1859 - Medicine

Medicine

"Treatise on Gout and Rheumatic Gout" by London physician Alfred B. (Baring) Garrod, 40, shows that Galen in the 2nd century was wrong in blaming gout on overindulgence. (The word derives from the Latin gutta, meaning drop, and describes a flow of matter from the vital organs to the extremities.) A staff doctor at University College hospital, Garrod identified the crystals found in gout with uric acid 11 years ago; he says in his treatise that the painful affliction is caused by "defective" excretion of uric acid in the blood, and can be controlled by avoiding foods high in purine and using drugs such as colchicine (see Franklin, 1785).

German graduate student Albert Niemann, 25, at the University of Gottingen isolates the alkaloid cocaine from coca leaves brought home from Peru by Austrian explorer Karl (Ritter) von Scherzer, 38. It will be used to dull the pain of toothaches and in some patent medicines, but physicians show little interest in the drug's potential for anesthesia (see 1884).

The Society for Promoting Employment of Women includes nursing as a desirable career for women, largely through the efforts of Florence Nightingale, but it does not recommend midwifery as suitable, even though Nightingale wants to see the status of midwives improved.

British surgeon Isaac Baker Brown, 47, advocates clitoridectomy—surgical removal of the skin hood above the clitoris—for the relief of nervous or sexual disorders. Brown will be expelled from the London Obstetrical Society in 1866 for reviving the practice and will die in 1873, but U.S. practitioners will perform the procedure from 1867 until well after the turn of the century, despite attacks by the American medical profession on "female castration."