Content tagged with “medicine” under “Stuff I Looked Up”

“No one quite knows, it seems. Many historians state that the ‘correct’ ancient symbol for medicine is the Rod of Asclepius, which is a single serpent winding around a staff. Asclepius was a diety associated with healing. Myth states that he used snakes in his healing rituals. The caduceus is a…”

“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: Doctors and dentists have just been historically separated from each other. They train in different schools, and practice in different locations. Health insurance started in the 1920s and 1930s at hospitals, with doctors who practiced there. Since dentists never…”

“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…”

“This appears to be a term for a surgery done while the patient is awake, either under local anesthetic or no anesthetic. I couldn’t find a formal definition, but I found a bunch of usages where it seemed to fit: From various sources: Reportedly, following a further waking surgery during which…”

“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…”

“ This is an old word for the ‘flu.’ ”

“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…”

“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 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…”