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OUTBREAK! Rising Above in the Time of Cholera

The recent outbreak of Ebola in parts of Africa–and the frightened posts and live-tweets that accompanied two infected health workers as they returned to the US–give us a glimpse not only of an epidemic’s power but of our private terrors. Self-preservation, fear of the unknown, and a desire to protect the boundaries of nations, persons, bodies and cells brings out the best and worst in us. History provides both sides; the uninfected locked up with the infected in 14th century plague houses, left to starve and suffer in the dark–or doctors like Cleveland’s Horace Ackley, who personally combated and...

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The Spring-Lancet, A “Bloodstain’d Faithful Friend!”

The origins of blood-letting date back to Hippocrates in ancient Greece when the practice was recommended to both prevent as well as remedy illness. Galen also supported therapeutic bleeding because it fit with his humoral theory. According to humoral theory, illness is caused by an imbalance of the body’s four humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm . Thus, maintaining a balance of humors by the removal of excess blood was thought to preserve health. The spring-lancet was predated by the thumb lancet (15th century) and fleams (17th and 18th centuries) . Both these devices required the user to...

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Don't Lose This Ticket! The Train to No-Diphtheria-Town

In April, we posted about "Deadly Diphtheria," an acute bacterial infection spread by personal contact, was the most feared of all childhood diseases. One in ten died from the disease, which suffocated its victims via a membrane that grew over the larynx. One of it's greatest horrors? It struck children under the age of five. Diphtheria vaccination first appeared in the 1890s, but only became widely used in the 1920s. Tracheotomy (opening the throat) and the intubation technique developed by Cleveland native Dr. Joseph O’Dwyer in the 1880s, which kept the airway open with a tube, provided last-resort means of...

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Arguing Insanity: The Trial of President Garfield's Assassin

Who Assassinated the President? When Charles Guiteau bought an ivory-handled British Bull Dog Revolver, he was thinking of which weapon was going to look best in a museum. Because his was a mission inspired by God; he was to kill the president. On July 2nd, 1881, after weeks of stalking him, Guiteau shot President Garfield at a public train station. The bullet from his revolver entered the president’s back, leaving shattered vertebra in its wake before becoming lodged somewhere behind his pancreas . Medical historians have since determined it was the probing of his wound with dirty hands and unclean instruments by Garfield’s...

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