Did you read GREAT DISCOVERIES 1 and learn how EDWARD JENNER found a way of preventing smallpox?

Here are some more people who made the most amazing (and not quite so amazing) MEDICAL discoveries in history!

People have been trying to solve Medical Mysteries for thousands of years. It was often thought that illnesses were caused and cured by magic – but then came ...

Hippocrates was an Ancient Greek Doctor from an island called Cos. He is often called the ‘FATHER OF MEDICINE’ because was the first person to write about disease in a completely scientific way. This means that Hippocrates thought people became ill because they ate something bad or stayed out in the cold for too long. At that time, lots of people thought you became ill if you had a nasty spell put on you!

Hippocrates believed there were four things in the body that needed to be equally balanced if a person was going to stay healthy. The four things were called HUMOURS and consisted of Phlegm, Yellow Bile, Black Bile and Blood – YUCK!

A couple of hundred years later, another Ancient Greek called Galen wrote about these Humours and added some of his own ideas. Galen wrote a lot of books and for more than a thousand years many people agreed with him – even though he was wrong most of the time!

And if you think that sounds bad, let me tell you about another Ancient Greek, HEROPHILUS, who did stacks of work on ANATOMY. This means that he found out a lot about the human body. Can you guess how?

He cut people up … and some of them might have been alive at the time!

It is said that, although most of the bodies he cut up were already dead (known as Dissection), for some of his investigations he cut up criminals who were very much alive. This is called Vivisection.

Herophilus learnt about the importance of the brain, measured the length of intestines and noticed that arteries carry blood. He was the first person to take a pulse by counting its frequency against a water clock.

These days, if you need surgery, you are given an injection that makes you sleep, so you don’t feel any pain during the operation.

But only a couple of hundred years ago, lots of people died of shock while having surgery – BECAUSE THEY WERE STILL AWAKE!

In the early 19th century, some Americans began investigating the use of General Anaesthetics to make patients unconscious during operations. In 1846, a Scottish doctor called JAMES YOUNG SIMPSON heard about their experiments with a gas called ETHER and decided to try it out.

He wasn’t completely happy with the results and looked for another gas to send people to sleep. He discovered that CHLOROFORM worked very well and started using it on his patients.

James Young Simpson was an Obstetrician, which means he looked after women who were having babies.

Now having babies can be a very painful business. Simpson was keen to try out Chloroform during childbirth to lessen the pain. However, lots of medical and religious people believed that God wanted women to suffer while having babies and therefore it would be wrong to stop the pain.

It just so happened that James Young Simpson was Queen Victoria’s doctor. This was really useful because he gave her chloroform when she gave birth to Prince Leopold in 1953.

After that, people stopped complaining.

They probably thought what's good enough for the Queen is good enough for anybody!