First printed edition of the Therapeutics of John the Physician is a medical handbook from the thirteenth century, holding important new evidence on medicine as craft in the Byzantine world. Of particular interest is a vernacular version of the text, which also contains a commentary. Here, an unknown reviser vividly describes cases and medical procedures, a type of knowledge rarely encountered in scholarly texts.

Book VI is entirely devoted to operative surgery. Adams himself says that it “contains the most complete system of operative surgery which has come down to us from ancient times”. Book IV contains much information on surgical diseases. The work also includes the first clear description of lead poisoning. Digital facsimile from the Internet Archive at this link.

The first book on Constantine the African, which sheds light on the School of Salerno, with which Constantine was associated, and the formation of a medical corpus in the High Middle Ages. 

The first comparison of medical systems of the Ancient Near East and the Greek and Roman world. The authors treat early medicine in Babylonia, Egypt, the Minoan and Mycenean world; later medicine in Hippocrates, Galen, Aelius Aristides, Vindicianus, the Talmud, focusing on the degree of "rationality" or "irrationality" in the various ways of medical thought and treatment.

Reproduces, with transcription, the Chester Beatty medical papyrus. See No. 5.

This is the best comparatively brief, but sufficiently detailed, survey in English.

Originally published by Eros nad Nilem (Prószyyńki i S-ka S.A, 1998).

Extensively revised by the author, with additional notes by the translator (unidentified), from Das Weib im altindischen Epos. Ein Beitrag zur indischen und zur vergleichenden Kulturgeschichte. Von Johann Jacob Meyer. (Leipzig, W. Heims, 1915.) Digital facsimile of the 1953 reprint of the English translation from the Internet Archive at this link. Digital facsimile of the original German edition from the Hathi Trust at this link.

"The six books of Sacred Tales “ are in a class apart. A record of revelations made to Aristides in dreams by the healing god Asclepius…they are of major importance, both as evidence for the practices associated with temple medicine, and as the fullest first-hand report of personal religious experience that survives from any pagan writer.” Modern scholarship has seen a proliferation of theories about the nature of Aristides’ illnesses (real or imagined) and about the meaning of his religious experiences; “a number of scholars have applied psychoanalytical theories to Aristides’ self-presentation” and have come to various conclusions. (Wikipedia article on Aelius Aristides, accessed 12-2016). See also Behr, Aelius Aristides and the sacred tales (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1968).

Corpus medicorum Graecorum, 11, 1, 3, 1-3.

Firdous al-Hikmah is one of the oldest encyclopedias of Islamic medicine, based on Syriac translations of Greek sources (Hippocrates, Galen Dioscorides, and others). It is divided into 7 sections and 30 parts, with 360 chapters in total. The work was eclipsed by those of Rabban al-Tabari's more famous pupil, Muhammad ibn ZakarÄ«a Rāzi (Rhazes). After writing the work in Arabic Rabban a-Tabari also translated it into Syriac, to give it wider usefulness. However, the information in Firdous al-Hikmah never entered common circulation in the West because it was not edited until the 20th century, when Mohammed Zubair Siddiqui assembled an edition using the five surviving partial manuscripts. There is still no English translation. A German translation by Alfred Siggel of the chapters on Indian medicine was published in 1951. (adapted from the Wikipedia article on Ali ibn Sahl Rabban-al Tabari, accessed 12-2016.)

See Max Meyerhof, "Alî at-Tabarî's 'Paradise of Wisdom", one of the oldest Arabic compendiums of medicine," Isis, 16 (1931) 6-54. Available from Scribd at this link.

Elwood is often referred to as the "father of the health maintenance organization. He not only coined the term, he also played a role in bringing about structural changes to the American health care system to simultaneously control cost and promote health by replacing fee-for-service with prepaid, comprehensive care. With N. N. Anderson, J.E. Billings, R.J. Carlson, E.J. Hoagberg, and W. McClure.

A broad historical overview of HMOs with a close analysis of one institution, the Marshfield Clinic in northern Wisconsin.

Digital facsimile from the Hathi Trust at this link.

Marcellus's compendium of pharmacological preparations drawing on the work of multiple medical and scientific writers as well as folk remedies and magic. Digital facsimile from the Internet Archive at this link.

First edition of the original Greek text, a medieval Latin translation based on Auxerre 240, a German translation, and a detailed commentary by Pithis of the De pulsibus by the obscure Byzantine physician Philaretos, from whose work physicians of the later Western Middle Ages and the Renaissance derived their theory of the pulses. This text, in the Galenic tradition "largely mediated through the pseudo-Galenic tract "On pulses, for Antonius" was included in the Articella from the 11th century onward. Philaretos lived sometime between the early 9th and late 11th century.

Gilles de Corbeil's medical poem De urinis was based on writings by Theophilus Protospatharius by way of the Articella. Poems such as this were intended as mnemonic aids for students, and they tended to be widely used. 

"Gentile's commentary de urinarum iudiciis makes a first attempt to comprehend the physiology of urine formation; aided by his dissection of cadavers, Gentile asserted that urine associated with the blood passes per poros euritides ("through the porous tubules") of the kidney and is then delivered to the bladder. Commenting on De pulsibus, he connected the relationship between fast pulse rate and urine output and correlated the color of urine with the condition of the heart. For the originality of his thought Mario Timio suggested^[8] that Gentile could be indicated as the 'first' cardionephrologist in the history of medicine." (Wikipedia article on Gentile da Foligno, accessed 1-2017). ISTC No. ia00093000. Digital facsimile from the Countway Library at Harvard at this link.

See also Carmina de urinarum iudiciis edited ab excellentissimo magistro Egidio cum expositione et commento magistri Gentils de Fulgineo noviter castigatis, Et pluribus in locis emendatis, per magistrum Auenantium, de Camerino artium & medicinae professorem (Basel, 1529) Digital facsimile of the 1529 edition from Google Books at this link.

"... the authors review all the ancient treatises, ranged in chronological order, that cite Nicander at greater or lesser length, from Celsus up to Paul of Aegina - not less than thirteen authors. . . . Next follows a section . . . . on Nicander as scientist, physician, and poet. Happily brief, this part is followed by another, more ample, on Nicander's poetic heritage, which starts with Virgil and ends with Keats, and includes ten authors, among them Dante, Ronsard, and Shakespeare. . . . there follow nineteen plates referring to snakes, derived from sculpture, manuscripts, paintings, and prints of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and copious appendices that risk constituting the most interesting part of the work..." - Society for Ancient Medicine

The commentary by Gentile da Foligno upon Avicenna's Canon was among the most influential medical texts of the Later Middle Ages. See Roger K. French, Canonical medicine: Gentile da Foligno and scholasticism (Leiden: Brill, 2001).

Digital facsimile from Google Books at this link.

Digital facsimile from medadoc.bibliothek.uni-halle.de at this link.

First published in Archiv für pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie und für klinische Medizin 52 (1871 and 57 (1873).

"....a translation and edition of the medieval Arabic medical work entitled Imtiḥān al-alibbā' li-kāffat al-aṭibbā' ("The Experts' Examination for All Physicians"). It is a study guide for students of medicine prepared by Abd al-Azīz al-Sulami who was chief of medicine to the Ayyūbid sultan in Cairo between 596/1200 and 604/1208. It is composed of ten chapters on ten fields of medicine: the pulse, urine, fevers and crises, symptoms, drugs, treatment, ophthalmology, surgery, bonesetting, and fundamentals.

Digital facsimile of British Library MS Harley 585 from the British Library at this link.

Translation of the medical and anatomical portions of the Etymologiae. Digital facsimile from the Internet Archive at this link.

Facsimile of the 1478 edition of Mondino's Anothomia along with the text and 18 plates from Guido de Vigevano's (fl. 14th century) Anathomia. Vigevano's manuscript, completed in 1345, is MS. 569 in the Musée Condé at the Chateau de Chantilly. In his Anathomia Vigevano discusses the usefulness of using drawings for the demonstration of anatomy as well as the church's attitude toward dissection of the human body. According to Wickersheimer, the Papal Bull of Boniface VIII in 1300 was not aimed at curtailing dissection, but was intended to halt the practice of boiling and dismembering the bodies of crusaders who had died away from home for easier transportation back to Europe. Vigevano's plates are among the earliest anatomical drawings of the time and are intended to show the techniques of dissection and a limited number of diagnostic techniques.

Parallel Arabic and French texts. Digital facsimile from the Internet Archive at this link.

Middle English text of Guy de Chauliac's surgery.

"Gilbertus's Compendium medicinae was translated into Middle English in the early 15th century.^[4] The gynecological and obstetrical portions of that translation were soon excerpted and circulated widely as an independent text known in modern scholarship as The Sickness of Women. That text was then modified further in the mid-15th century by the addition of materials from Muscio and other sources on obstetrics; this is known as The Sickness of Women 2.^[5] Between them, the two versions of The Sickness of Women were the most widely circulated Middle English texts on women's medicine in the 15th century, even more popular than the several Middle English versions of the Trotula texts" (Wikipedia article on Gilbertus Anglicus, accessed 01-2017).

Includes descriptions of plague, tuberculosis, scabies, epilepsy, anthrax, and leprosy. ISTC No. ib00447000.

Bayes's paper enunciated Bayes's Theorem for calculating "inverse probabilities”—the basis for methods of extracting patterns from data in decision analysis, data mining, statistical learning machines, Bayesian networks, Bayesian inference. Digital facsimile from the Royal Society at this link.

Black analyzed the London bills of mortality from 1701-1776. His work was the only study to provide a numerical account of insanity, a disease on people's minds because of George III's illness.

Heberden observed that the number of deaths from dysentery sharply decreased over the 18th century, but that deaths attributed to apoplexy increased. Digital facsimile from the Internet Archive at this link.

Gompertz function. "Gompertz showed that over much of the adult human lifespan, age-specific mortality rates increased in an exponential manner. Gompertz's work played an important role in shaping the emerging statistical science that underpins the pricing of life insurance and annuities. Latterly, as the subject of ageing itself became the focus of scientific study, the Gompertz model provided a powerful stimulus to examine the patterns of death across the life course not only in humans but also in a wide range of other organisms. The idea that the Gompertz model might constitute a fundamental ‘law of mortality’ has given way to the recognition that other patterns exist, not only across the species range but also in advanced old age. Nevertheless, Gompertz's way of representing the function expressive of the pattern of much of adult mortality retains considerable relevance for studying the factors that influence the intrinsic biology of ageing" (http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/370/1666/20140379, accessed 1-2017). Digital facsimile of the 1825 paper from the Royal Society at this link.

Gompertz-Makeham law. Makeham proposed the age-independent Makeham term that, together with the exponentially age-dependent Gompertz term, compose the Gompertz-Makeham law of mortality--one of the most effective theories to describe human mortality. See No. 8375.

On p. 452 of his paper Ogle reproduces in type "A copy of the earliest known Weekly Bill of Mortality. British Museum. Egerton MSS. 2603, f.4." Ogle states that Creighton attributed this manuscript bill of mortality to the year 1532, "in which year an Order of Council was issued calling on the mayor [of London] to furnish a bill of the deaths from plague." Bills of Mortality were not printed until 1603. Digital facsimile of Ogle's paper from Google Books at this link.

This is the best edition of Hirsch's Handbuch. Digital facsimiles of all 3 vols. from the Internet Archive at this link.

"The building of a connection between the Gompertz equation and the biology of ageing owes much to the work of biophysicist George Sacher [10] of the Argonne National Laboratory, whose introduction to ageing stemmed from the growing recognition during the 1950s that irradiation would shorten length of life [11]. The same recognition led physicist Leo Szilard [12] to propose the somatic mutation theory of ageing and prompted a range of studies on the effects of radiation on ageing both in animal models such as Drosophila (e.g. [13]) and also in human survivors of atomic bomb irradiation [14].

Sacher [10] used the Gompertz model to compare the patterns of increase in age-specific mortality rates across different species. By plotting age-specific mortality on a logarithmic scale against age (figure 1), he showed that a linear increase was generally observed, in accordance with the logarithmic version of equation (1.1), i.e.   

"Thomas B. L. Kirkwood, Decipherng death: a commentary on Gompertz (1825) 'On the nature of the function express of the law of human mortality and on a new mode of determining the value of life contingencies"). (http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/370/1666/20140379,  accessed 01-2017

The Hayflick limit. Hayflick demonstrated that a population of normal human fetal cells in a cell culture will divide between 40 and 60 times. The population then enters a senescence phase. 

The first conference on the medical applications of virtual reality.

Digital facsimile from the Hathi Trust at this link.

Includes considerable anthropological, biological, and health data. Digital facsimile from the Internet Archive at this link.

This is the first comprehensive book on the subject. The authors describe in detail, with numerous references, the limited hospital computer systems in operation at the time both in the United States and in Europe. The editor, who was responsible for the development of the most advanced system at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Group, and provides a detailed account of it here, began his preface with this statement: "A variety of computer applications in medical care has been developed within many hospitals in the U.S. and Europe over the past ten years. In the first half of 1973, there was not yet in existence a single completely computerized hospital information system, although considerable progress had been achieved in utlizing the computer for many inpatient and out patient services."

In 1975–1977, Blackburn, working as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University with Gall, discovered the unusual nature of telomeres, with their simple repeated DNA sequences composing chromosome ends.

Blackburn and Grieder discovered telomerase in the ciliate Tetrahymena.

In 2009 Blackburn and Grieder shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Jack W. Szostak "for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase."

See also No. 8387.

The papyrus has been dated to the 18th Dynasty of Egypt, around the time of pharaoh Tuthmosis III. The text is believed to have been composed earlier, during the Middle Kingdom, around 2000 BCE. The papyrus is so unusually well preserved that questions have persisted regarding its authenticity.

"The Hearst Papyrus contains 260 paragraphs on 18 columns^[2] of medical prescriptions, written in hieratic Egyptian writing. The topics range from "a tooth which falls out" to "remedy for treatment of the lung",^[1]but concentrates on treatments for problems dealing with the urinary system, blood, hair, and bites^[2] (by human beings, pigs, and hippopotamuses^[1]). One incantation deals with the 'Canaanite illness', "when the body is coal-black with charcoal spots", probably tularemia, one of the 'plagues' which helped to unseat the Hyksos.^[3] "(Wikipedia article on the Hearst Papyrus accessed 01-2017). See Chauncey D. Leake, Sanford V. Larkey and Henry F. Lutz, "The management of fractures according to the Hearst Medical Papyrus," IN: Underwood, E.A. (ed.) Science, medicine and history: Essays on the evolution of scientific thought and medical practice written in honour of Charles Singer (London: Oxford University Press, 1953) Vol. 1, pp. 61-74. Digital facsimile of the 1905 edition from the Internet Archive at this link.

A collection of ancient Egyptian medical documents from the early 18th century BCE, found in the temple of the Ramesseum. As with most ancient Egyptian medical papyri, these documents mainly concern ailments, diseases, the structure of the body, and supposed remedies used to heal these afflictions; specifically  namely ophthalmologic ailments, gynaecology, muscles, tendons, and diseases of children. It is the only well-known papyrus to describe these in great detail. Papyrus IV deals with issues similar to the Kahun Gynecological Papyrus, such as labor, the protection of the newborn, ways to predict the likelihood of its survival, and ways to predict which gender the newborn will be. It also contains a contraception formula.Papyrus V contains numerous prescriptions dealing with the relaxation of limbs, written in hieroglyphic script, rather than hieratic script.

Dating from about 450 BCE, this papyrus concerns snakes and the treatments for snake bites, and also the treatment of scorpion bites and spider bites.

French translations, with commentary of the Egyptian medical papyri.

Between November 1495 and June 1498 scholar printer Aldus Manutius (Teobaldo Mannucci) of Venice issued the first edition in the original Greek of Aristotle's Opera omnia. The set appeared in five thick quarto or small folio volumes, often bound in six. Assembling all of the texts was a major challenge for Aldus and his associates, requiring the help of scholars in different countries, and yet during the publication process Greek texts of both the Poetics and On Rhetoric, remained elusive, so they were excluded from the set. The editio princeps of Aristotle appeared at the close of a century that had witnessed a strong revival in Greek and humanistic studies; it was the first major Greek prose text, or collection of texts, to be reintroduced to the Western world in its original language by means of the printing press, and its success launched Aldus's efforts to produce further editiones principes of other Greek authors. In addition to the Aristotelian works, the five volumes contained works by Aristotle's successor, the botanist Theophrastus, the commentator on Aristotle, Alexander of Aphrodisias, the neo-Platonic philosopher Porphyrius, and Philo of Alexandria (Philo Judaeus) along with the spurious De historia philosophia attributed to Galen. ISTC No.: ia00959000. Digital facsimiles of the whole set are available from the Bayerische StaatsBibliothek, vol. 1 at this link.

"Between 1800 and 2000 life expectancy at birth rose from about 30 years to a global average of 67 years, and to more than 75 years in favored countries. This dramatic change was called a health transition, characterized by a transition both in how long people expected to live, and how they expected to die. Rising Life Expectancy examines the way humans reduced risks to their survival, both regionally and globally, to promote world population growth and population aging."

Allergy through 20 centuries; most common allergic diseases: historical reflections; mechanisms of allergy: important discoveries; detection and environmental influences and allergens; progress in allergy management; pioneers of allergy; allergy societies and collections; online supplementary material.

Gell-Coombs classification of hypersensitivity. Prior to development of this classification, all forms of hypersensitivity were classified as allergies, "and all were thought to be caused by an improper activation of the immune system. Later, it became clear that several different disease mechanisms were implicated, with the common link to a disordered activation of the immune system. In 1963, a new classification scheme was designed by Philip Gell and Robin Coombs that described four types of hypersensitivity reactions, known as Type I to Type IV hypersensitivity. With this new classification, the word "allergy" was restricted to type I hypersensitivities (also called immediate hypersensitivity), which are characterized as rapidly developing reactions" (Wikipedia article on Allergy, accessed 01-2017).

The antibody class labeled immunoglobulin E (IgE) discovered simultanteously by two independent groups: Ishizaka's team at the Children's Asthma Research Institute and Hospital in Denver, Colorado, and by Gunnar Johansson and Hans Bennich in Uppsala, Sweden. The publication by the Uppsala team is: Johansson, SG, Bennich, H."Immunological studies of an atypical (myeloma) immunoglobulin" Immunology 13 (1967) 381–94. The joint paper by both teams is: Ishizaka, Teruko; Ishizaka, Kimishige; Johansson, S. Gunnar O.; Bennich, Hans. "Histamine Release from Human Leukocytes by Anti-λE Antibodies". Journal of Immunology. 102(4) (1969) 884–892.