THE 1900s: MEDICINE AND HEALTH: PEOPLE IN THE NEWS

In 1900 Dr. John Auer begins a decade of work with Dr. Samuel J. Meltzer on the use of artificial ventilation and anesthesia during surgical operations in which the chest is open.

In 1908 Dr. Sara Josephine Baker becomes head of the Division of Child Hygiene within the New York City Health Department. She remains in the post for fifteen years.

Orthopedic surgeon Edward Hickling Bradford convinces state authorities to open the Massachusetts Hospital School for Crippled Children in Canton in 1904.

Dr. Will Henry Chase helps establish Alaska's first medical society in 1906 and the future state's first hospital two years later.

In August 1909 Dr. Alfred Einstein Cohn, a specialist in cardiovascular diseases, brings the first electrocardiograph to the Western Hemisphere at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.

In 1906 Dr. Arthur Joseph Cramp organizes the American Medical Association's Bureau of Investigation to research fraud and quackery in medicine.

Ohio surgeon George Washington Crile develops bloodtransfusion methods and pioneers their use in surgery beginning in 1905.

Famed Johns Hopkins University surgeon William Stewart Halsted publishes one of the most famous of his many works, an article titled "The Training of a Surgeon," in American Medicine in 1904.

Physician and patent medicine king Samuel Brubaker Hartman convinces fifty members of the U.S. Congress to endorse his popular product Peruna in 1903 and 1904.

Alabama surgeon Luther Leónidas Hill, who had performed the first successful heart suture operation in the United States, publishes a report of seventeen cases in Medical Record in 1900.

As dean of faculty at Amherst College in Massachusetts for twelve years beginning in 1898, Dr. Edward Hitchcock implements his idea of the importance of physical education for college students. His programs at Amherst are imitated at many other colleges around the country.

A pathfinder among American pharmacologists, Dr. Reid Hunt begins a decade as chief of the Division of Pharmacology at the U.S. Public Health Service in 1904.

Pharmacist and drug manufacturer John Uri Lloyd emerges as prominent supporter of the movement against impure drugs that leads to passage of the federal Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.

Dr. Franklin Henry Martin, a specialist in surgical gynecology, starts the journal Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics in 1905. He will serve as its editor for three decades.

In the early years of the decade Louisiana surgeon Dr. Rudolph Matas continues his innovative use of cocaine as an anesthetic that he began in 1886.

In 1902 military surgeon Walter Drew McCaw begins an eleven-year tenure as chief of the museum and library division of the U.S. Army Surgeon General's office in Washington, D.C., which evolves into the world's greatest medical library, the National Library of Medicine.

Dr. Anita Newcomb McGee plays a major role in the organization of a permanent U.S. Army Nurse Corps in 1901.

Physician and pharmacologist Dr. Samuel James Meltzer demonstrates in 1905 that magnesium salts can produce a state of unconsciousness and muscle relaxation in humans and thus could be used in the treatment of tetanus.

In 1900 bacteriologist Charles Edward North begins his thirty-year campaign to persuade dairymen to improve the sanitation of milk. Infant mortality caused by raw milk will eventually be eliminated.

One of America's greatest physicians, William Osler, begins publication of his seven-volume opus, Modern Medicine, Its Theory and Practice, in 1907.

In 1901 Dr. Francis Randolph Packard publishes his monumental History of Medicine in the United States, which sparks the development of medical historiography in America.

Surgeon Roswell Park, who had played a major role in bringing antiseptic surgical techniques from Europe to the United States, treats President William McKinley after he is shot at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, in 1901.

Dr. William Allen Pusey develops techniques for using X rays in the treatment of Hodgkin's disease and various skin diseases.

In 1903 Dr. Niles Oliver Ramstad cofounds the second oldest group medical practice in America in Bismark, North Dakota, and starts a hospital in that city two years later.

In 1908 military physician Frederick Fuller Russell begins to demonstrate the value of typhoid fever vaccination, first in the army and then in the civilian population.

Biologist William Thompson Sedgwick continues his studies of sewage disposal that make him a leader in sanitation engineering in the United States.

In 1901 Dr. Torald Hermann Sollmann begins a career of more than four decades at what is now Case Western Reserve University in Ohio and publishes the first extensive American pharmacology text. Sollmann and Dr. John Jacob Abel are probably the only two men who can truly be called "fathers" of pharmacology in the United States.

Beginning in 1906 Dr. Howard Taylor engages in five years of research on the group of diseases bearing his name and on the tick-borne Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

Beginning in 1904 Dr. Bertha Van Hoosen experiments with the use of "twilight sleep," a method of childbirth anesthesia using morphine and scopolamine. Three years later she begins a series of public lectures for women on hygiene.

Pathologist William Henry Welch continues his spectacular career at Johns Hopkins University. Among his innovations is the first pathology course in the United States based in a laboratory.