Hi, I hope this is the correct subreddit for this question. I am writing a short story for a school assignment and it features a student from Warsaw in Petrograd who falls ill to leukemia. He does not have citizenship. I found some articles about Russian medicine in 1923, but I haven't found much that specifies if everyone qualified for free healthcare. What would treatment in this case for him be like?

Thank you for any answer in advance!

Hello all, not sure if this the right place to look, but I recently acquired a vintage Cambridge Instruments Simpli-Scribe Electrocardiograph machine and all that is missing is the power supply. I would like to test its functionality however I am coming up empty handed in my search for the proper power cord online. Any advice or leads would be very much appreciated! Thanks again

I'm doing research for a novel I'm writing, but I'm struggling to find information on sepsis. The book is set in the late 1800s.

In the scene, a character receives an appendectomy after the appendix has burst. He then goes into sepsis and dies. My question is: What treatment would doctors give for sepsis back then? Bloodletting? Anything else?

The Elixir sulfanilamide disaster that killed more than a hundred people and hastened the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.

https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/histories-product-regulation/sulfanilamide-disaster

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Could any one suggest to me a book/article that covers some big points about the development of medicine from its earliest beginnings(prehistoric medicine) to the ancient Egyptian civilization.

For those involved in clinical research, here's the first informed consent form used for human research. Created by the Yellow Fever Commission in Cuba, headed by Walter Reed. There was some public outcry there and in the US following some adverse medical events, and this was created under some pressure. It is more for legal protection rather than true informed consent like the ones we use now (with very specific Good Clinical Practice elements).

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From the Philip S Wench Walter Reed / Yellow fever Collection

This is a rather famous image. I just completed a narrative about it. But I'm curious how familiar it actually is to history of medicine buffs.

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https://preview.redd.it/axl8v3uaiefc1.jpg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a3541c98dc699d5d7f6c5ccd6c41dfca1efd0653

A late 1950s film showing survivors of cardiac arrest, and saved by resuscitation. It was produced by renowned surgeon Dr Claude Beck as a sort of public service announcement (with a rather morbid title) to advocate for cardiac resuscitation education. It is a precursor to present day CPR and the ubiquitous AEDs we see all over. It was in 1947 when Beck saved a 14-year-old boy (the tall guy in the back row to the right) who went into ventricular fibrillation on his operating table. The medical team spent more than an hour trying to revive him, and it was the first successful use of a rudimentary device in a wooden box, called a defibrillator. (Not sure if the sound will come through, but the link to the journal article with the video is provided below. You'll need to click "Play Stream")

Source: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/suppl/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.106.610907

A friend and I came across this term in a book talking about Robert Schumann, the husband of composer and pianist Clara Schumann. We are looking for any other historical references that might suggest this was an actual medical practice.

https://www.history.com/news/cigarette-ads-doctors-smoking-endorsement?cmpid=email-hist-inside-history-2024-0110-01102024&om_rid=

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Source: https://insulin.library.utoronto.ca/islandora/object/insulin%3AW10011#page/1/mode/1up/search/gilchrist

1921 "Note card recording the first clinical use of extract" written by Fred Banting. Joseph Gilchrist was his med school classmate and friend who had diabetes and was not doing well. Banting gave him a pancreatic extract to take orally. It had "no beneficial effect". The extract was meant to be injected, not swallowed. A few weeks later, a 14-year-old boy received the first injection of insulin, and that too did not work very well. The extract was further refined, and the teenaged boy, who was at death's door, was saved. He went on to work, often drank on weekends, "had fun", and lived another 13 years.

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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-birmingham-67627128

https://www.medscape.co.uk/viewarticle/marking-100-years-insulin-treatment-england-2023a1000wk7?ecd=soc_tw_231225_mscpedt_news_mdscp_insulin

What was the name of the surgeon who was afflicted with a pathology, who created a classification system for said pathology and pioneered its surgical management?

My brain has hit a wall.

I'm writing a novel set in 17th century Netherlands. I need a character to pretend to be mute while passing through a town with a person who speaks. Could there have been any causes of mutism that wouldn't seem to affect the character's mental ability. The character does walk with limp from a battle injury. Could the limp be somehow connected with mutism? Could a stroke result in both mutism and a limp?

Edit-I recognize my title was poorly stated, and not sure how I should have indicated I was looking for a person who as mute and was neurotypical or not neurodivergent. I am at a loss to figure out how to best indicate a person who in general would be considered "normal."

I recently heard a throwaway line in a podcast that we haven't always used the language of "fighting," "battle," etc., when talking about illness, and that this didn't become the common parlance until germ theory was widely accepted.

Examples: "She lost her long battle with cancer, but she was a fighter the whole way through." "Sorry I didn't return your call, I was battling a three-day migraine, but I'm better now." Stuff like that.

Diseases have always been with us before we knew how to treat them, so how did doctors, healers, or just regular people discuss the people around them who were sick? Were they simply "afflicted?" Was there no discussion of how the person endured the changes happening to them, their character? Like today we call cancer survivors "warriors" or whatever. Was there ever a discussion, good or bad, of the character of people suffering and eventually dying from long illnesses we could not yet treat?

I would greatly appreciate help learning how we discussed illness before battle, fighter, strong, etc., came into being.

In 1872 Lister noticed the antibacterial properties of a certain mould, and then used it to treat an infected wound of a nurse in 1884. With such a miraculous cure for such a common ailment, Lister did absolutely nothing. He wrote it down in a diary and didn't publish it. Why? And also, how did he produce enough to cure an infection, if years later a group working on this struggled to produce enough to cure Albert Alexander?