On February 14, 1852, Dr. Charles West opened London England’s The Hospital for Sick Children. It was the first hospital in the country to provide inpatient care only to children. West was determined to reduce the approximate 20,000 children’s deaths occurring yearly in the…
On January 6, 1838, Samuel Morse gave the first public demonstration of the electric telegraph at New Jersey’s Speedwell Iron Works. The message, “a patient waiter is no loser”, tapped in code along two miles of cotton-covered wire, capped one of the most important…
On September 22, 1877, American zoologist Victor Ernest Shelford was born. He studied animal communities and correlations between changes in environment and the changes in animal populations. Looking at rivers, lakes, and forests in his first book, Animal Communities in Temperate America, Shelford outlined…
On September 16, 1921, physicist and metallurgist Ursula Franklin was born in Munich, Germany. Franklin’s view of her world formed as she grew from a young woman who suffered wartime workcamp imprisonment, through a doctorate in experimental physics, to emigration to a renewed life…
On August 6, 1881, doctor and bacteriologist Sir Alexander Fleming was born. As a doctor in the British Army Medical Corps (WWI), Fleming relied on his own skills in titration, the continuous measurement and adjustment in balancing a medication or treatment. He noticed that the…
On June 21, 1868, English zoologist Edwin Stephen Goodrich was born. As a promising student at the Slade School of Art, Goodrich became interested in zoology eventually specializing in comparative anatomy – a study that uses the data and achievements of anatomy, embryology, and…
On June 16, 1902, biologist Barbara McClintock was born. McClintock studied courses in genetics before it was accepted as a discipline. Using maize cobs as her exploratory medium, she noticed colour spots on kernels that could not be explained by Mendelian genetics. Immediately attracted…
On June 14, 1868, Austrian-American immunologist and serologist Dr. Karl Landsteiner was born. Early in his research of blood properties, he had concluded that agglutinin, a substance that causes particles to aggregate in a thickened mass, varied between blood types. He demonstrated how human…
On May 17, 1749, English country surgeon Dr. Edward Jenner was born. In the 18th century, smallpox was a disease that killed about 20% of victims who contracted it and, if it didn’t kill, it often disfigured or blinded many survivors. When an epidemic…
On March 27, 1905, aeronautical engineer Elizabeth Muriel Gregory “Elsie” MacGill was born in Vancouver, British Columbia. Attracted first to the red-hot field of radio, she became the first woman electrical engineering graduate from the University of Toronto. Working her first job at the…