Vesalius : Acta Internationales Historiae Medicinae

In this paper we present a review of Mexican medical literature in the 16th and 17th centuries, analyzing the presence of Vesalius anatomical contributions and the conservation of Galen teachings in the official circles. We start with the anecdotal identification of don Carlos, son of Philip II, with Gregorio López, a hermit living in New Spain in the second half of the 16th century, as a legendary possibility of being a celebrated patient of Vesalius. After a short review of the birth and early diffusion of Vesalius anatomy in Spain, we analyze the early anatomical and surgical books written and published in New Spain; those of Alonso López de Hinojosos (1578, 1595), Agustín Farfán (1592), Juan de Barrios (1607), Gerónimo Bezerra and Diego Osorio y Peralta (1685), identifying their acceptance or negation of the validity of Vesalius’ discoveries and the tensions existing between those two intellectual positions...

The purpose of this study was to confirm the locations in the United States of America (USA) of the first (1543) and second edition (1555) of the De humani Corporis Fabrica authored by Andreas Vesalius. Contacts were made at institutions of higher learning, museums, libraries and an update of locations of previous studies in 1943 and 1984. A total of 64 copies of the 1543 Fabrica and 58 copies of the 1555 Fabrica were recorded in University and Institutional Libraries in the USA. Twenty-Six (54%) out of 48 locations having both editions...

The innovation in anatomy, brought about by Andreas Vesalius1, particularly by means of his Fabrica, has had an important influence on the practice of surgery2. Various surgeons of the 16th and the 17th century have implemented different approaches in operative techniques, based on the anatomical knowledge drawn upon the Fabrica. Examples are given in this paper concerning Pierre Franco, Ambroise Paré, Giovanni Andrea della Croce, Girolamo Fabrici d’Acquapendente, Wilhelm Fabry von Hilden and Paul Barbette, who all, in one way or another, have proposed surgical techniques that required precise anatomical understanding, which was provided by the new Vesalian anatomy of the human body...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

This article describes the teaching of Medicine in Portugal in the Middle Ages, concerning the Visigoth, Moslem and Christian periods. With the foundation of Portugal in 1143, Medicine was initially taught by priests, but lately was settled in Lisbon the General Study and the activity of physicians, surgeons and apothecaries was ruled by the king.

The life and works of Dr Robert Robertson are reviewed set against the background of the extant British management of fevers during the latter 18th-century. Commencing in 1769, using the febrifuge Peruvian bark (cortex Peruvianus; Jesuit's Powder), he experimented and tested Peruvian bark mono-therapy protocols in the tropics in the cure and prevention of intermittent fever (predominantly malaria). His later work also showed the benefit of the bark in the acute care of developed continuous fevers (largely Ship Fever due to Epidemic Louse-borne Typhus Fever) in both the Temperate and Torrid Zones...

The bibliothéque municipale de Boulogne-sur-Mer (France) owns a copy of Vesalius' De humani corporis fabrica, published in Basel in 1543, which might have belonged to Vesalius ; it also has many handwritten notes that can be attributed to Ioan. Valterius Viringus or Jan Wauters (or Wouters) van Vieringen, who was the author of the first translation in Dutch of Vesalius' Epitome (1569).

This article surveys the characteristics and therapeutic use of black and white hellebore, the beloved plants of the Greeks. It tries to assess the reasons for their possible correct or disastrous use, according to the Greek texts, focusing on some evidence of drug experiments on tolerance to poisons, performed before Mithidrates Eupator's pioneering approach to toxicology. It also draws on new insights into promising remedies obtained from Helleborus provided by phytochemically active compounds.

William Rimmer was an American sculptor, painter, and gifted teacher of art anatomy whose works are still found in art museums and galleries. In addition to reviewing his career as an artist, this paper examines some of the details about his medical training and fifteen years as a country doctor. It has been said that Rimmer's personal and professional life may have been in part shaped by his belief in his family story that his father was heir to the French throne, a story that recent mitochondrial DNA analysis studies have shown to be unlikely...

Even though unhealthy consequences of night work for women have been evidenced by international scientific literature only in recent years, they were well acknowledged from ancient times. This essay traces the historical evolution of women's health conditions at work, focusing specifically on nocturnal work. Using the legendary web of Penelope of ancient Greek myths as a metaphor, the paper analyses the early limitations of night-work for women in pre-industrial era and the development of a modern international legislation on this issue, aimed at protecting women's health at the beginning of the twentieth century...

A very large number of articles about vitalism have been published since 1894 in the journal Science. Vitalism is a theory according to which living organisms appear to possess something more than inanimate objects. The "vital principle" is minted in 1778 by Barthez in "Les nouveaux éléments de la science de l'homme", (Stahl talks of phlogiston for chemistry). In their view, the life of the whole is not the simple sum of the life of the components. Such a view was hatched in response to the Cartesian mechanist interpretation of living matter as proposed by Galileo and Descartes...

OBJECTIVE: To review the selected historiographic and contemporary literature that examined the Ottoman public health practices and policies with special reference to the Gallipoli campaign during the First World War. To date, no work has been published surrounding the Ottoman public health policies and responses during the battle of Gallipoli. METHODS: A historiographic methodology was used to examine relevant primary and secondary publications using ten academic electronic databases...

AmedéeLatour (1805-1882), native Toulousain and grand-son of a professor of medicine, came to Paris to study, prior to support his doctoral thesis in 1834, bringing his "Proposals on art cure ". He has not practiced much medicine in Paris, but quickly focused toward medical journalism, writing articles in various scientific publications, particularly L'Union médicale from 1847 to 1882. He acquainted with several prominent medical doctors of the nineteenth century, especially Professor Andral. General Secretary of the French medical Congress in 1845, he was also the initiator and founder of the Social Security Association provident and mutual aid doctors in France...

Girolamo Fabrici d'Acquapendente, never published a systematic description nor an iconographic record of the nervous system except for the series of 21 pictures, entitled De Anatomia Capitis Cerebri Nervorum, stored in the Biblioteca Marciana of Venice.

On the 23rd of September 1940 SS Reichsfürher Heinrich Himmler, gave the SS doctors orders to collect the gold teeth from the mouths of those killed in death camps. Here we ask: who were the SS dentists who are directly implicated in that collection, what were the figures behind the process and how did the Nazis conduct this retrieval of gold? Here we give the answers for the first time...

The Georgian poet Rustaveli wrote his epic poem The Knight in the Panther's Skin around 1200. He knew the works of Hippocrates and Galen, and believed in the unity of body and soul.Thereare many references to health and medicine in the poem, and we shall highlight some of them. In 1185 Rustaveli left Georgia and settled in Jerusalem. There he lived and died at the Monastery of the Cross, where he was buried.

Marie Curie directed a research laboratory for 28 years. Between 1906 and 1934, forty five women worked under her guidance. Some were, and are, well-known in their own countries as their first woman full professor such as Ellen Gleditsch or Margaret von Wrangel, but for twenty eight of them, who were often French, nothing has ever been written. The strong presence of women in Marie Curie's laboratory has often been highlighted and has been considered as an exception, and the result of deliberate choice. Of course, these women did not choose this workplace by accident...

The untimely death of a young Princess of Wales reverberated around the world in August 1997. Diana, Princess of Wales, was not, however, the first holder of that title to suffer an early demise. Princess Charlotte of Wales was fifteen years younger and died exactly one hundred and eighty years earlier. A national feeling of grief and desolation consumed the nation in the same way as it did following the death of the "People's Princess" in the twentieth century. Her death during childbirth led to a change in the practice of obstetrics and a succession crisis in the British monarchy...

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