and that result from human body’s inflammatory response to injury.

Beginning around 1000 A.D., the ancient Chinese practiced a form of immunization by inhaling dried powders derived from the crusts of smallpox lesions. 

Around the fifteenth century, a practice of applying powdered smallpox "crusts" and inserting them with a pin or “poking” device into the skin became commonplace. The process was referred to as variolation and became quite common in the Middle East. However, the primary intent of variolation was that of “preserving” the beauty of their daughters and no mention was made of saving lives.
History of Immunology during ancient times

Herodicus of Selymbria

Herodicus of Selymbria, Thracian physician famous as the first person use of therapeutic exercise for treatment of disease and maintenance of health.

Herodicus was described as gymnastic master also as athletic trainer in Selymbria, on the northern coast of the Propoints, is credited in medical history with having understood how diet affected both health and illness, and with having originated one of the three branches of ancient therapeutic: dietetics, alongside pharmacology and surgery.

In Plato’s Republic Herodicus is said die in old age. Plato satirizes Herodicus as the inventor of contemporary ‘pampering medicine’ he was an athletic trainer with chronic disease. He mingled medicine and gymnastic and spent his life tending his disease and keeping himself alive.
Herodicus of Selymbria

Research history of primates

Nonhuman primates probably first became valuable to humans as pets but they are also the oldest recorded animal subjects for scientific research. The earliest primates began to appear after the time that dinosaurs had become extinct beginning almost 50 to 60 million years ago. They differed from other mammals in a number of ways, all of which can be traced directly to the biological makeup of modern human.

They tended to be larger and they had larger brain on proportion to their body size. Nonhuman primate pet trading is known to have occurred in Egypt as long as 5000 years ago; their use for medical purpose came somewhat later.

Medical experiments on primates have been known since the age of ancient Egypt (2nd millennium BC). Egyptian priests, dissected baboon cadavers for ritualistic purposes.

There is evidence in the literature that Hippocrates, ‘the father of medicine’, dissected monkeys in order to find out how gall is excreted.

Alexandrian doctors (3rd century BC) also carried out anatomical studies of monkey’s inner organs. There is also evidence of one Rufus of Ethers who studies the anatomy of simians even before Galen.

Darwin’s research on evolution and particularly his notes on the behavior of the gorilla established his credentials as one of the first observational primatologists. Also late in the 19th century, the British physician David Ferrier conducted comparative neuroanatomy studies of apes and monkeys.

Before World War II, the nations of France, Belgium, Russia and the United States had established research stations and conservation areas for nonhuman primate study, Nonhuman primates were also the subjects of medical research on tropical diseases, yellow fever, polio, and syphilis.
Research history of primates

Biography of Francis Peyton Rous MD (1879 – 1970)

Francis Peyton Rous, US pathologist who pioneered cancer research and discovered that cancer can be caused by a virus, though his work was not recognized until fifty six years later when he was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

Rous was born in Baltimore on October 5, 1879. He took undergraduate and medical degrees at Johns Hopkins University, and he became head of the laboratory for cancer research at the University of Michigan.

In 1909, his most important series of experiments examined the transmission of spontaneous cancerous tumors in chickens.

Preparing a cell-free filtrate from a malignant sarcoma isolated from a chicken leg and injecting it into healthy hens, Rous discovered that the recipients developed precisely the same tumors as the donors.

This discovery was regarded with suspicion for many years although Rous and his co-workers were able to show the nature of the growth and the causal agent (caused the Rous sarcoma virus).

The hypothesis proposed by Rous was not immediately accepted by the scientific community for the symptoms observed by Rous in the chicken were seemingly quite different from those generally described in the cases of viral infections such as grippe or measles.

In 1933, after R. E Shope discovered a growth in rabbits that often progressed to cancer, Rous took up his studies again and demonstrated several ways in which carcinogenic chemicals and tumor-inducing-viruses act together to speed up tumor production.

He also discovered that carcinogenic action consists of two phases – initiation, which gives a cell malignant potential; and promotion, in which the potential is realized as an actively growing cancer.

In his later years Rous was awarded many honors. In 1966, 56 years after his proof of the viral transmission, Rous was awarded the Nobel Prize. He was 87 years old.
Biography of Francis Peyton Rous MD (1879 – 1970)

Anesthesiology in history

The true meaning of Anesthesia is ‘insensitive to pain’. Anesthesiology is a knowledge or study how to have a condition of having sensation blocked. Other definition is “reversible lack of awareness”. This will allow patients to undergo surgery and procedures without feel pain.

In ancient Incas, shaman coked up chewed coca leaves and drilled holes in the heads of their patients while splitting into the wounds they’d inflicted.

Dated in 4200 BC, Sumerian people used opium poppies as herbal remedy. Opium then was introduced to China in 330 BC and India in 600 BC.

Assyrian and Egyptian physicians obtained artificial sleep for their patient by quickly compressing the Carotid vessels of their neck. Pictographs from 3000 to 2500 BC show a surgeon compressing a nerve in a patient’s antecubital fossa while operating on the patient’s hand.

This practice was followed as well by the Greek physicians.

Dioscorides, a Greek physician from the first century AD, commented on the analgesia of madragora, a drug prepared from the bark and leaves of the mandrake plant. He observed that the plant could be used to produce anesthesia.

Arab translation of the Greek medicine helped to make Islamic physicians supreme in the middle ages. 

Abulcasis and Avicenna wrote about anesthesia in their book: Al-Tasrif and The Canon of Medicine. Baghdad at that time became the world’s leading medical and drug center.

With the skill of the Arab Alchemists, the art of drug making began to evolve into the science of Pharmacology. Western physicians emerging from the Middle Ages found the Arab pharmacopoeia, in which a list of medicinal plants composed the anesthetic armamentarium.

In the 17th century, Marco Aurelio Severino described the technique of ‘refrigeration anesthesia’ in which snow was placed in parallel line across the incisional plane such that the surgical site became insensate within minutes.

The technique never became widely used likely because of the challenge of maintaining stores of snow year-round.

Joseph Priestly (1733-1804) discovered oxygen in 1774 and Lavoisier called this gas oxygen and later he discovered Nitrous Oxide. British Chemist Humphrey Davy in 1799 worked on this nitrous oxide and documented the analgesic efficacy of this gas and called it as laughing gas. The discovery was ignored until Connecticut dentist Horace Wells began to experiment using nitrous oxide as an anesthetic during tooth surgery.

General anesthesia was introduced in 1846 and became popular with patients because it was such an improvement over restraints, alcohol, opium or Mesmeric trance. In that year, dentist, William Thomas Green Morton performed the first public demonstration of diethyl ether (then called sulfuric ether) as an anesthetic agent, for a patient undergoing an excision of a vascular tumor from his neck.

This demonstration occurred at the Massachusetts General Hospital on October 16, 1846 inside what is known to date as the ‘Ether Dome’.

Actually, the person who gave the first anesthetic was Dr Crawford Long in Jefferson, Georgia in 1842. However, his report of his activities was delayed until 1849.

Chloroform was introduced as a surgical anesthetic by Scottish obstetrician James Young Simpson in 1847. Although it can eased pain of labor, chloroform had higher risks than those associated with ether.

The first effective local anesthetic was cocaine. Isolated in 1859, it was first used by Carl Koller, at the suggestion of Sigmund Freud, in ophthalmic surgery in 1884.

Chemical substance that has a morphine-like action, Opioids was first used by Racoviceanu-Piteşti, who reported his work in 1901.
Anesthesiology in history

History of Quinine

Quinine was the first effective treatment for malaria caused by Plasmodium. falciparum, appearing in therapeutics in the 17th century. It remained the antimalarial drug of choice until the 1940s. The tree is found in the rainforests along the northern end of the Andes Mountains.

Augustinian monk in Peru in 1633 wrote about powder of cinchona which can give a cure the fevers. In 1638 the Jesuits used quina bark to cure wife of the Viceroy of Peru.

The medicine, quinine, was made from bark of the cinchona tree, which grew in the mountain rainforests of Peru. Jesuit priests in Peru became familiar with curative powers of what they called ‘Peruvian bark’. There are several report that by around 1600 some Europeans had been cured of fever by Peruvian bark.

It was brought back to England in 1640. English Protestants called it powder of the devil. The introduction of quinine marks the beginning of modern pharmacology.

Englishman name Robert Talbor mid 1600s, then realized that those cinchona bark have a reaction to the malaria fever. He then started using cinchona bark to cure malaria. He treated royalty and then awarded knighthood and appointed as Royal Physician in 1679.

In 1820, Pierre-Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou isolated an alkaloid from cinchona (or quina) bark and named it quinine. The purified compound began to be used instead of powdered bark to treat malaria.

In 1828 Friedrich Wohler synthesized urea form ammonium chloride and silver cyanate, both considered minerals and showed that organic compounds might be made from inorganic ones.

This process, along with Hermann Kolbe’s preparation of acetic acid in 1845, gave hope to some that quinine might soon be artificially-synthetically-formed.

By the late 1800s, the malaria parasite had been identified and Ronald Ross had discovered the role of the mosquito vector. Ross launched “mosquito brigades” to eradicate the vector in England, while another public health advocate, S. P. James, advocated improving housing to separate humans from mosquitoes.

In 1854, Adolph Strecker at the University of Christiana, Oslo determined quinines empirical formula.

In 1936, quinine sulfate was made by Merck and Company, New Jersey and sold in machine made, wide mouth, blue glass bottles with metal screw caps.
History of Quinine

Bird flu in history

A flu pandemic occurs when a new influenza virus emerges for which people have little or no immunity, and for which there is no vaccine. The disease spreads easily person-to-person, causes serious illness, and can sweep across the country and around the world in very short time.

The highly pathogenic Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 virus is an emerging avian influenza virus that has been causing global concern as a potential pandemic threat. It is often referred to simply as "bird flu" or "avian influenza" even though it is only one subtype of avian influenza causing virus.

On the March morning in 1918, while the Great War still enveloped Europe, a company cook went to the infirmary at Camp Funston, Kansas, with flu-type symptoms. By lunchtime over 100 soldiers were filling the hospital. Two days later, over 500 lay dying.

Within a single week it had spread from Kansas to all 48 states and a couple of weeks later French civilians and military were infected.

That year the “Spanish Flu” pandemic swept the world, stemming from the H1N1 influenza A virus, and killed between 50 million to 100 million people during the 18 months of the pandemic.

In 1957, the "Asian Flu" outbreak claimed more than 100,000 lives. To blame was the H2N2 influenza virus. In 1968, the H3N2 virus was responsible for the loss up to 750,000 lives in the "Hong Kong Flu" pandemic.

In 1996, a strain of an avian influenza bird flu, called H5N1, was isolated in a farm goose in Guangdong Province, China; the virus was highly pathogenic.

1997: In Hong Kong, avian influenza A (H5N1) infected both chickens and humans. This was the first time an avian influenza virus had ever been found to transmit directly from birds to humans. During this outbreak, 18 people were hospitalized and 6 of them died.

This year quick action was taken. Hong Kong entire poultry population, about 1.5 million birds, was slaughtered, and many experts believed this aggressive culling prevented a wider pandemic.

In 1998, H5N1 is found in two more people in Hong Kong. One eventually dies. In 2003, 83 people are infected with the H7N7 strain, with one fatality. The epidemiological findings indicated that in 2003, a family traveled to the southern part of China where it is suspected that they acquired the virus.

In 2004, the H5N1 and H7N3 strains infected dozens of people in Vietnam and Thailand--and two in Canada. Many of these people died. In Japan it appeared in chickens, the frost time that country had experienced a bird flu since 1925.

In 2005, strains have been found to infect people in Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Thailand. Around 60 people have died, and strains are being detected in animals now for the first time in such places as Romania, Greece, Turkey, Russia, and England.

H5N1 virus has crossed the species barrier to infect humans, and there is a little natural immunity to H5N1 virus infection in the human population continue to be of a great concern for human health.

Bird flu in history

Arthritis in Ancient History

Arthritis is one of the most common medical problems in the world and also perhaps one of the most ancient.

Perhaps the oldest known type of arthritis, gout or gouty arthritis has been described since Hippocrates in the 5th century B.C. At one time, the term “gout” was used to describe all types of arthritis. Known as the “Disease of Kings” due to its association with rich foods and alcohol consumption. Colorful depictions of gout can be found in art and literature often with commentary on the moral character of the gout sufferer.

The word ‘arthritis’ is a blend of the Greek words ‘arthron’ for joint and ‘itis’ is for inflammation. Therefore, ‘arthritis’ literally means ‘joint inflammation’.

The disease was not named until the mid-nineteenth century, when a London doctor chose, in the contemporary fashion for Greek labels on medical matters.

Review of medical and archaeological papers reveals that arthritis has been common in humans and hominids since Paleolithic times.

It is also known that signs of diseases of the joints are undoubtedly the most widespread in the skeletons of all ancient peoples, from the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon races and all pre-historic populations to the present day.

In the British Isles, there was a particularly high prevalence in remains from Romano-British and Saxon burials suggesting that, whatever genetic factors there may have been, there was an extremely high level of physical activity.

It was estimated that osteoarthritis was present at an 8 to 15 percent frequency in the general ancient Greek population.

There is also evidence of arthritis in skeletons ranging form the Sub-Mycenaean through the Hellenistic period (1100 BC through the second century BC).

In the Early Medieval period of Nubia there was progressive bone loss in women. Multiple pregnancy, prolonged lactation and dietary deficiency may have been factors. Though women from the 18th and 19th centuries experienced post-menopausal bone loss, this was not as severe as in the present day.
Arthritis in Ancient History

History of Aspirin

From historical perspective, as early as about 3000 BC, aspirin in its crude form was known to the Egyptians, who employed the decoction of salicylates-containing plants like myrtle or willow leaves for joint pain.

Hippocrates of Kos, around 500 BC, recommended extract of willow bark for pain during childbirth. He is known to have commented on the antipyretic and analgesic properties of willow plants.

Although willow bark as a remedy was mentioned in Greek and Roman historic writings, this practice seemed to be lost during the Middle Ages.

In the 1700s, European settlers encountered Native American who used willow bark medicinally.

The modern history of aspirin began on June 2, 1763, when Edward Stone, a clergyman, read a paper to the Royal Society of London entitles An Account of the Success of the Bark of the Willow in the Cure of Agues.

Almost century late, a Scottish physician was to find that extracts of willow bark would also alleviate the symptoms of acute rheumatism.

Felix Hoffman, a German chemist working for Bayer in Germany, independently rediscovered it in 1897 and gave it to his father. His father was suffering from arthritis to and wished to avoid the side effect associated with salicylic acid.

In 1899 Bayer marketed acetylsalicylic acid as a powder under the trademark ‘Aspirin’. It was inexpensive, fast acting, specific and had relatively few serious side effects.

In 1950, aspirin found a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the most popular pain killer in the world.
History of Aspirin

Discovery of Paracetamol

The development of paracetamol began with the discovery of the fever lowering effect of acetanilide, a founding that resulted in the development of phenacitin by Bayer.

Paracetamol, N-acetyl-p-aminophenol, was a derivative synthesized by Bayer’s chemists in 1888 by Bayer but never tested for medicinal properties.

In 1893, it was evaluated clinically by Dr. von Mering, Schmiedeberg’s former student, who found that the drug produced methemoglobinemia.

However he believed mistakenly that it produced methemoglobinemia as an adverse effect and the compound was ignored.

A century later, paracetamol was reinvestigated in the United States, at the University of Yale by David Lester and C. A Greenberg, who demonstrated that paracetamol was the major metabolite of acetanilide and phenacetin, and was relatively safe as an analgesic and antipyretic.

At the same time, Flinn and Brodie found that even at high oral doses, paracetamol is not attended by the formation of methemoglobin.

In 1950 the first paracetamol product – a combination of paracetamol, aspirin and caffeine was in the United States market under the name Triagesic.
Discovery of Paracetamol

Erlanger, Joseph (1874-1965)

Erlanger is a US physiologist and educator who, in collaboration with Herbert Gasser, developed techniques for recording nerve impulses using a cathode ray oscilloscope. In 1944 they shared the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for demonstrating that different fibers in the same nerve cord can have different functions.

Born in San Francisco, Joseph Erlanger studied at the University of California (1895) and the John Hopkins Medical School (1899), where he worked for a seven years. From 1900 to 1906, he was an assistant in physiology at the university under William H. Howell.

Erlanger was appointed professor of physiology at the University of Wisconsin (1906-1910) and there began a successful collaboration with his student Gasser. He founded the department of physiology at the University of Wisconsin’s, new medical school. In 1910, he accepted an appointment as professor and head of physiology at Washington University in St. Louis,(1910-46), and Gasser joined him soon after.

Priori to 1921, Erlanger’s research focused primarily on the cardiovascular system. While a medicals students, he designed improvement to the sphygmomanometer a device for measuring blood pressure in the fingers.

At Wisconsin Erlanger and Gasser studied various means of applying electronics to physiological research. They devised a method of applying electric responses occurring in an individual nerve fiber and were able to record them using the oscilloscope. This happened in 1922.

An amplified impulse produced a characteristics wave form on the screen, which could then be studied. In 1932 Erlanger and Gasser found that the fibers within a nerve conduct impulses at different rate, depending on fibers thickness, and that each fiber has a different threshold of excitability. Different fibers produced different wave forms on the screen, indicating that different types of impulses were being passed.

This lead to their formulation of the law that the velocity of nervous impulses is directly proportional to the diameter of the nerve fiber.
Erlanger, Joseph (1874-1965)