May 21 in Medical History
26 entries: discoveries, epidemics, drugs and the people who shaped medicine.
Events
- American Red CrossAmerican Red Cross founded by Clara Barton
- Physicist Louis Slotin is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation while preparing a plutonium core experiment at the Los Alamos lab, he dies 9 days later and the accident ends all hands-on nuclear assembly work at Los Alamos
- Five abortion clinics in Miami, Florida, are targeted by a butyric acid attack
- Mushrooms have poisoned more than 800 in western Iran, killing 11
- More than 600 people, 75% children, identified as HIV in a month in Sindh province, Pakistan, thought to be due to use of infected needles
- Protests across American cities defending abortion rights after several US states pass new abortion laws
Born on this day
- William BabingtonIrish-born, English physician and mineralogist (died 1833)
- František ChvostekCzech-Austrian military physician and medicinal lecturer, born in Frýdek-Místek, Czechia (d. 1884)
- Willem EinthovenDutch physiologist and inventor of the electrocardiodiogram (Nobel Prize in Medicine 1924), born in Semarang, Dutch East Indies (d. 1927)
- Abel AyerzaArgentinian physician and academic (died 1918)
- Anne Walter FearnAmerican physician (died 1939)
- Hans BergerGerman neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and inventor of electroencephalography (EEG), born in Neuses, German Empire (d. 1941)
- Armand HammerAmerican industrialist (Occidental Petroleum), born in New York City (d. 1990)
- John Curtis GowanAmerican psychologist of gifted children, born in Boston, Massachusetts (d. 1986)
- Inese JaunzemeLatvian javelin thrower and surgeon (died 2011)
- Bengt I. SamuelssonSwedish biochemist, (1982 Nobel laureate for Medicine or Physiology for prostaglandins), born in Halmstad, Sweden (d. 2024)
- Raúl MaderoArgentine soccer defender (5 caps; Estudiantes) and sports physician (Argentina national team), born in Buenos Aires, Argentina (d. 2021)
- Linda LaubensteinAmerican physician and academic (died 1992)
- Jamie HepburnScottish politician, Member of the Scottish Parliament, born in Glasgow, Scotland
Died on this day
- Hieronymus Fabricius Ab Aquapende Italian physician (De Formato Foetu)dies at 82
- Lars RobergSwedish physician, natural science researcher, and educator, dies at 78
- Carl Wilhelm ScheeleSwedish pharmacist and chemist (lemon acid), dies of mercury poisoning at 43
- Mary Harris Thompson1st American woman surgeon, dies at 66
- Victor Segalen [Max Anely]French ship's doctor and writer, found death in a forest with copy of the works of Shakespeare at 41
- Thomas A.C. RennieScottish-American psychiatrist who led "Mental Health in the Metropolis: The Midtown Manhattan Study", dies of a cerebral hemorrhage at 52
- Jaime LusinchiVenezuelan physician and politician, President of Venezuela (born 1924)