August 7 in Medical History
13 entries: discoveries, epidemics, drugs and the people who shaped medicine.
Events
- Canadian-born American pharmacologist Frances Oldham Kelsey is awarded the U.S. President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service for her refusal to authorize thalidomide.
- First Lady Gives BirthJacqueline Kennedy becomes the first presiding US First Lady to give birth (Patrick Kennedy) since Frances Cleveland in 1895; the infant dies three days later
- U.S. President Jimmy Carter declares a federal emergency at Love Canal due to toxic waste that had been disposed of negligently.
- WHO confirms a deadlier strain of the mpox virus (formerly Monkeypox) has spread to four neighboring countries of the Democratic Republic of Congo: Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and Kenya
Born on this day
- Ernst LaqueurDutch chemist and psychologist (sexual hormones), born near Breslau, Germany (d. 1947)
- Maurice Rabb Jr.American ophthalmologist, born in Shelbyville, Kentucky (d. 2005)
- Helen CaldicottAustralian physician and anti-war activist, born in Melbourne, Victoria
- Richard SykesEnglish biochemist and academic
- James AllisonAmerican immunologist (Noble Prize for Medicine 2018), born in Alice, Texas
Died on this day
- François-Alphonse ForelSwiss physician, scientist, and founder of limnology, the study of lakes, dies at 71
- Virginia ApgarAmerican physician, childbirth specialist, and inventor of the Apgar score, dies of cirrhosis at 65
- Frances Oldham KelseyCanadian-American FDA Director (stopped thalidomide use in the US), dies at 101
- Kary B. MullisAmerican biochemist and winner of Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1993, dies from complications of pneumonia at 74