Hippocratic medicine: disease has natural causes
The Hippocratic corpus and its oath reframed disease as a natural process with observable course and prognosis, not divine punishment.
Humanity
115 events across three thousand years — chosen to be multi-regional and honest about uncertainty. Follow a thread to trace one capability through time, or filter by region and kind.
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Galen binds medicine to observation — and authority
Galen of Pergamon dissected, experimented and wrote so prolifically that his corpus defined medicine in Europe and the Islamic world for 1,400 years.
Bimaristans: hospitals as institutions
Endowed public hospitals — bimaristans — spread through the Islamic world, offering care regardless of creed, with wards, teaching and medical licensing.
Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine
Avicenna's Canon organized all medical knowledge of its day into a systematic encyclopedia of diseases, drugs and clinical method.
Vesalius corrects the body
De humani corporis fabrica, with its woodcut anatomy, was built from Vesalius's own dissections — and showed that Galen, the unquestioned authority, had been wrong about much.
Harvey demonstrates blood circulation
William Harvey's De Motu Cordis used calculation — the volume of blood pumped demanded recirculation — to prove the heart is a pump.
Jenner tests the first vaccine
Edward Jenner showed that cowpox exposure protected against smallpox — a deliberate infection preventing a worse one.
Fleming's mold, Florey's medicine
Alexander Fleming noticed mold killing bacteria in 1928; a decade later Florey, Chain and wartime industry turned the observation into mass-produced penicillin.
The human genome is sequenced
The international public consortium and Celera simultaneously announced essentially complete drafts of the three-billion-letter human genome.
mRNA vaccines in a pandemic year
Built on decades of Karikó and Weissman's work on modified RNA, COVID-19 vaccines were designed from a posted genome in days and authorized before the year ended.
Chronology
Hippocratic medicine: disease has natural causes
The Hippocratic corpus and its oath reframed disease as a natural process with observable course and prognosis, not divine punishment.
Galen binds medicine to observation — and authority
Galen of Pergamon dissected, experimented and wrote so prolifically that his corpus defined medicine in Europe and the Islamic world for 1,400 years.
Bimaristans: hospitals as institutions
Endowed public hospitals — bimaristans — spread through the Islamic world, offering care regardless of creed, with wards, teaching and medical licensing.
Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine
Avicenna's Canon organized all medical knowledge of its day into a systematic encyclopedia of diseases, drugs and clinical method.
Vesalius corrects the body
De humani corporis fabrica, with its woodcut anatomy, was built from Vesalius's own dissections — and showed that Galen, the unquestioned authority, had been wrong about much.
Harvey demonstrates blood circulation
William Harvey's De Motu Cordis used calculation — the volume of blood pumped demanded recirculation — to prove the heart is a pump.
Jenner tests the first vaccine
Edward Jenner showed that cowpox exposure protected against smallpox — a deliberate infection preventing a worse one.
Fleming's mold, Florey's medicine
Alexander Fleming noticed mold killing bacteria in 1928; a decade later Florey, Chain and wartime industry turned the observation into mass-produced penicillin.
The human genome is sequenced
The international public consortium and Celera simultaneously announced essentially complete drafts of the three-billion-letter human genome.
mRNA vaccines in a pandemic year
Built on decades of Karikó and Weissman's work on modified RNA, COVID-19 vaccines were designed from a posted genome in days and authorized before the year ended.