December 17 in Medical History
15 entries: discoveries, epidemics, drugs and the people who shaped medicine.
Events
- The first account of a blood transfusion is published, in the form of a letter from physician Richard Lower to chemist Robert Boyle, in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
- Davina Thompson makes medical history by undergoing the first combined heart, lung, and liver transplant at Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, England
- The DNA of a young girl or woman is successfully extracted from a 5,700-year-old piece of birch tar used as chewing gum found on Lolland Island, Denmark
- French President Emanuel Macron tests positive for COVID-19, sending other European leaders into isolation
- Swedish Anti-Lockdown StrategyKing Carl XVI Gustaf says Swedish authorities have failed in their response to COVID-19, criticizing the country's controversial anti-lockdown strategy
Born on this day
- Émile RouxFrench physician , bacteriologist, immunologist who developed the 1st diphtheria vaccine and co-founded the Pasteur Institute, born in Confolens, France (1853-1933)
- Kazys GriniusLithuanian physician and politician, third President of Lithuania (died 1950)
- Dorothy RoweAustralian psychologist and author (died 2019)
- James McGaughAmerican neurobiologist and psychologist
- Carlo M. CroceItalian-American oncologist and academic
Died on this day
- Elizabeth Garrett Anderson1st qualified woman physician in Britain, first woman mayor (Aldeburgh), dies at 81
- Armand FrappierFrench Canadian physician and microbiologist, dies at 87
- Janet D. RowleyAmerican physician and the first person to identify a chromosomal translocation in any cancer, dies of complications of cancer at 88
- Osamu HayaishiAmerican-Japanese biochemist and academic (born 1920)
- Henry HeimlichAmerican surgeon and inventor of the Heimlich maneuver, dies at 96