-
The Angel Glow of the Battle of Shiloh
In April of 1862, the Battle of Shiloh was fought in Hardin County, Tennessee. The Confederate General Albert Johnson attempted to ambush the Federal forces led by General Ulysses S. Grant. The initial assault and the Federal counter attack was one of the bloodiest battles in America to date. There were 23,000 casualties littered over the Tennessee countryside. Medical techniques at the time were rudimentary at best. Many soldiers died of infection and gangrene instead of their original wounds. If they survived the infection, the men faced possible battlefield amputations without anesthesia and no guaranteed success rate. The conditions of the battle made it nearly impossible to get the wounded…
-
Francis Bacon
Born in January 1561, Bacon was the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon and his second wife Anne. During his time at Cambridge, Bacon began to question the accepted methods of scientific research, believing them to be flawed. His ideas led to the modern approach to scientific research. It is suggested that it was his experimentation of the effects of freezing on decomposition and preservation that led to him catching a chill and developing pneumonia, leading to his death. Bacon embarked on a career in Law and Politics, following his father’s sudden death which left him in financial difficulties. Despite the difficulties Bacon was served as a Member of Parliament from…
-
First Human blood transfusion
Jean-Baptiste Denys was born in Paris around 1643, and after qualifying from Montpelier, worked as personal physician to Louis XIV of France. Denys was following the work of early controversial human anatomists, notably Andreas Vesalius in the 16th Century, who contravened guidelines set by the Royal Colleges of Physicians banning human dissection. Vesalius not only performed autopsies, which flouted religious principles of medicine, but he performed them publically to ensure as many apprentices, practitioners and lay-people as possible could attend and learn. His work, published as De Humani Corporis Fabrica in 1543, and dedicated to Holy Emperor Charles V, not only blew holes in the theories of Galen, which had…
-
The Black Death
“Ring a ring a roses, A pocket full of posies, Attishu, attishu We all fall down” We are all familiar with the nursery rhyme of our childhoods, which is generally thought to be associated with the plague outbreaks of the 14th and 17th centuries, although this connection seems to date from as recently as the early part of the 20th century. Undoubtedly the rhyme has much older origins and there are variations around the world, which appear to mirror the culture of the locale. Whatever the history of the rhyme, it conjures up a picture of one of the most devastating events of medieval history. The Great Plague is believed…
-
The Tunguska Event
On the morning of June 30, 1908, a fireball, that has been estimated to have been up to 30 million degrees Fahrenheit in the center, was seen roaring across the sky. At 7:17 A.M. in Russia, the flying object exploded above the Earth creating shock waves that registered 5.0 on the Richter scale and an air blast that was so strong that it sent waves across the globe, twice. It was reported that there was not one single explosion but a series of explosions that occurred which could be heard 745 miles away. Once the explosions were over, dust clouds rose up miles into the atmosphere. The sun reflected off…
