History of Medicine

It's been over a year since COVID-19 first made its appearance, yet it remains as challenging as ever to beat. As cases surge around the world with no clear remedy in sight except for the vaccine (hopefully!), there is increasing attention being paid to ancient remedies. After various Indian and Chinese remedies made their rounds (which I wrote about some time back), here's a new one that made news this month. Andrographis paniculata , a herbal plant commonly known as green chiretta, was recently approved by Thailand for treating COVID-19. Their ministry of health has started a pilot program to test the alternative treatment after human trials showed patient condition improving within days of treatment with the extract. The ancient herb has apparently reduced the severity of inflammations in early stages of the disease.  Turns out, Andrographis paniculata is a well known ayurvedic herb, called  Kalmegh,  and is used to treat liver disease and fever. According to ayurveda, the &

I can think of no other year, at least in my lifetime, that the new year has held so much promise and people have welcomed January 1st with so much eagerness and hope! It's a time to bid goodbye to 2020 and the pandemic, and welcome the new year with new beginnings- a historic vaccine, the triumph of science and the return to normal life with friends, travel and in-person school! With January 1st holding so much importance, have you ever wondered why it is that day that begins the new year? January 1st is quite a random day really. It is the middle of winter with no special religious or seasonal festival marking the date or even the month, so why do we start the year on that day? Of course, it goes back to the Classical age!  The first new year celebration goes back several millennia to around 2000 BC when the Mesopotamians started celebrating the new year. However, they celebrated it on the vernal equinox in mid-March, when the length of day equals the length of night. The Egyptia

Pandemic probably tops the long list of new words added to our vocabulary in 2020, but before it earned that notoriety, covid-19 was classified as an epidemic in Wuhan, China. It was only in March 2020 that WHO upgraded it to a pandemic -- far deadlier and more widespread than an epidemic. What's in a name, you ask? Merriam Webster defines an epidemic as a disease affecting a large number of individuals within a population, community, or region at the same time;  a pandemic is an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large number of people, according to the WHO. Not surprisingly, both words are derived from ancient Greek. Pandemic comes from the Greek word pandemos , based on pan meaning "all" + demos meaning "people" or "population"; pandemic therefore affects nearly all of the people. In contrast, epi means "upon," so epidemic is something visited upon the people. 

Although we have come to associate COVID-19 with many negatives-  school closures,   quarantine, social distancing, and travel restrictions to name a few- it has also provided a boost for science, particularly in the area of vaccine research. The pandemic of historical proportions has triggered a global race to develop a vaccine against the virus. The development of a new vaccine typically takes 10-15 years, a luxury the world can ill afford right now. So companies around the world are racing to find a solution in record time. This has led to the development of an entirely new type of vaccine called mRNA or messenger RNA vaccine. mRNA vaccines are not a new concept; they have been known for a few decades but have not been developed seriously until now. mRNAs are tiny pieces of genetic code that tell cells in our bodies to make a protein.  The two companies at the forefront of vaccine development, Pfizer and Moderna, are both using mRNAs to develop a vaccine. They both use synthetic mRN

Today's news about Pfizer's coronavirus vaccination brings hope for an end to the covid-19 pandemic. With an effective vaccine (90% effective as Pfizer has claimed for their vaccine is truly spectacular!), we can finally think about returning to life as before- normal school, yay! (never thought I would say that ever!), even though it will be months or years before a sufficiently large population can be given the vaccine. Nevertheless, it is exciting news for people, as well as for the scientific community that a new vaccine was developed in such an unprecedented short time. In honor of Pfizer's announcement today, I decided to update an older post about vaccines and their history.   A vaccine protects a person from becoming sick when exposed to the virus. How exactly does that happen? When a person gets infected by a virus (any type of virus in general), the white blood cells in their body produces antibodies to fight the virus which helps them recover, and these antibodi

As I ponder a career in medicine, I have started researching colleges with good medical programs, which made me curious about medical schools in the past. Although the art of medicine was widely practiced in ancient civilizations, it wasn't really taught as a science until much later. It was only during the Classical period that medical schools started being established as a formal place to study the science of medicine.  The first known medical school was built in Alexandria around 311 BCE in modern-day Egypt (which was controlled by the Greeks at the time). However, Pergamum (where Hippocrates practiced) is rumored to have had a medical school earlier than that but there is very little known about this school, so the first medical school is credited to Alexandria. The Greeks were always stronger in medicine than the Romans, and Alexandria was certainly proof of that! What is also impressive is that Alexandria School of Medicine united all the different medical doctrines including

Symbol of the discipline of pharmacy After prescriptions, I decided to explore the history of pharmacy. Pharmacy is defined as “the art of preparing and dispensing drugs or a place where drugs are sold.” The word itself originates from the Greek word for remedy, pharmakon . However, the concept of a drug store where a pharmacist makes and dispenses medicine didn't exist in ancient Greece, but came much later- back in the ancient times, priests and doctors acted as the pharmacist, combining different ingredients as medicine for patients. This process, called compounding, is now done at the pharmacy. Although drug stores did not exist back in ancient times, doctors and priests were history’s first pharmacists as they practiced the art of pharmacy.  During the Egyptian civilizations, they mostly worked in temples or palaces, making medicines or personal luxury goods for priests and the royalty. In the Classical world, the best-known pharmacist was the Greek Diocles of Carystus, who wa