I woke up this Easter morning thinking about a few years ago when my kids would frantically hunt down treats hidden by the Easter bunny the night before. Those are good memories. By association, crazy as it sounds, I also began to wonder about rabbits and how they regulate their temperature. I also thought how grateful we should be to the rabbit and many of its related furry friends. From a medical perspective, animals have helped immensely in our understanding of how our body works, how it can get sick and how it can be treated. |
In the late 1800's, Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen discovered the x-ray, allowing us to further optimize devices that today help us see all sorts of internal body structures.
One hundred years before the discovery of the x-ray, Edward Jenner rubs pus from a dairymaid's cowpox lesion into scratches on the arm of his gardener's 8-year-old son. Six weeks later he exposes the boy to smallpox. The gardener's son remains healthy. Jenner created the word 'vaccine' from the Latin vacca for cow. Vaccines are subsequently discovered for disease such as cholera, anthrax, rabies, typhoid fever, plague, diphtheria, tuberculosis, pertussis, influenza, measles, rubella and many more. More recently for lyme disease and in the future perhaps for HIV. |