February 16 in Medical History
23 entries: discoveries, epidemics, drugs and the people who shaped medicine.
Events
- Jews are expelled from Burgdorf, Switzerland, accused of spreading the Bubonic Plague
- Bangka Island massacre: Japanese soldiers machine-gun 22 Australian Army nurses and 60 Australian and British soldiers and crew members from two sunken ships. Only one nurse and two soldiers survive.
- Contract of InterestBritish premier Winston Churchill contracts pneumonia
- The last Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) is decommissioned by the United States Army
- Film & TV HistoryAngelina Jolie undergoes a preventive double mastectomy after learning she had an 87% risk of developing breast cancer due to a defective BRCA1 gene
- America evacuates 400 citizens from COVID-19-infected cruise ship Diamond Princess quarantined in Yokohama port, Japan
- Alabama Supreme Court rules frozen embryos can be considered children as part of a wrongful death case where frozen embryos were accidentally destroyed at a clinic
Born on this day
- Rheticus [Georg Joachim de Porris]Italian-Austrian mathematician (trigonometric tables), astronomer, physician, and cartographer, born in Feldkirch, Archduchy of Austria, Holy Roman Empire (d. 1574, or 1576)
- Carl Theodor Ernst von SieboldGerman zoologist known for his work on parasitology and invertebrates, born in Würzburg, Gemany (d. 1885)
- Francis GaltonBritish anthropologist and geneticist (eugenics), born in Birmingham, England (d. 1911)
- Ernst HaeckelGerman biologist (Causes of Evolution) and philosopher (Social Darwinism), born in Potsdam, Prussia (d. 1919)
- Raymond SacklerAmerican philanthropist, psychiatrist and president of Purdue Pharma the company that created OxyContin (1991-99), born in Brooklyn, New York (d. 2017)
- Lucy KaplanskyAmerican folk singer-songwriter, guitarist, mandolin player, and clinical psychologist, born in Chicago, Illinois
Died on this day
- Richard MeadEnglish physician. worked on transmissible diseases, dies at 80
- Elisha Kent KaneAmerican naval surgeon and Arctic explorer (led expedition to Greenland discover fate of John Franklin), dies at 37
- Friedrich DessauerGerman physicist (radiologist), dies at 81
- Peyton RousAmerican pathologist and Nobel Prize laureate (1966) who discovered the Rous sarcoma virus, dies at 90
- Kenneth RobinsonBritish politician (influential Minister of Health under Harold Wilson, reformed Health Service), dies at 84
- Mary AmdurAmerican toxicologist and public health researcher (born 1908)
- William MastersAmerican gynecologist who studied sexual dysfunction, dies of complications from Parkinson's disease at 85
- Theodore Isaac RubinAmerican psychiatrist and author credited with popularising psychotherapy, dies at 95
- Anne Marie HochhalterAmerican disability and anti-gun activist, paralysed victim of the Columbine School massacre, dies as a result of her wounds at 43
- Semyon GluzmanUkrainian psychiatrist and human rights activist (A Manual on Psychiatry for Dissidents, The Fear of Freedom), dies at 79