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History Club Case File N 6 o
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SCIENCE and
MEDICINE Thanks to science, we are able to travel around the world (and into space), grow food to feed the world’s growing population, and respond to the challenges of climate change. But science isn’t new. It has been around for thousands of years in one form or another. The history of science and medicine is too big to fit it all into one History Detectives Case File, but hopefully what you read here will inspire you to find out more!
Early Science
So, what is science? The word science comes from the Latin word scio meaning ‘to know/ understand’. Doing science is the activity of studying the way the world is, and how everything works. We know that ancient civilisations were doing science. The Ancient Greeks were exceptional scientists, and today we still use some of their knowledge. They had fantastic astronomers (who study stars, planets and galaxies), and mathematicians like Euclid and Archimedes, who found out loads about shapes.
You may have heard a funny story about Archimedes, who discovered how to measure volume at bath time! He stepped into his bath and the water overflowed and he realised that the space his body took up pushed the water up and out onto the floor. The story goes that he was so excited that he ran through the streets with no clothes on shouting ‘Eureka!’
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We also get some of our most important maths from the early Islamic Scholars, such as Al-Khwarizmi who developed algebra about 1200 years ago. Incredibly, none of these early mathematicians had quite got to grips with the idea of ‘zero’, which is a whole other story! Nearly 2500 years ago, Ancient Greek mathematician, Pythagoras, wrote down a theory to work out angles of a triangle and the lengths of the sides. But Pythagoras didn’t come up with it himself. We know that the Ancient Egyptians used the same maths to track the path of the stars nearly 4000 years ago and, incredibly, they used it to build pyramids in alignment with the stars and planets.
The Egyptians also knew to rub mouldy bread onto infected wounds (as we will see later, this wasn’t completely mad!) But the Egyptians weren’t right about everything. They thought that the Earth stood still and that the Sun was rolled around it by a giant dung beetle! Because science hasn’t always been able to explain everything, people have often blended their scientific knowledge with myth and religion to make sense of why things happen.
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The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment Maybe you have heard of the Scientific Revolution or the Enlightenment. These are the names we give to a period of Western history when there was a major change in the way that people understood the world. This different worldview changed the way people did science and the way people thought about religion, and this changed art, philosophy and politics.
Before the Enlightenment, Europeans thought that the Earth was the centre of the universe. They thought the Moon, the planets, the Sun and stars all moved around the Earth. This idea originated in ancient Greece with Ptolemy and in Roman Egypt. But a revolution was started by a Polish man called Copernicus. He was born in 1473, and was a great mathematician and astronomer. Towards the end of his life, Copernicus published his theory of the universe. In Copernicus’s theory, the Earth was no longer the centre of the universe; now the Sun was the centre, and it was the motion of the Earth that made it look as if the stars moved across the night sky and made the Sun rise and set each day.
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Copernicus died in 1543. About 70 years later, in 1609, Italian astronomer, Galileo first used a telescope. He was the first to see the moon craters, and it is because of Galileo that we know that the planets go round the sun.
This was a major change to how people thought about the universe. Suddenly established ideas were turned on their head! Some big thinkers started questioning what they thought they knew. Philosophical questions such as ‘what is the world actually like?’ and ‘how can be sure that we know what we know?’ became really important. In the past, people may have looked to the Bible and the ancient Greek scholars to answer these questions, but now science became the way to explain the world. ‘Scientific method’ was the new way to discover knowledge and test out what we thought we knew.
Did you know? The Catholic church didn’t seem that bothered about the work of Copernicus. But in 1633 Galileo, who was himself Catholic, was convicted of heresy (which is the charge that he went against the teachings of the church). His work showed the Earth was not the centre of the universe and the Church didn’t like that! He was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life. It wasn’t until 1992 that Pope John Paul II apologised for condemning the work of Galileo and for punishing him for his scientific breakthrough.
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The new scientific method (proposed by Francis Bacon) was open-minded about conclusions. Experiments and studies became systematic and reliable. Previously, some results had been rejected as mistakes if they didn’t fit existing theories. But now evidence was more important than belief, and theories could be rejected if experiments proved them wrong. ‘Empiricism’ became really important to science. Empiricism is just a fancy word for the idea that everything we know about the world comes to us through our senses: what we see, hear, smell, taste and feel.
Unfortunately, we don’t have the space to mention every important scientist or inventor. But one of England’s best-known scientists during the Scientific Revolution was Sir Isaac Newton. Newton was born in 1643 and is most famous for his theory of gravity (the force that makes things fall to earth and stops us floating off into space), which apparently came to him when an apple fell on his head! Jump forward a few hundred years and Newton’s ideas about gravity no longer fit with modern facts. Even though Newton’s theory of gravity works fine here on Earth, we need a different theory to understand how forces work in space. Einstein worked on this in the early 20th century. Since Einstein, things have changed again and scientists now know that forces work in a different way when things are really, really small, in the realm of quantum mechanics. The way these theories have changed when they don’t fit shows how the scientific method works.
Did you know?
Sir Isaac Newto n was President of the Royal Society fo r 24 years! The Royal Society used to be known as Th e Royal Society of Lond on for Improvin g Natural Knowledge (tha t’s a mouthful!) It w as founded in 1660 and was a really im portant place for scien tists to share ideas.
There are lots of branches of science. At school you will learn physics (which aims to find the laws that explain the physical world), chemistry (the study of the stuff in substances and materials), and biology (the study of living things). Thanks to science, there have been countless life-changing inventions, including the printing press in 1440, commonly thought to be the most important invention ever! It completely revolutionised how people were able to access information, led to increased literacy, and enabled mass communication.
Religion also encouraged literacy because protestants were all supposed to read the bible and understand the word of God.
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Medical breakthroughs There have been many marvellous medical breakthroughs and advancements in how we treat illness that have meant we all now live longer, healthier lives. Here are just a few. Which do you think is most important?
Germ theory:
Can you believe that once we had no idea about ‘germs’, or about how infectious diseases were spread. There have been all sorts of explanations, some wacky and others not too far from the truth. It was believed that the Black Death was spread by ‘bad air’ and plague doctors wore masks full of herbs to disguise the poisonous smell. This is called miasma theory and is now known to be false, but it was used to explain the Cholera outbreaks in the 19th century. That is, until a man called John Snow made the connection between dirty water and the disease in 1854. He mapped who got ill and noticed a pattern in cases. Louis Pasteur did experiments that also helped to build the knowledge we now have about ‘germs’.
Antibiotics: We use antibiotics to treat all kinds of infections
caused by bacteria, but they can’t be used to treat viruses like cold and flu. In 1928, Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered Penicillin, and changed medicine forever. He was a scientist who studied bacteria. He left the lid off one of his petri dishes (a little dish used to grow bacteria) and mould started to grow on it. He realised that the bacteria were dying near the mould and so penicillin was discovered! (The Ancient Egyptians were not wrong to rub mouldy bread onto infected wounds because some moulds contain antibacterial properties... but maybe don’t try this at home!)
Nursing: This is one of the few fields of medicine that women were able to
make a massive contribution to early on. The history of professional nursing traditionally begins with Florence Nightingale, one of the best-known nurses. Before her, nursing was done by family members or servants, usually women. In 1854, Florence Nightingale travelled to Turkey to lead a team of nurses that were looking after injured soldiers during the Crimean War. She worked hard to improve hygiene and reduce infection among the injured soldiers. The following year, Mary Seacole, travelled all the way from Jamaica to the Crimea set up a home for soldiers to get well. In 1860, Nightingale started a training school for nurses in London. It wasn’t until 1951 that male nurses were allowed to join the professional register!
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Anaesthesia:
Anaesthetics make a patient unconscious, or numb an area of the body, so that operations can take place without causing pain. During the Enlightenment gases were discovered, and the gas, nitrous oxide, was tested on people as an anaesthetic in the late 1700s. The first ‘official’ demonstration of ether (a more effective gas than nitrous oxide) was in 1846. Chloroform was discovered in 1831 and first used as an anaesthetic by a Scottish doctor called James Young Simpson in 1847. Before anaesthetics, most amputations, tooth-pulling, and wound stitching would have been unbearably painful! Eek!
Before anaesthetics, doctors had to be quick! The quicker they were the less pain the patient had to endure, and the less chance there was of the patient dying from the shock the pain!
Vaccines:
During vaccination, a little bit of a disease (which won’t cause illness) is given to the person and their immune system learns to fight it. This means that when the patient is exposed to the disease in real life, their body already knows how to fight it off. Edward Jenner was the first to develop vaccination, in 1796. Where Jenner lived, there was a local belief that dairy farmers would become immune to the killer disease smallpox if they had a much milder cowpox infection, which was caught from cows. Jenner took some gooey material from the sore on the hand of a local milk maid who had cowpox. He used this to vaccinate an eight-year-old boy that worked in his garden, called James Phipps. James became unwell for several days, but then recovered. A few months later he was found to be immune to smallpox. Incredible!
NHS:
NHS stands for National Health Service and it was set up in 1948. The main idea of the NHS was that everybody in the country has access to healthcare that costs nothing at the point of delivery. It is paid for out of taxes that are paid to the government. Having the NHS means that even the least welloff people can have healthcare. Before the NHS a lot of poorer people just couldn’t afford to go to the doctor! Nowhere else in the world has a system quite like the NHS!
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FROM THE COLLECTION Lancaster has been home to several notable scientists. These included William Whewell, born in Lancaster in 1794, who is remembered as being a ‘polymath’. A polymath is one of those people who is really good at everything! He was a scientist, but published on a range of subjects including astronomy, geology, maths and economics, and even wrote poetry. He used words for the first time that we still use today, including the word ‘scientist’! Richard Owen was also born in Lancaster and went to school with Whewell. He was a scientist, researcher, and fossil expert. You will find out more about him in the Richard Owen History Detectives Case File.
This giant pestle and mortar were used by another of Lancaster’s scientists, Edward Frankland. Frankland was born in Catterall, near Lancaster in 1825. Although his family moved around during his early years, they came to Lancaster to live in 1833 where he attended Lancaster Royal Grammar School from age 12. Frankland loved Chemistry. He really wanted to be a doctor, but his family couldn’t afford the fees to train, so his only option was to take up an apprenticeship.
In 1840, when Edward was only 15, he started working for Stephen Ross in his pharmacy in Cheapside. The apprenticeship was incredibly hard work. He would collect the keys to the shop at 5.45am and sweep and clean until his master arrived at 8am. The shop was open until 8pm. Edward would have had both a breakfast break and a lunch break, unless it was Saturday; on Saturday the shop didn’t close until 9pm and Edward worked without a lunch break! Much of Edward’s early time as an apprentice was spent using this pestle and mortar to crush ingredients to a fine powder. These included drugs, paints, sugar, and cocoa. It was very hard physical work. It took nearly a full day to grind a pound of cocoa! There were few safety precautions, and sometimes this work was dangerous because the ingredients could be very poisonous, such as mercury. Apprentices worked these long, hard hours without pay.
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Life was like this for Edward for the first two years of his apprenticeship, but his duties changed as time went on. He moved from grinding to making the full range of medicines sold in the pharmacy. Some Victorian cures could be quite unpleasant and you might have been prescribed laxatives for chicken pox (which would give you diarrhoea), smoke inhalation for asthma, or the anaesthetic chloroform for hiccups!
Edward Frankland left Lancaster and moved to London to work in a chemist’s laboratory. He went on to make some significant discoveries in chemistry and reformed the teaching of the subject in schools by introducing laboratories.
BE A REAL HISTORY DETECTIVE: What clues about Lancaster’s scientific past can you look for today? Head into the city centre and you can see a green plaque in honour of Edward Frankland on Moorlands Church on High Street. Both Frankland and another notable Lancastrian physicist Sir John Ambrose Fleming both attended Sunday school at this church. If you visit the statue of Queen Victoria in Dalton Square, you will see a panel of notable Victorian scientists and writers. This includes local science heroes Richard Owen, Edward Frankland, and anatomist Sir William Turner. Have you ever travelled along St Leonard’s Gate? This street bears the name of the medieval St Leonard’s Leper Hospital to which it once led. Leprosy is a contagious disease caused by bacteria that results in large lumps on the skin and can leave people disfigured. The hospital was founded in the 1190s on this site just outside the town boundary to isolate people with leprosy from the rest of the population. It was in use for about 300 years.
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At 44 King Street, you can see a pestle and mortar sign, used to identify a Chemist. Visual signs were important at a time when not everybody could read. A sign like this one would be easy to spot and even small children would know what it meant.
There is another green plaque at 19 Castle Hill. This is the site of Lancaster’s first purpose-built dispensary, founded by David Campbell MD, providing healthcare for the poor since 1785. Dr Campbell first started dispensing to the poor from his own home on the corner of Castle Park, in 1781. A ? Coade stone plaque featuring the Good Samaritan was w Did you kno placed above the door to his home, and this was later ’t n ld u o w s moved across the road to the new dispensary in 1785 (you sarie Often dispen ere Th . se a e is can see the space where it once sat on the front of the d s u treat infectio l ita sp o h r e building). 200 years before the NHS, dispensaries such as te fev was a separa is th d n this one started to provide free medical care to the poor, a in Lancaster, here paid for by charitable donations from wealthier people. is probably w d a h u Sometimes the poor residents that might need to use the you went if yo s a w t a dispensary paid a very small monthly fee to get healthcare th an illness s. free at the point of delivery. The dispensary in Lancaster contagiou served the workhouse as well as poor residents recommended for treatment by wealthier donors. Records show that in 1799 alone, 1,211 patients were treated (1,040 apparently cured), as well as 94 surgeries, and 82 cases of midwifery.
In fact, we can thank the dispensary on Castle Hill for our very own hospital, Royal Lancaster Infirmary. The dispensary joined forces with a fever hospital in the town and opened first in Thurnham Street in 1883. In 1896, the first building at the site on Ashton Road opened. It was paid for with a donation of £10,000 by Lord Ashton, James Williamson. The Coade stone carved plaque of the Good Samaritan that has followed the dispensary around Lancaster now sits above the entrance to Medical Unit 1 at the Royal Lancaster Infirmary (moved from the dispensary at 19 Castle Hill).
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Talking about the philanthropic work of Lord Ashton, let’s head over to Williamson Park. If you look carefully while you are exploring the woodland park trails, you might see a path leading to a raised platform. This is the site of the Greg Observatory. There is nothing left to see, except the foundations, but you can read all about it on an information board at the location. The building that once stood here was built to house telescopes that had belonged to John Greg, the owner of Caton Mill from 1820. People could pay a penny to come into the observatory and use the equipment to view a star in the sky in broad daylight – 6,000 people did this in the summer of 1892! There was also a weather station in the building and weather readings were taken daily by volunteers. Next door to Williamson Park is the enormous building and grounds of Lancaster Moor Hospital. Now closed and refurbished into housing, this hospital once looked after patients suffering with mental illness. It first opened in 1816 as the first Lancashire County Asylum. Despite its spooky gothic appearance, the hospital pioneered humane treatment of mental illness during the 20thcentury. It was fully closed by 2000.
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We are also very lucky to live in a Special Area of Conservation. Morecambe Bay is a protected site thanks to its unique geography, ecology, and wildlife. We are all very excited at the prospect of the Eden Project North, an environmental science observatory and visitor centre. Don’t forget to get your History Detectives Time Travel Passport stamped! This month have it stamped at Lancaster City Museum when you find this quirky piece of Victorian medical equipment. This is a Magneto-Electric Machine, a portable electric shock machine (not quite the ‘pocket-size’ that the label announces!). The metal ends would be applied to the patient’s body and the handle cranked until sufficient electricity was generated. The faster the handle was turned the bigger the jolt! Electricity was thought to cure all sorts of mental and physical health issues during the Victorian era, from headaches and tiredness to piles! (If you don’t know what piles are, ask a grown-up.)
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...is to create a fact file about a Science and Medicine hero or heroine! There have been far too many amazing breakthroughs in science and medicine for us to mention here. But, why not have a go at doing some research of your own to create a fact file about one of the amazing men and women that have worked in science and medicine. Maybe you will pick one of the Enlightenment polymaths who laid the foundations for modern day science, or a ground-breaking Victorian chemist or medical doctor. Or, maybe you will research a well-known contemporary scientist, such as Timothy Berners-Lee or Jane Goodall!
You can visit the library to find books that will help, and you can also use the internet to find out more. You might have seen a programme on television that has inspired you to choose a particular scientist, or maybe you have learned about a scientist at school. Ask your teacher – your school might have some useful resources for you to use. You could use a computer to create your fact file, or maybe you would prefer to make a little handmade book, or a poster. You might even dress up as your scientist of choice and introduce yourself by video! We would really love to see your creations. Ask your grown up to upload your fact files to our Facebook page, and we will display them in our online gallery.
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Or...
...MAKE A NON-NEWTONIAN FLUID (CORNFLOUR SLIME)! (Warning: This is messy science) When we observe water, we can see that it flows, drips, trickles and splashes. In fact, we expect most fluids to behave in this way. These fluids are Newtonian fluids and are called this because they obey Newton’s law of viscosity (this is quite complicated but look it up if you are interested). Some fluids don’t obey this law and behave in some very unusual ways. The exciting news is that you can easily make one of these non-Newtonian fluids at home!
YOU WILL NEED: Mixing bowl 225g Cornflour 230ml water Mix the cornflour and some of the water in the bowl using a spoon (or your hands, if you like to get hands-on). You may need to add more or less water to make the mixture the consistency of honey. Now experiment! Try to pick some of it up. Let it drip from your fingers and squeeze it in your fist. Push your hand into the bowl fast, and push your hand in slow. We expect most fluids to splash when something hits them hard (think of a stone splashing into a pond). This non-Newtonian slime becomes hard under pressure – you can even roll it into a ball! Can you do some research and find out why this happens? Do not dispose of this down the sink as it can block it! Pop it straight into a lined bin when you are finished with it.
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