March 20 in Medical History
20 entries: discoveries, epidemics, drugs and the people who shaped medicine.
Observed today
- National Native HIV/AIDS Awareness Day (United States)
Events
- FDA approves sale of AZT (AIDS treatment)
- Singer Gloria Estefan fractures her spine when a truck hits her tour bus near Scranton, Pennsylvania
- US Supreme Court rules unanimously employers can't exclude women from jobs where exposure to toxic chemicals could potentially damage fetus
- UK admits humans can catch CJD (Mad Cow Disease)
- US tobacco company Liggett admits cigarettes are addictive
- A woman who can smell Parkinson's disease has helped researchers identify molecules on the skin of people with the disease in Manchester, England
- Smoke from Australian bushfires killed more people than the fires - 417 vs 33 according to new study published in "Medical Journal of Australia"
- Overseas spectators will not be allowed to attend the Tokyo Summer Olympics due to the pandemic Japanese organizers confirm
- Somalian drought may have killed 43,000 people in 2022, half of them children under five, according to new research presented by UNICEF in Mogadishu
Born on this day
- Martinus van MarumDutch physician and inventor (Homo Diluvii Testus, constructed largest electrostatic machine in the world), born in Delft, Netherlands (d. 1837)
- Maud MentenCanadian biochemist, known for the Michaelis–Menten equation, born in Port Lambton, Ontario (d. 1960)
- Fredric WerthamGerman-born American psychiatrist and author, born in Nuremberg, German Empire (d. 1981)
- Amelia Chopitea VillaBolivia's first female physician (died 1942)
- Elisabeth GeleerdDutch-American psychoanalyst (died 1969)
- Arnold BurgenBritish physician and founding President of Academia Europaea, born in London, England (d. 2022)
- Tim YeoEnglish politician, Shadow Secretary of State for Health
Died on this day
- Julius Robert von MayerGerman physician and physicist (first law of thermodynamics), dies at 63
- Alfred PloetzGerman physician, biologist, and eugenicist, dies at 79
- J. Michael BishopAmerican immunologist and microbiologist known for his work on oncogenes (Nobel Prize 1989), dies of pneumonia at 90