John Snow and Cholera

A British doctor, John Snow, played a major role in the discovery of the waterborne nature of cholera. During the second cholera pandemic in 1831, Snow was practicing in Soho, London. The river Thames, as Snow observed, was an open sewer. Its highly contaminated water was supplied as drinking water to the people of London and it had eventually killed many. In 1849, John Snow published the first account of his 'waterborne' theory.

In 1854, the first case of cholera death was reported in Soho, London. Within 10 days 500 local residents were dead. John Snow inspected the drinking habits of the victims of this outbreak. He found that people drew their drinking water from the Broad Street pump that was right outside. John Snow assumed that cholera might be caused by 'some as-yet-unidentified' infective particles in the sewage-contaminated water. John Snow also noticed that in the nearby workhouse an brewery, which had their own private water supplies, there were almost no casualties. Thus Snow showed that cholera was not directly transmitted through airborne particles, but by drinking contaminated water.

On September 1854, John Snow persuaded the authorities to remove the Broad Street pump's handle and the cases of cholera in that town were suddenly reduced dramatically.

Today, next to the site of the pump in Broad Street (now Broad Wick Street) in Soho, London is the John Snow Pub, which commemorates the significance of John Snow's discovery.

Home remedies to stop Hiccups!

The word hiccup itself was created through imitation. The alternate spelling of Hiccough results from the incorrect assumption that it originates from the word cough.

Hiccups are known to occur in almost all mammals. Ultrasounds have shown that even fetuses have hiccups!

A hiccup is basically an involuntary contraction (myoclonic jerk) of the diaphragm that may repeat several times per minute.

Charles Osborne Osborne (1894-1991) of Anthon, Iowa, the US, had hiccups for 68 years, from 1922 to February 1990, and was entered in the Guinness World Records as the man with the longest attack of hiccups, an estimated 430 million hiccups. During the first few decades, he hiccupped up to 40 times a minute, slowing to 20 a minute in later years.

Home remedies to stop Hiccups:

British army helped eradication of malaria?

In 1897, a British army doctor named Ronald Ross made an incredible discovery related to malaria. When he was in Secunderabad, India he dissected and examined the stomach of many mosquitoes. After the examinations, he got to know the relation between mosquitoes and malaria. He observed that mosquitoes who feed on malaria-patients had pigmented cysts on their wings. This came as proper evidence that mosquitoes and malaria were somehow connected.

Malaria is a deadly disease that transfers from person-to-person through anopheles mosquitoes. It can be mild, chronic or fatal. It has symptoms like high fever, headache and body pain. In some sever cases Chronic Anemia which results in coma. If chronic malaria is not treated, it has death rate of 10-40% or even higher.If pregnant women are diagnosed with malaria, they give birth to malnourished babies in which some babies even die.

But due to Ronald Ross’s discovery, the eradication of malaria became possible. In 1902, Ross was awarded with a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. On 20^th August 1897, i.e. that day he made the discovery on is celebrated as Mosquito Day. 

Sleepy Sickness

From 1916-1927, millions of people were affected by the Encephalitis Lethargica disease also known as sleepy sickness. The disease aims for the brain and makes its patient motionless and speechless. Almost one third people died due to the acute stages of the disease in conditions like deep sleep or in the state of insomnia due to which it got its name.

Survivors of the disease experienced miserable symptoms and side-effects such as severe migraines, fever, sore throat, hiccups, twitching and vision problems. All though few people did recover from it, most people eventually just died.

The Symptoms of the disease were so different and confusing that doctor struggled to identify it and this made it more difficult to discover a proper cure. The long time survivors faced a condition known as Parkinsonism. Their neurological system was affected in such a way that they practically existed like living statues.

By the end of 1930, the strange disease mysteriously disappeared all of a sudden. Though the disease has very rare cases now, no one really knows how exactly the disease occurred.

During 1960 a new drug called as L-dopa was discovered which showed the chances of curing the disease – Parkinsonism.

Oliver Sacks, a British neurologist was the first to treat his patients using the drug. In 1972, he published a book in which he described the effects of L-dopa on the patients who were asleep for about half a century. A patient named Rose.R, who was affected by the disease in 1926, was admitted in a hospital in 1935. In 1969, she was given the L-dopa drug which woke her up with her memories of 1920s which made her think of herself as still a young girl. After she came to her practical senses, everything became strange and unbearable for her which eventually made her think that she was better asleep not knowing the new world around her!

Cows cure for SmallPox?

The origin of smallpox is not really known. But it is said that it possibly started spreading in the river valleys of Egypt, India, Middle East and China. It cannot be certainly said that it originated from animals but it is possible that it occurred from cowpox, horsepox or camelpox. The earliest evidence of skin damage was seen on the faces of the mummies in the year 1570 - 1085 BC. In the 5^th and 7^th century it was introduced in Europe and was frequently epidemic during the middle.

For many centuries, smallpox was considered as a deadly disease. Many attempts carried out for eradication of the disease failed.

At the end of the 18^th century, a great discovery regarding smallpox was made. An English surgeon named Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaid who had suffered from cow pox always recovered from smallpox. In the May of 1976, he chose a boy and a dairymaid for his experiment. He took a scraping from the cowpox pustule on the hand of the dairymaid and rubbed it on the body of the small boy. Then he took smallpox virus from another patient and injected it into the small boy. But much to his surprise, the small boy showed no signs of smallpox.

Then Edward Jenner tried the same experiment on his own child and obtained the same results. He made a discovery that changed the world and became a base for immunology.

A new vaccine was made based on Jenner’s research which made eradication of smallpox possible for the world.

Typhoid Mary

In the summer of 1906, Henry Warren, a banker from New York went on a vacation to their family residence on Long Island, with his family. Their Irish cook Mary Mallon suddenly left her job and disappeared. After she left, in a few weeks, out of the 11 members in Henry’s house, 6 of them were diagnosed with Typhoid. Warren was shocked and roped in George Soper, a New York Sanitary Engineer. But what made Soper think was that Typhoid spreads only in slum or dirty areas whereas Warren belonged to a rich household. So it was highly unlikely for the disease to spread except by healthy carriers. Soper suspected Mary Mallon to be the reason and tracked her down in New York.

Mary Mallon was an excellent cook but wherever she worked, that residence used to get infected by Typhoid. After catching her, tests were carried out and the report proved that she was in fact a healthy living carrier of Typhoid.

She spent her next 3 years in an isolation hospital on North Brother Island in New York’s East River. In 1910, she was released from isolation and the health authorities lost track of her. Suddenly, in 1915, in Sloane Maternity Hospital in Manhattan, people experienced an outbreak of Typhoid. In that hospital a woman named Mrs. Brown worked as a cook. After investigation it was revealed that the cook Mrs. Brown was in fact ‘Typhoid Mary’ (Mary Mallon). Again she was put into isolation on North Brother Island until her death in 1938.

The Black Death

The second cycle of plague was known as the Black Death, which spread rapidly through Europe in the mid – 14^th century. It may have erupted somewhere in Central Asia in the 1330’s and spread westwards to the Middle East, North Africa and Europe along caravan trading routes. It was probably carried to major coastal ports on merchant ships. Descriptions of large buboes, boils, bruises, black pustules and the coughing up of blood, vomit and sputum suggest that the Black Death may have been a combination of bubonic, septicaemic, and pneumonic plague.

In Europe alone, in a few years, from 1347-53 at least 25 million people died, possibly more than one-third of the population of Europe. Everywhere countless bodies were buried by surviving family and friends, tossed onto rattling carts, buried in pest pits, or left to rot in the mid day sun to be devoured by wolves, pigs and dogs. In Venice, the dead were rowed out to sea. There were mass graves stacked high with decaying corpses. In some places, even the funeral bells and weeping ceased, for everyone was expected to die!

As the epidemic slowly retreated, there was an outpouring of macabre art and literature across Europe. ‘The Dance of Death’, ‘The Grim Reaper’, ‘Fearsome Visions of Hell’, ‘The Devil and The Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse’, and ‘The symbol of the Skull and Crossbones’ are all chilling reminders of the dreaded disease that once devastated Europe.