Good evening. Tonight, the entire history of medicine — told slowly, for sleep.
From the first doctors in Egypt four thousand years ago to the hospital you would go to tomorrow. Two hours of calm history to fall asleep to. You do not need to hear the end.
Told by Dr Elias Marlow, the Sleepless Doctor. No sudden sounds. The music stays quiet and fades away; the pictures slow down as the night goes on. If you drift off in the middle of ancient Greece, that is exactly what this is for.
CHAPTERS
0:00 Opening — A Curious Kittens production
0:37 Tonight’s story
2:27 Chapter 1 — The first doctors: Egypt and the Edwin Smith Papyrus
9:19 Chapter 2 — Babylon and the price of a surgeon
15:28 Chapter 3 — Hippocrates, and the idea that illness has natural causes
23:55 Chapter 4 — Galen, the gladiators, and fourteen hundred years of being believed
30:07 Chapter 4A — The Yellow Emperor’s Classic
36:51 Chapter 5 — The house of healing: Baghdad, Cairo, and the Canon
44:30 Chapter 5A — Forty days: the plague and the birth of quarantine
50:12 Chapter 6 — Vesalius opens the body
56:01 Chapter 6A — Ambroise Paré and the night the oil ran out
1:01:40 Chapter 7 — William Harvey and the circle of blood
1:07:17 Chapter 7A — The little animals
1:13:32 Chapter 8 — Jenner and the milkmaid
1:20:29 Chapter 9 — Ether Day, 16 October 1846
1:26:30 Chapter 10 — A pump handle, and a pair of hands
1:33:21 Chapter 10A — The lady with the data
1:39:32 Chapter 11 — Lister, Röntgen, and seeing inside
1:46:36 Chapter 12 — A dish, a dog, and a ladder
1:55:20 Goodnight
SOURCES
Everything in this episode comes from a primary document or a peer-reviewed paper. The ones I leaned on:
Ch 1 — Breasted JH, The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1930 (Cases 1–48; the verso spells)
Ch 2 — The Code of Hammurabi, laws 215–223, trans. R.F. Harper, 1904
Ch 3 — Hippocrates, On the Sacred Disease; The Oath; Airs, Waters, Places — Loeb Classical Library, trans. W.H.S. Jones, 1923
Ch 4 — Galen, On the Natural Faculties, trans. A.J. Brock, Loeb, 1916
Ch 4A — Huangdi Neijing Suwen (Veith 1949; Unschuld 2003); Wang Shuhe, Mai Jing; Shennong Bencao Jing; Chen Shou, Sanguozhi (Hua Tuo); Tu Y, Nobel Lecture 2015 and Nat Med 2011;17:1217
Ch 5 — al-Razi, A Treatise on the Smallpox and Measles, trans. Greenhill, 1848; Ibn Sina, The Canon of Medicine, Book I, trans. Gruner, 1930
Ch 5A — Ragusa council decree of 27 July 1377 (Liber Viridis); Tomić & Blažina, Expelling the Plague, 2015; Crawshaw JS, Plague Hospitals, 2012; Cipolla CM, Public Health and the Medical Profession in the Renaissance, 1976; Benedictow OJ, The Black Death 1346–1353, 2004
Ch 6 — Vesalius A, De humani corporis fabrica, Basel, 1543 (Garrison & Hast translation, 2014)
Ch 6A — Paré A, Apologie et Traité, 1585, and Dix livres de la chirurgie, 1564 (Keynes G, ed., 1951)
Ch 7 — Harvey W, Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis, 1628 (Willis translation, 1847)
Ch 7A — Dobell C, Antony van Leeuwenhoek and his “Little Animals”, 1932 (the letters); Hooke R, Micrographia, 1665
Ch 8 — Jenner E, An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, 1798
Ch 9 — Bigelow HJ, Insensibility during surgical operations produced by inhalation, Boston Med Surg J 1846;35:309–317
Ch 10 — Snow J, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, 2nd ed., 1855; Semmelweis I, The Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever, 1861 (Carter translation, 1983)
Ch 10A — Nightingale F, Notes on Matters Affecting the Health of the British Army, 1858; Notes on Nursing, 1859; Notes on Hospitals, 1863; Bostridge M, Florence Nightingale, 2008
Ch 11 — Lister J, On a new method of treating compound fracture, Lancet 1867;89:326–329; Röntgen WC, On a new kind of rays, Nature 1896;53:274
Ch 12 — Fleming A, On the antibacterial action of cultures of a Penicillium, Br J Exp Pathol 1929;10:226–236; Banting FG et al., Pancreatic extracts in the treatment of diabetes mellitus, CMAJ 1922;12:141–146; Watson JD, Crick FHC, Molecular structure of nucleic acids, Nature 1953;171:737–738
Where a story is only a story (Paré on St Bartholomew’s night, the Chinese doctor paid while you were well), the narration says so.
Dr Elias Marlow is a storyteller, not your doctor. Nothing in this video is medical advice.
Pictures are illustrations made for this channel, not photographs of the people or places described.
A Curious Kittens production.
#sleepstory #historyofmedicine #fallasleep #historyforsleep
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