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A great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin, this physician and chemist from Philadelphia took a great interest in acupuncture, translating a French work on acupunctureinto English and experimenting with acupuncture on his own patients. In 1826, he published an article describing his experiences, entitled “Cases Illustrative of The Remedial Effects of Acupuncturation” in the North American Medical and Surgical Journal. In addition to writing a chemistry textbook for medical students, Bache also coauthored (with George B. Wood)The Dispensatory of the United States of America, which was written in 1934 and an influential reference work on medicinal plants that included a discussion of ginseng.
Louis-Joseph Berlioz, a French physician, was instrumental in popularizing the study and use of acupuncture in France. His “Records of chronic illnesses, bloodletting, and acupuncture” (Mémoire sur les Maladies chroniques, les évacuations sanguines et l’acupuncture), published in 1816, presented his observations from several years of experimentation with acupuncture. Among the illnesses that he reported being cured by acupuncture were “nervous fever,” whooping cough, and paralysis. Louis-Joseph also is known in history as the father of the famous composer Hector Berlioz (1803–69), who had initially studied medicine before deciding upon a musical career.
From 1665 to 1697, Andreas Cleyer, a German physician, served with the Dutch East India Company in Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia), then a Dutch colony. In his 1682 work entitled An Exemplar of Chinese Medicine, or brief works on medicine in the Chinese spirit (Specimen Medicinae Sinicae sive opuscula medical ad mensem sinensum), Cleyer described the central theories of Chinese medicine.
Physician to the Roman emperors and the self-promoting, opinionated author of more than 300 medical works, the Greek physician Galen was a giant of his day whose teachings dominated medical thought and practice until the seventeenth century. His great contribution was to fuse Hippocratic humoral doctrines with anatomical and physiological study. In addition to his undeniable scholarly brilliance and considerable clinical skills, Galen actively pursued anatomical and physiological investigations through animal dissection and experimentation. Although he was never able to dissect humans, he developed theories of human anatomy based on his animal studies. Among his many discoveries was the famous observation that the arteries carry blood, not air. In addition to his great influence in the Byzantine Empire, Galen’s works profoundly shaped Arabic medicine after they were translated into Arabic starting in the ninth century. Beginning in the late-eleventh century, these Arabic translations, as well as some of Galen’s original Greek texts, were translated into Latin, ushering in a period when Galen’s work became the basis of medical education in Western European universities. As such, his teachings served as the point of departure from which Renaissance thinkers developed new scientific understandings of the human body.
Born on the island of Cos, this Greek physician is conventionally considered to be the founding ancestor of Western medicine. We know little of his life beyond some scattered scraps of information and historical legends, and it may well be that there was even more than one individual using that name. Sometime during the second to third century BC, the so-called Hippocratic corpus came to light in Alexandria, Egypt. This was a collection of several dozen medical works conventionally attributed to Hippocrates. The works in the corpus vary in style style and content, and people have long debated how many, if any, of these works were actually written by Hippocrates himself. As an ensemble, however, this “Hippocratic medicine” represented a clear departure from older, supernatural explanations of disease that attributed illness to spirits, gods, or demons. Hippocratic medicine defined health and disease in terms of the balance or imbalance of the four “humors” or fluids that animated the human body: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. The state of these humors depended on natural factors, not supernatural whims, and the Hippocratics paid close attention to the effects of environment, climate, and personal activity on health and disease. Since illness was a natural phenomenon, furthermore, the Hippocratics taught that the doctor also needed to be a philosopher, someone who pursued natural (as distinct from supernatural) knowledge. Although the humoral model of medicine has long been defunct, Hippocrates’s presence is felt today in the form of the “Hippocratic oath,” a code of conduct for physicians that is still recited by some graduating medical students.
Few figures occupy a more revered place in the history of medicine than Edward Jenner, the English surgeon who invented vaccination against smallpox. Indeed, the word “vaccine” itself is derived from “vaccinia,” the coxpox virus, which formed the raw material for Jenner’s method. Coxpox, a harmless illness that spread from cows to people, could confer immunity to smallpox without the risk of contracting smallpox itself. Thus, vaccination represented a considerable advance over previous methods of variolation, which carried the risk of a fatal smallpox infection. Born in the English countryside and raised by his clergyman brother after the death of their father, Jenner was apprenticed to a local surgeon when he was thirteen years old. After eight years of training, Jenner studied in London with the famous surgeon John Hunter before returning to the countryside to practice medicine. Observing that people who had contracted coxpox could not catch smallpox, Jenner carried out his first vaccination experiment in 1796, ultimately publishing an account of his successful results in 1798. Thereafter, he devoted his career to popularizing vaccination, which spread rapidly to other parts of the world and resulted in a marked decrease in smallpox mortality. Almost two centuries later, after concerted international cooperative efforts, the World Health Organization declared in 1979 that smallpox had been officially eradicated.
A German physician and naturalist, Engelbert Kaempfer spent two years in Japan as a doctor with the Dutch East India Company in 1690-92. Prior to this, he had already had obtained extensive experience outside his native Europe, serving as doctor with the Swedish Embassy in Persia, India, and Ceylon. In 1694, Kaempfer completed a treatise entitled Charming Political, Natural Science, and Medical Exotica (Amoenitatum exoticarum politico-physico-medicarum). Eventually published in 1712, it contained a section on acupuncture and provided the first Western description of the medicinal uses of gingko.
Dr. Irvine Loudon is a Senior Research Associate of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine and an Honorary Fellow of Green College, University of Oxford. Dr. Loudon became an academic medical historian after retiring from a career as a general practitioner in Oxfordshire, going on to write influential books on the history of British medicine and the history of childbirth. His notable publications include the following: Medical Care and the General Practitioner, 1750–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); Death in Childbirth: An International Study of Maternal Care and Maternal Mortality 18001950(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); and The Tragedy of Childbed Fever (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). He also edited The Oxford Illustrated History of Western Medicine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Born Mary Pierrepont, this versatile and talented Englishwoman was the daughter of the fifth Earl of Kingston and a cousin of the eminent novelist Henry Fielding. She was recognized during her time as an accomplished and prolific writer of letters, poetry, and essays and for introducing smallpox inoculation (also called “variolation”) to England. In 1712, she eloped with Edward Wortley Montagu, then a Whig member of Parliament, who subsequently served as British ambassador to Turkey in 1716–18. During her time in Turkey, Lady Montagu learned about indigenous methods of inoculation, in which material from smallpox pustules was inserted into a lesion on a healthy person’s skin. This would provoke a milder form of the disease that then would confer future immunity. She had her own son Edward inoculated shortly before the family left Constantinople, and, in 1721, her daughter Mary became the first person in England to undergo inoculation. The procedure subsequently won influential proponents across Europe, including the Prince of Wales, Catherine the Great of Russia, and the royal families of Prussia and Austria. The procedure also spread to North America thanks to the efforts of the famous Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather. Lady Montagu’s most famous literary work, Embassy Letters, which published posthumously, described her experiences in Turkey. A definitive collection of the hundreds of letters that Lady Montagu wrote to family members and friends was edited by Robert Halsband and published by Oxford University Press in 1965–67.
After 1600, the Japanese government limited foreign trade to Deshiima, an island off the coast of Nagasaki. Furthermore, they barred trade with all Europeans, except with the Dutch. Not surprisingly, doctors with the Dutch East India Company were among the most important sources of knowledge about Asian medicine, which in Japan included techniques adopted from China. Prominent among these doctors was Wilhelm ten Rhyne, who studied acupuncture and moxabustion in Japan for two years before moving to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), where he lived for the next 24 years. HisTreatise on Arthritis (Dissertatio de arthritide) of 1683 includes the first Western medical essay on acupuncture ever published.
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