July 12 in Medical History
17 entries: discoveries, epidemics, drugs and the people who shaped medicine.
Events
- Yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans begins, resulting in an estimated 4,500 deaths in the city
- Joseph Dunn (14) is attacked by a shark, suffering non-fatal wounds in New Jersey, the final episode in a spate of shark attacks along the Jersey coast where 4 people died over 12 days
- Frederick McKinley Jones receives a patent for an air conditioning unit for trucks, helping to change long-haul carriage of food and blood
- US Surgeon General Leroy Burney links smoking to lung cancer
- Reagan’s Cancer ScareDoctors discover a cancerous growth in President Ronald Reagan 's colon
- Kirby Puckett , MLB centerfielder, retires after 12 seasons from Minnesota Twins, due to loss of vision in one eye
- The first single-pill, once-daily treatment for HIV Atripla is approved by the US Food and Drug Administration
- At least 92 people die in a fire in a COVID-19 hospital ward in Iraqi city of Nasiriya
Born on this day
- Claude BernardFrench physiologist involved in the founding of modern physiology (blind experiments), born in Saint-Julien, Rhône (d. 1878)
- William OslerCanadian physician and author (circulatory system), born in Bond Head, Province of Canada (d. 1919)
- Albert CalmetteFrench physician, bacteriologist and immunologist (Bacillus Calmette-Guérin), born in Nice, France (d. 1933)
- Weary DunlopAustralian colonel and surgeon (died 1993)
- Judith L. RapoportAmerican child psychiatrist and obsessive-compulsive disorder researcher (The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing), born in Manhattan, New York (d. 2026)
- Satoshi ŌmuraJapanese biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
- Marie-Claire ChevalierFrench nurse and abortion rights activist (1972 Bobigny trial), born in Meung-sur-Loire, France (d. 2022)
- Karl J. FristonEnglish psychiatrist and neuroscientist
Died on this day
- Ruth Westheimer (née Karola Ruth Siegel) German-American sex therapist and media personality (Dr Ruth)dies at 96