• Question: Who discovered how to make medicine?

    Asked by Ellz to Carmen, Laura, Steph on 19 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Stephanie Dyson

      Stephanie Dyson answered on 19 Mar 2015:

      Louis pasteur noticed that milk maids who had been exposed to cowpox so they didn’t get small pox. The started using this as a way to stop people getting deadly small pox

      Steph

    • Photo: Carmen Denman

      Carmen Denman answered on 19 Mar 2015:

      In general, that is difficult to define. Medicine is really an ancient concept! We humans have been trying to heal, cure, protect and save ourselves from disease for ages. There was a great Greek guy Hippocrates that sort of invented the idea of physicians and their code of practice. However, like Steph, I would lean towards the use of a vaccine as the first administration of medicine.

      Louis Pasteur actually made the first rabies vaccine. Before Pasteur in 1885, The first idea for a sort of vaccine was by Edward Jenner, who in 1796 started using cowpox pustules as a means of protection against smallpox. they didn’t know why it works, but like Steph said the observation that milkmaids exposed to cowpox through their line of work were immune to the horrible disfiguring smallpox disease prompted him to test this theory and saw good results. Of course there wee not so many rules and regulations back then, so humans volunteers were used!

      Cheers,
      Carmen
      More info on vaccines here: http://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/timelines/all

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