Content tagged with "medicine"
A term used in teaching hospitals to differentiate students from full, practicing physicians. I spoke to a cardiologist friend who told me the term isn’t used much outside of academia. In a teaching hospital, residents often provide services to patients, but they are not those patients’ assigned…
A special type of needle used specifically to deliver smallpox vaccine. It has two small prongs on the end, and it’s just deep enough to puncture the skin multiple times and deliver the vaccine to the correct depth. It was used heavily in the worldwide campaign to eradicate smallpox in the 1960s and…
This categorizes the surface of red blood cells present in blood. Different blood types have red blood cells with different surface receptors. The profile of these receptors cause the body to recognize or reject cells as “belonging.” If it rejects them, the body will fight off the foreign red blood…
I found a few reasons for this: Interestingly, most of the reasons above also apply to vision care and optometrists. I just always wondered.
This is called “sublingual administration,” as “lingual” generally refers to the structures of the tongue and mouth. There is a large mucous gland under the tongue that supplies saliva to the mouth. Anything that comes into contact with this gland is absorbed into its capillaries, then into the…
This is an old word for the “flu.” In the James Bond novel Casino Royale, Bond’s hotel room is bugged by the manager’s wife, who pretends to be sick with the flu so she can eavesdrop. In a book about the Vanderbilt family, I found this: [he] had taken suddenly ill with an attack of “the grippe,” a…
These are the stereotypical headgear worn by doctors in the past. A band goes around the head, and a circular mirror is attached to it. When it’s worn like this, it’s actually being stored, not used. To use it, the doctor would position it over one of their eyes. The mirror had a small hole in the…
Hepatitis B and Hepatitis C are the dangerous versions. Hepatitis is generally defined as inflammation of the liver. It can be caused two ways: To be clear, “hepatitis” is simply liver inflammation. “Viral hepatitis” is liver inflammation caused by a virus. The condition is generally referred to by…
This was an era of medicine in the 1700s and 1800s where physicians performed extreme treatments on their patients in an attempt to “shock” them out of whatever condition ailed them. Treatments such as bloodletting, purging, and sweating were common. These very likely caused more deaths than they…
