penguinsweaters:

Lucy Hobbs Taylor, born today in 1833, was the first American woman to earn a degree in dentistry.

She was denied admission to the Ohio College of Dental Surgery due to her sex, but began studying privately under the tutelage of its dean, Dr. Jonathan Taft, and later apprenticed herself to a licensed graduate before opening her own practice in the spring of 1861 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Later she moved her practice to Iowa where, in July 1865, she was elected to membership in the Iowa State Dental Society and sent as a delegate to the American Dental Association convention in Chicago. Finally, in November 1865 she was admitted to the Ohio College of Dental Surgery where, after receiving credit for her years of professional practice, she graduated in February 1866, thus becoming the first woman in the U.S. to receive her doctorate in dentistry.

Later Lucy would be quoted as saying, “People were amazed when they learned that a young girl had so far forgotten her womanhood as to want to study dentistry.”

Lucy died in 1910 but her skill and dedication to the field of dentistry has not been forgotten. In 1983, the American Association of Women Dentists honored her by establishing the Lucy Hobbs Taylor Award, which it presents annually to members in recognition of professional excellence and achievements in advancing the role of women in dentistry.

Sources 1, 2, 3

<3

(via dendroica)

biomedicalephemera:

Radiograph of Theodore Roosevelt, 1912.

In this 1912 x-ray, one can clearly see the bullet that hit Teddy Roosevelt in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on October 14, 1910, lodged right above his fourth rib on his right side. There is a small amount of shading surrounding the bullet, due to scar tissue buildup and the body’s natural attempts to encase foreign objects that it cannot remove.

Despite being shot, Roosevelt assumed he had not been hit in the lungs as he coughed no blood. He proceeded to give his 90-minute stump speech, though he prefaced it by stating,

Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet - there is where the bullet went through - and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.

As the bullet pierced both his steel eyeglasses case and his speech notes before entering his body, it did not do significant damage, despite entering his lungs a solid two inches. Remembering the horrible complications that medical intervention had when William McKinley was shot by a bullet that would likely not have killed him, Teddy Roosevelt opted not to have the projectile removed. It never caused severe complications, and aside from a short recovery (two weeks time), never bothered Roosevelt to bear. He carried the bullet in his right lung to the day he died in 1919.

Image: George Grantham Bain Collection, United States Library of Congress.

Frontispiece for “The Life of W.T. Sapp, the World Famous Ossified Man”

W.T. Sapp was born in Lebanon, KY, in 1854, and had a normal early childhood. By age seven, though, a significant stiffening of the joints had begun to appear in his legs and arms. By age ten, Sapp was completely immobilized aside from his left forearm, left hand, and jaw. He was still able to feed himself and write, but needed to be attended to in order to move about and care for himself in other ways. The disuse of his muscles led to a complete atrophy of the tissue (leading to a weight of only 40 lbs at adulthood), and the cost of his care led to his family displaying him as a sideshow freak.

However, unlike the majority of historical “freakish” persons, W.T. Sapp was cared for by a loving caretaker (a member of his church as a child) and family, and was very intelligent, referred to as an “encyclopedia in a baby carriage”. His successful career as a “circus freak” was not at the cost of his personal dignity and fulfillment, according to his own hand. He lived for over 45 years, and became one of the most renowned medical anomalies in the Western hemisphere and Western Europe. 

This book was written Sapp’s his 43rd year of life. The exact condition Sapp was afflicted with is not known. However, there are many juvenile-onset muscular dystrophy/atrophy conditions known to exist today, and no doubt the majority existed in the past, as well.

[source]

Today in History - May 14

Berkeley, Gloucestershire, England, 1796

On May 14, 1796, Edward Jenner performed the first of his 23 case studies involving inoculating people with cowpox (Vaccinia virus) in order to protect them from the worst effects of smallpox (Variola virus).

Dr. Jenner took the pus from a blister on the hand of milkmaid Sarah Nelmes, who had contracted cowpox from a cow named Blossom. He then injected this virus into eight-year-old James Phipps, allowing him to develop cowpox (similar to, but far less deadly than smallpox), and once he was healed, exposed him to smallpox. When James developed no symptoms, Edward Jenner presented a paper proposing widespread vaccination against smallpox to the Royal Society of London.

Both clergy and traditional physicians expressed credulity and disgust at the idea, despite the fact that it had been shown decades earlier to be a plausible concept - in 1721 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had herself and her children inoculated with cowpox sores after witnessing the procedure in Istanbul, and not 20 years earlier, Dr. Benjamin Jesty had success inoculating himself and his wife with cowpox during a particularly deadly smallpox outbreak.

More recent studies have shown that the practice of cowpox inoculation against smallpox may have occurred in China over 2500 years ago, but it was never widespread, and the west never truly caught on to the idea until Dr. Jenner proved with twenty-two subsequent subjects (including his own 11-month-old son) that cowpox inoculation was effective and far safer than smallpox itself. Following his second presentation on the subject at the Royal Society of London (including the case studies of his own family), the concept was still widely ridiculed by clergy and some of the public, but the efficacy was no longer seen as a matter of being an “Old Wives Tale”.

Despite his being far from the first to assert the value of vaccination, Edward Jenner is still seen as the one who saved “more lives than anyone else in human history”, because he’s the one who persisted and found a way to convince the community at large of the efficacy of the procedure. After all, in the words of Francis Galton,

In science, credit goes to the man who first convinces the world, not the man to whom the idea first occurs.

More on Edward Jenner and Smallpox:

Edward Jenner at Columbia University

BBC History: Edward Jenner

History Learning Site: Edward Jenner

Proceedings of the Baylor University Medical Center: Edward Jenner and the history of smallpox and vaccination

tuesday-johnson:

ca. 1850, [daguerreotype portrait of a woman with darkened eyeglasses]

via JonnyPhoto, Flickr

tuesday-johnson:

ca. 1890, [Bellevue Operating Theater]

via Alex Peck’s Medical Antiques Archives

Now good digestion
wait on appetite
And health on both 

No idea what this means, but I’m sure it’s true, because why else would there be pennyfarthing tricycles? Those signify true truthiness in my world.

Medical Register of New England. Francis H. Brown. 1888.

Toiletine, the “Fountain of Youth”

I’m not sure I’d ever be able to trust a compound intended for use on the skin, and internally (for everything from sore throat to piles) - something described as “lotion” does not sound edible!

Official Souvenir Program, Greenfield (Massachusetts) Sesquicentennial. 1903.

“Aunt Sally” - 1939

“Aunt Sally” was the midwife in Gees Bend, Alabama. She was the only medical personnel in a large radius around Gees Bend. This was not uncommon in much of the rural South, and midwives often picked up the skills of a basic nurse, apothecary, and dentist early in their apprenticeships. Many times midwifery ran in families.

Demonstrating the use of a new model of prosthetic arm.

ca. 1950, Walter Reed Hospital