Medicine/Behavioral Science

Marshall Nirenberg is best known for “breaking the genetic code” in 1961, an achievement that won him the Nobel Prize. But what exactly is the genetic code? And how did he decipher it? This exhibit will explore genetics research in the 1950s and 1960s and explain the importance of Nirenberg's experiments and discoveries.

Welcome to the National Academies' Intellectual Property website. From Internet content protection to human gene patenting, Intellectual Property (IP) in many forms have emerged from legal obscurity to public debate. This website serves as a guide to the Academies' extensive work on Intellectual Property and a forum to discuss ongoing work

The VL is the oldest catalog of the web, started by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of html and the web itself. Unlike commercial catalogs, it is run by a loose confederation of volunteers, who compile pages of key links for particular areas in which they are expert; even though it isn't the biggest index of the web, the VL pages are widely recognised as being amongst the highest-quality guides to particular sections of the web.

Am I pregnant? The answer to this age-old question once demanded a combination of guesswork, intuition, and time. In 1978, however, the long wait to know for sure became a thing of the past. Trumpeted by advertisements as “a private little revolution,” the first home pregnancy tests started appearing on drug store shelves that year. A quarter of a century later, innovations promise to make even the telltale thin blue line obsolete. This web site looks at the history of the home pregnancy test—one of the most ubiquitous home healthcare products in America—and examines its place in our culture.

The home pregnancy test works by identifying the presence of the “pregnancy hormone,” human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), in urine. Research that led to a sensitive, accurate test for hCG was done by scientists in the Reproductive Research Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at NIH.

The two greatest misconceptions about medicine arise primarily from our modern attempts at interpreting the medical system of the Middle Ages. The first misconception is to see medicine in the Middle Ages as an unsophisticated system. Early scholars of medieval medicine found medieval doctors' theories ridiculous when compared to modern ones. Charles Singer, for example, found medieval medicine demonstrative of "the wilting mind of the Dark Ages." <1> Singer also believed that medieval medicine, specifically the Anglo-Saxon herbals, "lacked any rational element which might mark the beginnings of scientific advance."<2> But recently, historians like M.L. Cameron in Anglo-Saxon Medicineand John Riddle in Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance attempt to validate medieval medicine in light of modern medicine. By analyzing common herbals, both Cameron and Riddle have found a few recipes that have therapeutic merit.

Research Aids for the Nineteenth Century

The Academic Medical Library of Paris (BIUM) has the pleasure to announce
the e-publication of M.J.B. Orfila's works on its website. With introductions by J.R. Bertomeu (Universitat de Valencia) and D. Gourevitch (EPHE Paris). (Site available only in French)

An historical compendium of the people, departments, schools, research centres and affiliated organisations that make up the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences at the University of Melbourne, with references to archival materials and a bibliography of historical published literature.

Throughout the last three thousand years, smallpox has shadowed civilization. A viral infection, the disease spread along trade routes, emerging first in Africa, Asia and Europe and reaching the Americas in the sixteenth century. Because smallpox requires a human host to survive it tended to smolder in densely populated areas, erupting in a full-blown epidemic every ten years or so.

Wherever it appeared, the legacy of smallpox was death, blindness, sterility and scarring.

While some medical practitioners claimed to cure smallpox, most medical traditions focused on prevention. Quarantining smallpox patients often limited the spread of the disease and was commonly used even into the twentieth century as there is no cure for smallpox.

We provide information about the history of Federal efforts devoted to public health, preserve and interpret the history of PHS, and promote historically-oriented activities across the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in partnership with the History Office of the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health Historical Office.