March 15 in Medical History
23 entries: discoveries, epidemics, drugs and the people who shaped medicine.
Observed today
- Christian feast day: — Artémides Zatti
Events
- A dam failure causes the sudden flooding of the mining city of Potosí in present-day Bolivia leading to the death of thousands and the massive release of toxic mercury into the environment.
- Louisiana establishes 1st health board to regulate quarantine
- Lenin Suffers a StrokeVladimir Lenin suffer his 3rd stroke
- 1st state contraceptive clinic opens in Raleigh, North Carolina
- First American blood bank in a hospital is opened at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, Illinois
- Royals basketball star Maurice Stokes collapses during a playoff game with encephalitis; He goes into a coma & is permanently disabled
- US Department of Veterans Affairs officially established as a Cabinet position
- European countries impose restrictions on gatherings and borders as COVID-19 deaths rates rise dramatically - Italy 1,809, Spain 288, France 120
- AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine halted in Germany, France and Italy joining some other countries despite little evidence of unusual blood clotting
- Hong Kong amid its worst COVID-19 outbreak records over 4,000 deaths in a few months, largely due to low vaccination, as Omicron hits, forcing it to abandon its covid-zero policy,
Born on this day
- Archibald MenziesScottish surgeon and botanist (died 1842)
- John SnowEnglish physician who studied cholera and is considered the 'Father of modern epidemiology', born in York England (1813-1858)
- Emil Adolf von BehringGerman physician, 1901 Nobel Prize for Physics for his serum to cure diphtheria, born in Hansdorf, Prussia (d. 1917)
- Waldemar HaffkineUkrainian bacteriologist (1st to develop and use vaccines against cholera and bubonic plague), born in Odessa, Russian Empire (d. 1930)
- Benjamin R. JacobsAmerican biochemist (died 1963)
- E. Donnall ThomasAmerican physician (1990 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for bone marrow transport), born in Mart, Texas (d. 2012)
- Frank DobsonBritish politician, Secretary of Health under Tony Blair, born in York, England (d. 2019)
- Sunetra GuptaIndian epidemiologist, author, and academic
Died on this day
- Davidson BlackCanadian paleoanthropologist and doctor of anatomy who identified "Peking Man", dies while working alone during the night, in Beijing, China at 49 (1884-1934)
- John Scott HaldaneScottish physiologist, dies at 75
- Benjamin SpockAmerican pediatrician and writer (Common Sense Book of Baby Care), dies at 94 (1903-1998)
- Alec CoppenBritish pioneering psychiatrist (serotonin theory of depression), dies at 96