A history of medicine in 50 discoveries

What's a discovery?

The iceman: forensic analysis of a neolithic killing

A parade of ants: magic and folk healing

Massage: rubbing out demons and kinks

Secrets of the dead: ancient Egyptian mummifiers and surgeons

170 BC: sleep therapy at the Temples of Asklepios

AD 200: Galen discovers nerves and humors

900: al-Razi and evidence-based medicine in the Middle Ages

1508: Da Vinci's heart

1600: the Chamberlen family secret

1670: looking through Van Leeuwenhoek's tiny microscopes

1721: fighting smallpox and public opinion in colonial Boston

1747: limeys and the conquest of scurvy

1776: a folk remedy for congestive heart failure

1799: heroic bloodletting, leech mania, and discovering what doesn't work

1816: Rene Laennec invents the stethoscope

1828: cutting the stone

1846: laughing gas

1847: wash your hands

1848: monster soup

1854: cholera and epidemiology

1867: Gregor Mendel and inherited traits

1870: discovering ancient skull surgeries

1881: spontaneous generation and the germ theory of disease

1882: tuberculosis emerges from the miasma

1894: a barrel of snakes and an antitoxin

1896: the discovery of x-rays

18989: a small-game hunter fights bubonic plague

1898: viruses borrow life support from tobacco leaves and humans

1900: Marie Curie's lab glows in the dark

1901: making blood transfusions safe

1905: hormones and endocrinology

1907: Typhoid Mary becomes the world's most notorious cook

1909: Ehrlich's magic bullet and the beginnings of chemotherapy

1922: controlling diabetes

1929: Fleming's dirty dishes give us penicillin

1930: psychosurgery

1939-1955: rat poison for a U.S. president

1944: discovering DNA

1945: a miracle drug in the sewage

1945: saving lives with sausage casings, washing machines, and juice cans

1951: Frankenstein and the heart machines

1967: Baruch Blumberg discovers a cancer-causing virus

1967: the first heart transplant

1972: a magic bullet from Chinese medicines

1978: the first test tube baby

1983: preventing cancers

1998:MMR vaccine, autism, discovery, and fraud

2011: bionic parts

2013: poop therapy for the human microbiome

2016: researching the Zika Virus.