1898 - Medicine

Medicine

Bacteriologist Shibasaburo Kitasato at Berlin isolates the causative agent of dysentery.

Parasitology pioneer Rudolf Leuckart dies at Leipzig February 6 at age 75.

Bubonic plague will kill an estimated 3 million people in China and India in the next decade (see 1896; 1910).

The Joslin Clinic (later the Joslin Diabetes Center) has its beginnings in a practice started by Boston physician Elliott P. (Procter) Joslin, 29, at 81 Bay State Road. Few treatments for diabetes exist, complications of the disease commonly lead to blindness or amputation of lower extremities, most patients die within 2½ years of diagnosis, but Joslin is among those who have observed that drastic calorie intake can extend lives for months and even years. One of them starves herself down to 69 pounds, but Joslin urges all his patients to remain optimistic until a more effective treatment can be developed (see insulin, 1916; Banting, 1922).

Anna Wessel Williams uses her efforts to obtain enough rabies vaccine to begin large-scale production in America (see 1891). Together with Italian physician Adelchi Negri she has identified the distinctive brain cell peculiar to an animal with rabies and will develop a method that quickly detects the so-called "Negri bodies."

The Palmer School of Chiropractic is founded at Davenport, Iowa, by Canadian-born magnetic healer Daniel David Palmer, 53, who has developed a system of manually manipulating the joints, especially the spine, for which he makes extravagant claims (the word chiropractic is Greek for "done by hand"). Palmer allegedly restored the hearing of a nearly deaf man 3 years ago by manipulating his spine.

Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound is widely advertised as "The Greatest Medical Discovery Since the Dawn of History" (see 1881). Production and sale will continue for another 76 years, but the patent medicine Pe-Ru-Na has a higher alcoholic content and enjoys even higher sales; promoted as a cure for catarrh, Pe-Ru-Na has made physician-promoter Samuel Brubaker Hartman, now 68, a fortune of $2.5 million. Many patent medicines contain opium; annual U.S. imports of raw opium have increased to more than 52 grains per capita, up from less than 12 grains in the 1840s, and while alcohol abuse is common among U.S. men the dependence on opiates has been increasing among women (see 1905).

Heroin is introduced under that brand name as a cough suppressant by Farbenfabriken vorm. Friedrich Bayer und Co. (see Hoffmann, 1897). Derived from opium, it is based on a formulation devised in 1874 by a London pharmacist who was looking for a non-addictive alternative to morphine (see 1806), boiled morphine together with acetic anhydride, and produced a substance five to 10 times as potent as morphine with immensely addictive narcotic properties. Absent any laws to bar its sale in a time when coughing is associated with the spread of pneumonia and tuberculosis, Heroin will enjoy wide popularity among physicians and patients (see Massachusetts law, 1905; Aspirin, 1899).