On September 17, 1683, Leeuwenhoek wrote to the Royal Society about his observations on the plaque between his own teeth, “a little white matter, which is as thick as if ’twere batter.” He repeated these observations on two ladies (probably his own wife and daughter), and on two old men who had never cleaned their…
The first observation of microbes using a microscope is generally credited to the Dutch draper and haberdasher, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who lived for most of his life in Delft, Holland. It has, however, been suggested that a Jesuit priest called Athanasius Kircher was the first to observe microorganisms. He was among the first to design…
Že v preteklosti smo imeli na slovenskem med zdravniki precej mož, ki so bili s svojimi mislimi, idejami in deli dosti pred svojim časom. Med stebre preventive lahko s ponosom uvrstimo utemeljitelja preventive dr.Marka Gerbca (1658-1718). Po študiju medicine na Dunaju, v Padovi in Bologni, si je pridobil dva doktorata in se je leta 1684…
Shifting over to the New World, in colonial America, quarantine was always handled as a local matter by individual colonies. The earliest evidence of quarantine was in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1647. This was implemented because of plague in the West Indies. But this was very much a local jurisdiction, interwoven immensely with commerce.…
The Colony of Virginia passed an act for the collection of vital statistics, requiring the recording of births and deaths, when a law directed ministers or churchwardens in each parish to present a “register of all burials, christenings, and marriages” yearly at the June meeting of the court. A similar act passed in 1659 stated…
During the sixteenth century Louis Savot, a Paris physician, undertook a “scientific” study of smoky chimneys. He suggested significant improvements—narrowing the width of the fire place and requiring a smooth flue so that less air entered the chimney around the sides of the fireplace and creating a stronger draft in the flue. Ducts passed under,…
In the Virginia colony, the first hygiene law was established in North America.
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