December 9 in Medical History
23 entries: discoveries, epidemics, drugs and the people who shaped medicine.
Events
- First Christmas Seals sold (Wilmington, Delaware, post office)
- The subsequent Nuremberg trials begin with the Doctors' Trial, prosecuting physicians and officers alleged to be involved in Nazi human experimentation and mass murder under the guise of euthanasia.
- Great Smog of London (England): Wind resumes, lifting city's worst smog after 4 days; over 8,000 deaths attributed to conditions; clean air legislation enacted in its wake
- The eradication of the smallpox virus is certified, making smallpox the first of only two diseases that have been driven to extinction (with rinderpest in 2011 being the other).
- US Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders resigns after comments about masturbation
- MLB pitcher Roy Halladay announces his retirement due to persistent back injury
- World Anti-Doping Agency bans Russia from all major sporting events including 2020 Tokyo Olympics and 2022 football World Cup in Qatar for manipulating laboratory data
- Canada approves the Pfizer/ BioNTech vaccine for COVID-19
- United Arab Emirates is the first country to authorize China's Sinopharm vaccine for COVID-19 saying it is 86% effective
- Luigi Mangione (26) is arrested at an Altoona, Pennsylvania fast food restaurant after a five-day manhunt, and charged with murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in NYC
Born on this day
- Gemma Frisius [Jemme Reinerszoon]Frisian physician, mathematician and cartographer (created globe), born in Dokkum, Friesland (now Netherlands) (d. 1555)
- Augustus Quirinus RivinusGerman physician and botanist, born in Leipzig, Germany (d. 1723)
- Carl Wilhelm ScheeleSwedish pharmacist and chemist (lemon acid), born in Stralsund, Swedish Pomerania (d. 1786)
- Jean-Olivier ChénierFrench Canadian physician and Patriote, born in Lachine, Canada (d. 1838)
- Ida S. ScudderIndian physician and missionary (died 1960)
- Roger Wolcott SperryAmerican neurobiologist (1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, work with split-brain research), born in Hartford, Connecticut (d. 1994)
- Jan KřesadloCzech-British psychologist and writer, born in Prague, Czechoslovakia (d. 1995)
- Rina VenterSouth African Minister of National Health and Population Development (1989-94), 1st South African woman to hold a cabinet post, born in South Africa
- Dimitrios TrichopoulosGreek epidemiologist, oncologist, and academic (died 2014)
- Saima WazedBangladeshi psychologist
- Mona Hanna-AttishaAmerican pediatrician, professor, and public health advocate
Died on this day
- Heinrich Christian Friedrich SchumacherDanish surgeon, botanist and professor of anatomy (research work in malacology), dies at 73
- Norman BreslowAmerican statistician and academic (born 1941)