Riva Rocci

The cuff sphygmomanometer was invented by Italian physician Scipione Riva-Rocci in 1896. (Scipione Riva-Rocci (7 August 1863 — 15 March 1937) was an Italian internist and pediatrician who was a native of Almese. He earned his medical degree in 1888 from the University of Turin, and from 1900 until 1928 was director of the hospital in Varese.)This simple device caught the eye of US surgeon Harvey Cushing, who believed he could use it in the measurement of BP, which would be useful in his ongoing studies of cerebral perfusion. Cushing introduced this instrument at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Early supporters of this new method of BP measurements were Theodore Janeway in New York City and George Crile in Cleveland, OH. After only 2 years of experience on the wards of Johns Hopkins Hospital, Cushing and his surgical house officers set out to promote wider use of the cuff. This was the foundation for the use of BP measurements in epidemiologic studies and for controlled clinical trails of antihypertensive agents, which have so dramatically reduced the socioeconomic impact of heart attack and stroke in the last 25 years. Contrast the history of spirometry with that of the development and widespread application of the sphygmomanometer, invented 50 years after the spirometer.

John Hutchinson’s Mysterious Machine

John Hutchinson, a surgeon, recognized that the volume of air that can be exhaled from fully inflated lungs is a powerful indicator of longevity. He invented the spirometer to measure what he called the vital capacity, ie, the capacity to live. Much later, the concept of the timed vital capacity, which became known as the FEV1, was added. Together, these two numbers, vital capacity and FEV1, are useful in identifying patients at risk of many diseases, including COPD, lung cancer, heart attack, stroke, and all-cause mortality. This article cites some of the rich history of the development of spirometry, and explores some of the barriers to the widespread application of simple spirometry in the offices of primary care physicians.

John Hutchinson, a surgeon, invented a calibrated bell, inverted in water, in order to be able to capture and measure the volume of exhaled air from fully inflated lungs. He coined the term vital capacity, ie, the capacity for life, because he realized that compromise of this crucial measurement was predictive of premature mortality. His exacting observations taught him that in normal subjects, the vital capacity was directly related to the height, and inversely related to the age of the individual. Weight had only a minor effect on the vital capacity, but he observed that vital capacity became mildly reduced following a large meal.1 In his first article published in 1846, he reported on measurement of 2,130 individuals, including deceased patients .Hutchinson would go to the morgue immediately following death, insert into the trachea the equivalent of an endotracheal tube with a stopcock, and inflate the corpse with a bellows until no more air could enter. He then released the flow of air into his spirometer by opening the stopcock. The lungs and thorax emptied through elastic recoil. Of course, this was not the full FVC, but something very close to it. The lungs emptied to their minimum volume, a function of the residual volume. In this era, tuberculosis was rampant in Europe. Hutchinson recognized that fibrotic complications from tuberculosis resulted in a reduced vital capacity and early death. Similar observations were made in heart failure and in coal miners.2

Hutchinson was a handsome young man . He had a keen ear for music and became a master violinist. Hutchinson became a consultant to the insurance industry of London. He believed that the vital capacity should be used in actuarial predictions for persons selling life insurance. Hutchinson’s invention was initially acclaimed:
…we have no hesitation in recording our deliberate opinion, that it forms one of the most valuable contributions to physiologic science that we have met with for some time. In all future investigations into the phenomena of the respiratory process, the name of Mr. Hutchinson must receive honorable notice.2

Hutchinson’s instrument was not widely accepted in London, or anywhere else, and still remains absent from most physicians’ offices and clinics. This may be one of the reasons why John Hutchinson was frustrated when he left his wife and three children and emigrated to Melbourne, Australia at 41 years of age.

He may have been in search of gold, since a gold strike had just been made in Australia. Another speculation is that he had tuberculosis and sought the cure of a prolonged ocean voyage with abundance of fresh air and sunshine, which was a common method of seeking the cure for tuberculosis in that era.2 Other speculations over alcohol abuse were made.2 After he reached Australia, he abandoned all further use of his spirometer. Toward the end of his life he moved to Fiji, where he died at 50 years of age, probably a victim of murder.2 His autopsy showed no signs of tuberculosis, nor did it explain his demise.5 No evidence of liver disease was found at autopsy.2

A statue was erected to the memory of John Hutchinson by the Thoracic Society of Australia and the British Thoracic Association in 1990 . It can be viewed by visitors to Fiji.

For details read the full article John Hutchinson’s Mysterious Machine Revisited*
Thomas L. Petty, MD, Master FCCP in the CHEST Journal
http://chestjournal.chestpubs.org/content/121/5_suppl/219S.full
CHEST May 2002 vol. 121 no. 5 suppl 219S-223S

Mitral valve

Mitre is the liturgical headdress and part of the insignia of a Christian bishop. In the Western church it is a tall pointed hat with peaks in front and back, worn at all solemn functions

The mitral valve is named so because of its similarity in shape to the mitre. Andreas Vesalius, the father of anatomy, noted the striking similarity between the two while performing anatomic dissections in the sixteenth century.

The bishop in the board game chess is represented by a stylized Western mitre.

Flexner Report

The 1910 report that revolutionized medical education and established current system of education.

The Flexner Report is a book-length study of medical education in the United States and Canada, written by the professional educator Abraham Flexner and published in 1910 under the aegis of the Carnegie Foundation. Many aspects of the present-day American medical profession stem from the Flexner Report and its aftermath.

The Report (also called Carnegie Foundation Bulletin Number Four) called on American medical schools to enact higher admission and graduation standards, and to adhere strictly to the protocols of mainstream science in their teaching and research. Many American medical schools fell short of the standard advocated in the Report, and subsequent to its publication, nearly half of such schools merged or were closed outright. The Report also concluded that there were too many medical schools in the USA, and that too many doctors were being trained. A repercussion of the Flexner Report resulting from the closure or consolidation of university training, was reversion of American universities to male-only admittance programs to accommodate a smaller admission pool. Universities had begun opening and expanding female admissions as part of women's and co-educational facilities only in the mid-to-latter part of the 19th century with the founding of co-educational Oberlin College in 1833 and private colleges such as Vassar College and Pembroke College.

William Chester Minor

William Chester Minor, also known as W. C. Minors was an American surgeon who made many scholarly contributions to the Oxford English Dictionary while confined to a lunatic asylum.

William Chester Minor ( June 1834 - March 26 1920) was born on the island of Ceylon, the son of Congregationalist Church missionaries from New England. He is known to have been fascinated as a teenager by the young Ceylonese girls and to have had lascivious thoughts which plagued his conscience. At 14 he was sent back to the United States by steamship, finishing his education as a surgeon at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut in 1863.
He was accepted by the Union Army as a surgeon and saw service at the Battle of the Wilderness in May, 1864. This was a battle that was notable for the horrible casualties suffered. He was ordered as a surgeon to brand an Irish deserter, a member of the Fenian Brotherhood, on the face. Paranoid delusions about the Fenians, Irish revolutionaries, were part of his later madness.

After the end of the American Civil War Minor saw duty in New York City. He was strongly attracted to the fleshpots of the city and devoted much of his off-duty time spending time with prostitutes. By 1867, his bizarre behavior had come to the attention of the Army and he was transferred to a remote post in the Florida Panhandle. By 1868 his disease had progressed to the point that he was admitted to St. Elizabeth's Hospital, a lunatic asylum in Washington, DC. After eighteen months he showed no improvement. He was allowed to resign his commission and take retirement pay.

In 1871 he went to London, England settling in the slum of Lambeth where once again he took up a dissolute life. Haunted by his paranoia he shot a man he believed had broken into his room. He was judged innocent by reason of insanity and incarcerated in the aslyum at Broadmoor in the village of Crowthorne, Berkshire. As he had his army pension and was not judged dangerous, he was given rather nice quarters and was able to buy and read books.

It was probably through his correspondence with the London booksellers that he heard of the call for volunteers from what was to become the Oxford English Dictionary. He devoted the remainder of his life to that work.

He was one of the most effective of the volunteers, systematically reading through his library, and compiling lists of the occurrence of words. He kept current with the words needed in the volume currently being worked on, and as his lists grew was able to supply quotations on demand for a particular word. Eventually he became well acquainted with the editor of the OED, Dr. James Murray, who visited him at the asylum and befriended him. In time Minor's condition grew worse; his health failed and he was permitted to return to the United States and St. Elizabeth's. Psychiatry had progressed in the meantime and Dr. Minor was diagnosed as suffering from dementia praecox or schizophrenia. He died in 1920 in New Haven, Connecticut.

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

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Uvea

The uvea is the middle portion of the eye. The term derives from the Latin word for grape, since anatomists once thought that the peeling of the outside of the eye left a grape-like structure beneath

John Snow and the 1854 Broad Street Cholera Outbreak

Many historians trace modern public health and epidemiology to the day in 1850s when Dr. John Snow, having discerned the link between cholera outbreaks in London and water sources used by the afflicted populace, removed the handle of the Broad Street water pump. Thus one cholera epidemic was stopped, but it would still be years before the etiology of cholera was discovered.

In the mid-19th century, the Soho district of London had a serious problem with filth due to the large influx of people and a lack of proper sanitary services. Many cellars (basements) had cesspools of nightsoil underneath their floorboards. Since the cesspools were overrunning, the London government decided to dump the waste into the River Thames. This action contaminated the water supply, leading to the cholera outbreak.


Outbreak
On 31 August 1854, after several other outbreaks had already occurred elsewhere in the city, a major outbreak of cholera struck Soho. Dr Snow later called it "the most terrible outbreak of cholera which ever occurred in the kingdom."

Over the next three days 127 people on or near Broad Street died. In the next week, three quarters of the residents had fled the area. By 10 September, 500 people had died and the mortality rate was 12.8 percent in some parts of the city. By the end of the outbreak 616 people died.

Snow was a skeptic of the then-dominant miasma theory that stated that diseases such as cholera or the Black Death were caused by pollution or a noxious form of "bad air". The germ theory was not widely accepted by this time, so Snow was unaware of the mechanism by which the disease was transmitted, but evidence led him to believe that it was not due to breathing foul air. He first publicized his theory in an essay On the Mode of Communication of Cholera in 1849. In 1855 a second edition was published, with a much more elaborate investigation of the effect of the water-supply in the Soho, London epidemic of 1854.

By talking to local residents (with the help of Reverend Henry Whitehead), he identified the source of the outbreak as the public water pump on Broad Street (now Broadwick Street). Although Snow's chemical and microscope examination of a sample of the Broad Street pump water was not able to conclusively prove its danger, his studies of the pattern of the disease were convincing enough to persuade the local council to disable the well pump by removing its handle. Although this action has been popularly reported as ending the outbreak, the epidemic may have already been in rapid decline, as explained by Snow himself:

Snow later used a spot map to illustrate how cases of cholera were centred around the pump. He also made a solid use of statistics to illustrate the connection between the quality of the source of water and cholera cases. He showed that the Southwark and Vauxhall Waterworks Company was taking water from sewage-polluted sections of the Thames and delivering the water to homes with an increased incidence of cholera. Snow's study was a major event in the history of public health, and can be regarded as the founding event of the science of epidemiology.

Malaria

This word comes from the mediaeval Italian mal (=bad) and aria (=air), describing the miasma from the swamps around Rome. This 'bad air' was believed to be the cause of the fever that often developed in those who spent time around the swamps.

The first Heart Transplant

He performed the world's first human heart transplant operation on 3 December 1967, in an operation assisted by his brother, Marius Barnard; the operation lasted nine hours and used a team of thirty people. The patient, Louis Washkansky, was a 54-year-old grocer, suffering from diabetes and incurable heart disease. Barnard later wrote, "For a dying man it is not a difficult decision because he knows he is at the end. If a lion chases you to the bank of a river filled with crocodiles, you will leap into the water, convinced you have a chance to swim to the other side." The donor heart came from a young woman, Denise Darvall, who had been killed in a December 2, 1967, road accident while crossing a street in Cape Town. After securing permission from Darvall's father to use her heart, Barnard performed the transplant. Twenty years later, Dr. Marius Barnard recounted, "Chris stood there for a few moments, watching, then stood back and said, 'It works.'"[3][who?] Washkansky survived the operation and lived for eighteen (18) days. However, he succumbed to pneumonia induced by the Immunosuppressive drugs he was taking. Though the first patient with the heart of another human being survived for only a little more than two weeks, Barnard had passed a milestone in a new field of life-extending surgery.

Barnard became an international superstar overnight and was celebrated around the world for his daring accomplishment. He was quite photogenic, and enjoyed the media attention following the operation. Barnard continued to perform heart transplants. A transplant operation was conducted on 2 January 1968, and the patient, Philip Blaiberg, survived for 19 months. Dorothy Fisher was given a new heart in 1969 and became the first black recipient. She lived for 12 years 6 months after the transplant.[4] Dirk van Zyl, who received a new heart in 1971, was the longest-lived recipient, surviving over 23 years.[5]

Barnard performed ten orthotopic transplants (1967 – 1973). He was also the first to perform a heterotopic heart transplant, an operation that he himself devised. Forty-nine consecutive heterotopic heart transplants were performed in Cape Town between 1975 and 1984.

When many surgeons — disillusioned by poor results — gave up cardiac transplantation, Barnard persisted until the advent of cyclosporin, which helped revive the operation throughout the world. He was also the first surgeon to attempt xenograft transplantation in a human patient, while attempting to save the life of a young girl unable to leave artificial life support after a second aortic valve replacement. He was later accused of wrongdoing by her parents.

After his first successful heart transplant Barnard became known as the "film star surgeon". He was loved by his patients throughout the world, hundreds of whom were treated free of charge, and hated by many others who were jealous of his instant success. He was accused by some colleagues in the profession of "stealing" the idea and the opportunity to perform the first heart transplant. Often considered a spoiled and arrogant personality, he was also regarded as kind and considerate by others. Due to his widely publicized love affairs, he became jokingly known as "doctor of hearts", referring to the heart as emotional symbol rather than in its usual medical context.

Barnard was an outspoken opponent of South Africa's laws of apartheid, and was not afraid to criticize his nation's government, although he had to temper his remarks to some extent in order to travel abroad. Rather than leaving his homeland, he used his fame in order to campaign for a change in the law. After Denise Darvall provided the means for the very first heart transplant, Barnard transplanted her kidney into a 10-year-old coloured boy. The donor for the second heart transplant was also coloured. Christiaan's brother, Dr. Marius Barnard, went into politics, and was elected to the legislature on an anti-apartheid platform. However, Barnard later claimed that the reason he never won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was probably because he was a "white South African".

Intra Aortic Ballon Pump

This story may be apocryphal, but here it goes. In the late 1960s, the intra-aortic balloon pump (IABP) was being readied for its first use in a human.(The IABP device was pioneered at the Grace-Sinai Hospital in Detroit during the early 1960s by Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz) Its developers thought that private insurance companies would not stand for such a radical new therapy, and approached the military, asking them to keep an eye out for IABP candidates in military hospitals.
One day, the call came. A retired general was hospitalized in Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He had a history of multiple infarcts and was now end-stage. The IABP scientists were all ready to go, until they found out the general was Eisenhower. They declined the opportunity because they worried that if the IABP failed in him, it would permanently ruin the future prospects of the device.

Eosinophilia-Myalgia syndrome (EMS),

EMS was first recognized in 1989 in New Mexico. Three women sought medical help for a mysterious, undiagnosable condition presenting with marked peripheral blood eosinophilia and severe myalgia, followed by the development of scleroderma-like chronic skin lesions. It was eventually discovered that all of the women had one thing in common: they had been taking L-tryptophan, a health food supplement sold as a sleep aid.


The tainted product was traced back to Showa Denko Inc, a Japanese company, that had been cutting corners in their purification procedure to reduce their manufacturing costs. Additionally, they were experimenting with genetically engineered bacteria in order to accelerate and increase the efficiency of their production process. As a result, contaminated batches of L-tryptophan were placed on the market. Within three months, 37 people died and over 1500 were permanently disabled from using this product.


About a decade back, a similiar epidemic of a novel syndrome with features suggestive of SSc had occurred in Spain in the 1980s. The outbreak, termed toxic oil syndrome and affecting over 20,000 individuals, was linked to consumption of contaminated rapeseed oils used for cooking

Scrofula - King's Evil

In the Middle Ages it was believed that "royal touch", the touch of the sovereign of England or France, could cure diseases because sovereigns were appointed by the Divine. Scrofula was therefore also known as the King's Evil. The kings were thought to have received this power due to their descent from Edward the Confessor, who, according to some legends, received it from Saint Remigius. From 1633, the Book of Common Prayer of the Anglican Church contained a ceremony for this, and it was traditional for the monarch (king or queen) to present to the touched person a coin —usually an Angel, a gold coin the value of which varied from about 6 shillings to about 10 shillings. King Henry IV of France is reported as often touching and healing as many as 1,500 individuals at a time.

Queen Anne touched the infant (later Doctor) Samuel Johnson in 1712, but King George I put an end to the practice as being "too Catholic". The kings of France continued the custom until Louis XV stopped it in the 1700s, though it was briefly revived to universal derision in 1825

Protein S

In 1979, researchers in Seattle, Washington, first discovered protein S and arbitrarily named it after the city of its discovery.

St Vitus Dance

Dancing mania or choreomania, from the Greek: χορεία (khoreia = 'dance') + μανία (mania = 'madness’) was a social phenomenon that occurred primarily in mainland Europe between the 14th and 18th centuries; it involved groups of people, sometimes thousands at a time, who danced uncontrollably and bizarrely, seemingly possessed by the devil. During the initial outbreaks of the mania, religious ceremonies were held in an attempt to exorcise the demons thought to be causing the mania. People commonly prayed to St. Vitus for aid, and he soon became the patron saint of the dancers - may be the frenzied movements of religious fanatics during the middle ages journeyed to the healing shrine of St. Vitus.
The phrase "St. Vitus' Dance", however, is in fact a name given to a syndrome known as Sydenham's chorea, characterized by rapid, irregular, and aimless involuntary movements of the arms and legs, trunk, and facial muscles in Rheumatic fever.

In third grade, Andy Warhol had St. Vitus' dance, which is believed to be a complication of ?scarlet fever and causes skin pigmentation blotchiness. He became somewhat of a hypochondriac, developing a fear of hospitals and doctors. Often bed-ridden as a child, he became an outcast among his school-mates and bonded strongly with his mother. When in bed he drew, listened to the radio and collected pictures of movie stars around his bed. Warhol later described this period as very important in the development of his personality, skill-set and preferences.

Nobel Prize 2008 - HIV & HPV

Harald zur Hausen went against current dogma and postulated that oncogenic human papilloma virus (HPV) caused cervical cancer, the second most common cancer among women. He realized that HPV-DNA could exist in a non-productive state in the tumours, and should be detectable by specific searches for viral DNA. He found HPV to be a heterogeneous family of viruses. Only some HPV types cause cancer. His discovery has led to characterization of the natural history of HPV infection, an understanding of mechanisms of HPV-induced carcinogenesis and the development of prophylactic vaccines against HPV acquisition.

Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier discovered human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Virus production was identified in lymphocytes from patients with enlarged lymph nodes in early stages of acquired immunodeficiency, and in blood from patients with late stage disease. They characterized this retrovirus as the first known human lentivirus based on its morphological, biochemical and immunological properties. HIV impaired the immune system because of massive virus replication and cell damage to lymphocytes. The discovery was one prerequisite for the current understanding of the biology of the disease and its antiretroviral treatment

The first antidepressant

Iproniazid was the first antidepressant ever marketed. It was originally intended for the treatment of tuberculosis.In 1952, its antidepressant properties were discovered when researchers noted that the patients given iproniazid became "inappropriately happy". It was subsequently developed as an antidepressant and was approved for use in 1958.It was later withdrawn in 1961 due to the unacceptable incidence of hepatitis and was replaced by less hepatotoxic drugs like isocarboxazid (Marplan), phenelzine (Nardil), and tranylcypromine (Parnate).

Orphan Annie

"Orphan Annie eye" (empty or "ground glass") nuclei are a characteristic histological finding in papillary carcinoma of the thyroid gland.

Small pox

A quarter of a century has gone by since the last natural case of smallpox anywhere in the world. Ali Maow Maalin, a cook at the hospital in Merca, Somalia, and sometime vaccinator in a World Health Organisation eradication team, developed his rash on 27 October 1977. After this final hiccup smallpox joined the dodo and the dinosaur as life-forms extinct in the natural world.


Maalin was lucky: his case was mild. To be absolutely certain that the world was smallpox-free, surveillance went on for two years after his illness. There were no more ‘natural’ cases and on 8 May 1980, Resolution WHA33.3 was signed at the eighth plenary meeting of the 33rd World Health Assembly. It declared that ‘the world and all its people’ had ‘won freedom from smallpox . . . which only a decade ago was rampant in Africa, Asia and South America’.

Smallpox was only extinct by resolution and in ‘nature’, however. It lived on in laboratories in frozen form. It still does. There is currently concern that some of it may have fallen into the wrong hands. Laboratory stocks of smallpox are just as malevolent as their natural counterparts. The last human smallpox infections anywhere in the world were contracted from such stocks and occurred not in Africa, Asia or South America, but in England.


1978 Henry Bedson was professor of medical microbiology at Birmingham University. His father, Sir Samuel, had also been a microbiologist, whose work on psittacosis had been recognised by a proposal to call the group of organisms to which it belonged Bedsonia. Henry Bedson had been trained as a virologist by the doyen of British smallpox experts, Allan Downie of Liverpool University

The WHO had told Henry Bedson that his application for his lab to become a Smallpox Collaborating Centre had been rejected. This meant that in the fairly near future his lab’s work on the virus would have to stop. The WHO wanted as few sites as possible handling the virus. They had acceded, however, to his request to continue research until the end of 1978. Their safety inspectors would visit. Henry faced a dilemma. He wanted to finish his current research programme, which was significantly advancing our understanding of smallpox viruses. But Henry was also aware that the laboratory would fail the forthcoming WHO safety inspection and that there would be no money for an upgrade because of its imminent closure. Smallpox work continued in Birmingham, but the WHO inspectors were unhappy. Correspondence started with Geneva about safety problems. Although Bedson’s laboratory was not state of the art, it was a lot better than it had been. So Bedson gambled. To finish the project in time the pace of work intensified, and more and more virus strains were cultured. But the bet failed, disastrously.
On Friday, 11 August, Janet Parker, a medical photographer in the Anatomy Department, which was located directly above the poxvirus laboratory, developed a headache and muscular pains. Her husband had to drive her to work. On Saturday she felt better and went for a walk, and on Sunday she called on a neighbour, although she began to feel ill again. On Tuesday she developed spots. On Wednesday her GP prescribed an antibiotic. It was stopped on Friday because it was thought to be causing the rash. More spots developed and she went to stay with her parents. On the following Thursday, 24 August, she was admitted to hospital. Smallpox was suspected, and it was confirmed by electron microscopy of fluid from her rash. At 10 p.m. that night she was moved to the Catherine-de-Barnes smallpox hospital, where she died on 11 September. Mrs Parker had been joined there by her mother who, despite being vaccinated on 24 August, developed smallpox on 7 September. She recovered. On 6 September, after the Government announced an investigation into the outbreak, Henry Bedson went into the shed at the bottom of his garden and cut his throat.

The investigation concluded that Mrs Parker had probably been infected by a strain of smallpox called Abid (after one of its earlier victims, a three-year-old Pakistani boy), which was being handled in the smallpox laboratory on 24 and 25 July. The virus had travelled in air currents up a service duct from the laboratory below to a room in the Anatomy Department which was used for telephone calls; on 25 July Mrs Parker had spent much more time there than usual ordering photographic materials because the financial year was about to end.

Courtesy: Small Pox scares, Hugh Pennington http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n17/penn01_.html

Its flowing!!!

The word diabetes was coined by Aretaeus (81–133 CE) of Cappadocia. The word is taken from Greek diabaínein, and literally means “passing through,” or “siphon,” a reference to one of the diabetes major symptoms of excessive urine discharge. The word became diabetes from the English adoption of the medieval Latin, diabetes. In 1675, Thomas Willis added mellitus to the name (Greek mel “honey,” sense ‘honey sweet’} when he noted that a diabetic’s urine and blood has a sweet taste (first noticed by ancient Indians). In 1776, it was confirmed the sweet taste was because of an excess of sugar in the urine and blood.
Willis, in 1670, distinguished between those with a sweet-tasting urine, (diabetes mellitus) and those with polyuria without taste (diabetes insipidus).

Another source - The word “diabetes” derives from the 1st century AD Greek “diabaínein,” meaning “to stand with legs apart,” presumably alluding to the polyuria associated with the condition when left untreated. Subsequently, the word “mellitus,” derived from the Latin word for honey, was added to refer to the sweet taste of the urine of a patient with diabetes.

The ancient Chinese tested for diabetes by observing whether ants were attracted to a person's urine, and called the ailment "sweet urine disease" (糖尿病); medieval European doctors tested for it by tasting the urine themselves, a scene occasionally depicted in Gothic reliefs.

Elizabeth Blackwell

Portrait of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first ever woman doc
Syracuse University Medical School collection

Beri Beri

The origin of the word is from a Sinhalese phrase meaning "I cannot, I cannot", the word being doubled for emphasis

Leiden mutation

It is named after the city Leiden (The Netherlands), where it was first identified in 1994 by Prof R. Bertina et al.

Hemophilia B

Christmas disease named after Stephen Christmas, the 10 yr kid in which the condition was first described. It was published in 1952, in the christmas addition of BMJ. Incidentally St Stephens feast day falls on Dec 26, just a day after Christmas.

The syphilis post

Syphilis - the proper name of a fictional shepherd, entered our language in a long poem composed in 1,300 verses of elegant Latin hexameter and published in 1530(Syphilis sive morbus Gallicus- Syphilis, or the French disease) by the greatest physician of his generation, a gentleman from Verona (also the home of Romeo and Juliet), Girolamo Fracastoro (1478-1553).Fracastoro dabbled in astronomy (he became friendly with Copernicus when both studied medicine at Padua), made some crucial geological observations about the nature of fossils, wrote dense philosophical treatises and long classical poems, and held high status as the most celebrated physician of his time (in his role as papal doctor, for example, he supervised the transfer of the Council of Trent to Bologna in 1547, both to honor his holiness's political preferences and to avoid a threatened epidemic). In short, a Renaissance man of the Renaissance itself.
Syphilus is presented as the first man to contract the disease, sent by the god Apollo as punishment for the defiance that Syphilus and his followers had shown him

Courtesy: Syphilis and the Shepherd of Atlantis
Natural History , Oct, 2000 by Stephen Jay Gould (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_8_109/ai_65913170/pg_2/?tag=content;col1)
Image:Albrecht Durer