Category Archives: medical research

Reconstructing an Early Modern Panacea

Posted on by | Leave a comment

For nearly two millennia, Theriac—a panacea developed in antiquity—was produced and praised across Europe. By the 19th century, it was dismissed as quackery. Today it has been reconstructed and will soon be tested. Danuta Raj explains.

In recent years, historical reconstruction has emerged as an innovative approach in research, bridging traditional historiography with hands-on practices from craftsmanship and the sciences. This interdisciplinary method allows scholars to re-examine and reinterpret primary sources through ‘practice’ and direct experience. By engaging with the material culture of the past—smelling, touching, and even tasting—researchers gain insights into historical realities that might otherwise remain obscure.

Making Theriac

Historical reconstructions, especially those involving the recreation of ancient medicines, are truly fascinating. They expose researchers to sensory factors not usually included in texts: pungent smells, unusual textures and sometimes, let’s be honest, less-than-pleasant tastes. These experiences are often far from what we’re accustomed to, so first encounters can be… surprising, to say the least!

Today, Theriac is making a return in academic circles, no longer as a highly valued medicine but rather as a model for investigating historical medical and apothecary practices. Thanks to collaborations between historians and pharmacists, ancient formulations emerge again after centuries of oblivion.

Guldenius recipe for Theriac

Our historical-pharmaceutical team comprises four people from three universities. We call ourselves The Pracademics. The recipe we worked on has its own intriguing history. In 1630, in Toruń, Poland, amidst plague outbreaks, an apothecary named Paul Guldenius prepared a batch of Theriac to help the citizens survive the epidemic. He was granted official permission by authorities in Wittenberg, the best-known approval centre for that part of Europe. The recipe was preserved in municipal documents, allowing us, centuries later, to attempt a reconstruction of an authentically used version.

Making Theriac

Our first step was translating the recipe to stay as true as possible to the original craft. Then came the small task of gathering 71 ingredients from Europe, Africa, and Asia. Some, like St John’s wort or ginger, are still valued in medicine today. Others are so obsolete that obtaining them became an adventure in itself. Let’s just say that ordering obscure materials from the far corners of the internet led to my credit card details being stolen. Twice.

The preparation took a week of grinding and two days of mixing. We even used historical utensils from the pharmacy museum because no contemporary laboratory equipment quite fit the bill. Adjusting a 17th century recipe to a 21st century setting was truly challenging but immensely enjoyable. It’s great fun to watch when a text, previously seen as straightforward, turns out to be problematic. What exactly does “reasonably sticky” mean in practical terms?

At the end, we were rewarded with a blackish, sticky residue with a tar-like smell, matching descriptions of freshly prepared Theriac. Prepared in early spring 2024, our Theriac is currently maturing and will be ready in early 2025. Once matured, the Theriac will be subjected to laboratory analyses, which will tell even more about this intriguing medicine.

The 2024 conference, “Historical Reconstructions: Touching the Past” in Wrocław, Poland. (text in English) provided an exciting platform for interdisciplinary discussion. We plan to make this event regular, so if you’re intrigued by delving hands-on into history, stay tuned for the next edition!

Danuta Raj is a pharmacist working on historical reconstructions, and—more conventionally—phytochemistry of medicinal plants. Other team members include Jakub Węglorz, Katarzyna Pękacka-Falkowska, both historians, and Maciej Włodarczyk, a pharmacist.

Further reading

  1. Raj D., Pękacka-Falkowska K., Włodarczyk M., Węglorz J.; The real Theriac – panacea, poisonous drug or quackery?, J. Ethnopharmacol., 2021, Vol. 281, nr 114535; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jep.2021.114535
  2. Ahnfelt N. O., Fors H., Wendin K.; Making and taking theriac: an experimental and sensory approach to the history of medicine. BJHS Themes, 2022, Vol. 7, 1-24; DOI: 10.1017/bjt.2022.6
  3. Di Gennaro Splendore B., The State Drug. Theriac, Pharmacy, and Politics in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2025)

“The forgotten man of Africa”

Posted on by | 1 Comment

Standing on the deck of the exploring vessel Pleiad in July 1854, Edinburgh trained doctor William Balfour Baikie was about to lead an expedition into the interior of Africa to test the validity of a cure for malaria, writes Wendell McConnaha.

B&W photo of bearded man, formally dress, 19th century

William Faulkner Baikie at the time of his first voyage, Orkney Library

Baikie had been seconded to the mission sponsored by the merchant Macgregor Laird and the Royal Geographical Society, which would leave from Fernando Po, an island in Equatorial Guinea, now called Bioko. Baikie was initially to serve as naturalist and assistant surgeon, but a series of events had elevated him to the expedition’s leader.

For years, men had attempted to explore the path of this great river and, although they encountered natural barriers and local hostility, it was malaria that threatened to cut short the life of any European who ventured inland, and the Bight of Benin was referred to as the Whiteman’s Grave. As the anonymous rhyme said: “Beware and take care of the Bight of Benin. There’s one comes out for forty goes in.”

Although the death rate among Europeans traveling into the interior in this part of Africa often exceeded 70 percent, the focus up to the time of Baikie’s voyage was curing the disease rather than looking for a prevention, and even the preferred method for treating those contracting the disease remained in doubt.

Sailed 19th century exploring vessel
The exploring vessel Pleaid, Frank Cass & Co.

As early as 1630, Jesuit Brothers working in Peru had observed the Quechua Indians using bark from the cinchona tree in treating malaria. The bark was collected, dried, ground into a fine powder and mixed with water to form a strong tea. The treatment had quickly been adopted by the crews of slave ships traveling between Europe, Africa and South America. Royal Naval surgeons soon began utilizing the treatment for sailors who had contracted malarial fever. In 1817, two French chemists isolated the crystals within the bark naming their extract quinine. However, bloodletting and purgatives remained the standard methods of treating malaria within the general medical establishment.

Not just treating

In 1847 Dr Alexander Bryson, an Assistant Surgeon in the West Africa Squadron, presented the Admiralty with a report in which he announced the use of quinine had cut the mortality rate in half, and proposed quinine might also be used as a prophylactic. Baikie was convinced that Bryson was correct in his assumption.  Although the purpose of his mission was to explore the Niger and Benue rivers and establish trading sites, Baikie would also use his command position to conduct the first clinical trial testing Bryson’s theory.

Each crew member would be given two-thirds of a glass of wine containing five grains of quinine each morning and a second glass before retiring in the evening. Baikie was staking his reputation and the lives of those under his command on this untested theory. If he were correct, the centre of Africa would be opened to outside exploration.  If wrong, he could lose his life and the lives of all those entrusted to him.

On 7 November the Pleiad returned to Fernando Po. They had been on the river for 118 days, explored and charted over 600 miles, and established a series of trading sites. Most importantly, for the first time in the history of African exploration, they had completed the mission without the loss of a single life.

Baikie travelled to England, published the journal of his exploring voyage and then returned to the Niger, where he spent his last five years living alone among the Igbo. His enlightened approach in working with the indigenous people earned him such respect that to this day the Igbo word for “white man” is “Beke.” Baikie died at age 39 of tropical fever. Revered in Africa, his role in establishing a prevention for malaria is largely forgotten by the rest of the world.

Memorial to William Balfour Baikie
Memorial tomb to William Balfour Baikie (1825-1864),
St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall, Orkney Library and Archives

Professor Wendell McConnaha is a retired university professor in education who has worked around the world. When in Nigeria, he first learned of William Baikie and resolved to write his story, which he has now done in The King of Lokoja: William Balfour Baikie the Forgotten Man of Africa. 

References and further reading

Christopher Lloyd, The Search for the Niger, (London, Collins, 1973), pp. 21-22

C. M. Posser and G. W. Bruyn, An illustrated history of malaria, (New York, NY:

Alexander Bryson, Report on the Climate and Principal Diseases of the African Station, Printed by order of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, (London, W. Clowes and Sons, 1847)

How a pregnancy test saved the lives of a family in Nazi times

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Susanne Krejsa MacManus explains how pregnancy testing saved the life of a refugee woman biochemist and her family in the run-up to World War II.

In the 1930s, the Institute of Animal Genetics at Edinburgh University was the only UK laboratory that ran pregnancy tests. Although the Aschheim-Zondek method invented in Berlin in the late 1920s had been seen as a great step forward, the result took more than 100 hours. It also required testing on female mice. No wonder that the scientific community was excited by a new method that took four hours.

Austrian biochemist Regina Kapeller-Adler had developed a method for detecting the amino acid histidine in the urine of pregnant women in 1933. As the Vienna Daily reported on 30 May 1933 under the heading “Eine neue Schwangerschafts-Reaktion” (a new pregnancy test): “The great advantage of this new chemical pregnancy test lies in the fact that it can be carried out in four hours, whereas the tool that has been most ideal for early diagnostics up until now […] requires a hundred hours until it can be read.”

The second advantage was that it employed a chemical instead of a biological reaction, and no mice had to be killed.

After Hitler occupied Austria (Anschluss) in March 1938, Regina, her medical doctor husband Ernst Adler and their young daughter Liselotte were in severe danger because they were Jewish. The Nazis persecuted Ernst Adler, and he escaped deportation to the Dachau concentration camp only at the very last moment. Regina lost her post at the Institute of Medical Chemistry at the University of Vienna; before that, she had also not been able to get her postdoctoral qualification – as a woman and a Jew.

When Francis Crew, Professor of Genetics at Edinburgh University, learned about the danger Regina and her family were in, he offered her a job in his laboratory, with support of The Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (formed in 1933 in help refugee scientists and other academics).

There was still a problem to be solved: Britain only permitted entry for foreigners if there was a mandatory “guarantor” to vouch for them. Fortunately, Napoleon and Henrietta Ryder deposited the considerable amount of £50 for the Adler family whom they did not know personally, and little is known about this couple. Regina together with husband and daughter could leave Austria, even taking their furniture and his medical equipment with them.

In Britain

In January 1939, they reached London and journeyed on to Edinburgh. Within two months of their arrival in Scotland, she was demonstrating her pregnancy test at the Eleventh British Congress of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. After the German invasion of Norway in 1940, most female foreign citizens were ordered to leave the east coast of Britain. Regina unusually received permission to remain in Edinburgh to continue her research since it was categorised as being of national importance. Ernst was interned on the Isle of Man from May to September 1940. After his release and re-qualification, he started a medical practice in Edinburgh in 1942.

In July 1941, Regina received her Doctor of Science degree from Edinburgh University. From the end of the war, she spent fruitful years in the Pharmacology Department of the university, and in 1952 she got her first university position as lecturer in the Department of Clinical Chemistry. From that time, she meticulously trained and encouraged a series of Ph.D. students, to whom she acted as mentor.

Regina gained recognition, grants and awards. She was internationally acclaimed as a major authority on histamine, which is made in the body and derived from histidine, and gallantly titled “The Histamine Queen” by her exclusively male colleagues in the field, an allusion to her forename. In June 1973, she was presented with the University of Vienna’s Golden Honorary Diploma. She died in Edinburgh on 31 July 1991 at the age of 91.

Kapeller-Adler’s method was an important step towards the modern pregnancy test, but it was not yet the final breakthrough. Not fully reliable on its own, it was used as an additional test or pre-test when standard tests did not give a clear yes-or-no answer.  Today, pregnancy tests detect the hormone human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), which starts to be produced around 6 days after fertilisation. The results are available in a few minutes.

Acknowledgement and references

Information from this blog came direct from Liselotte Adler-Kastner, daughter of Regina Kappler-Adler and Ernst Adler. In addition, it refers to two articles that she wrote about her parents in “Visa to Freedom 1939 thanks to a Pregnancy Test”, Edinburgh Star 62, March 2009, 9-11, and “From personae non gratae in Vienna 1938 to respected citizens of Edinburgh: a vignette of my parents Dr Ernst Adler and Dr Regina Kapeller-Adler”, Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift (1998) 110/4-5: 174-180 (Viennese Clinical Weekly)

Further reading:

Interview with Liselotte Adler-Kastner at Refugee Voices.

Museum of Contraception and Abortion (MUVS)

Susanne Krejsa MacManus is an independent journalist, author and archivist in Vienna. She does research for the Museum of Contraception and Abortion (MUVS). Thanks go to Liselotte Adler-Kastner, Regina’s daughter.

 

 

Control and the therapeutic trial: the influence of insulin

Posted on by | Leave a comment

How do we decide whether a drug, or other treatment, actually works? Martin Edwards describes the rhetorical strategy adopted by the Medical Research Council to establish its authority.

Patients’ variations in response to disease and treatment can render it fiendishly difficult to know whether a therapy is benefitting a particular individual. For centuries, the gold standard was the assessment of a wise and experienced clinician but during the first half of the twentieth century, new methodologies arising from the laboratory, hospital and statistical theory challenged this traditional model.

The stakes were high, no less than the moral authority to adjudicate how the therapeutic efficacy should properly be ascertained. Between the wars, the debate in Britain was frequently vitriolic – particularly between the Royal College of Physicians, which prioritised clinical acumen, and the Medical Research Council (MRC) which advocated newer methodologies.

The University of Toronto in 1921 granted British patent rights over insulin to the MRC and thus offered the MRC control, not only over insulin manufacture and supply, but also how to assess its effects and proper usage.

In fact, the MRC’s approach to testing was, as with other drugs at that time, highly eclectic; it sent samples of insulin to trusted clinicians in prestigious hospitals without any protocol or scheme for investigation – the clinicians were simply asked to report their experiences with the drug.

An unanticipated consequence of the MRC’s control of insulin supply was that it was on the receiving end of public clamour for the drug. Heartrending letters to the MRC described young people, typically in their teens or early twenties, dying slowly and horribly from diabetes, and pleaded for supplies of life-saving insulin.

Patients even turned up at the MRC, supported by loved ones. Landsborough Thomson, MRC Council Secretary, recalled the MRC administration being swamped by these requests and unable to fulfil its normal functions.

Reserved for controlled studies

In response, the MRC under the direction of its chairman Walter Morley Fletcher adopted a standard response to such requests, stressing that insulin was a new drug which needed to be reserved for ‘controlled studies’. The meaning of ‘controlled’ was not defined nor did it refer to the presence of a comparison group – none of the MRC insulin trials used one – but rather vaguely implied proper conduct, regulation and scrutiny.

So successful was this rhetorical strategy that the MRC repeated it when restricting supplies of penicillin in the 1930s and streptomycin and influenza vaccine in the 1940s. In each case, it stated that the drug should be reserved for ‘controlled trials’.

Control is a powerful word with implications of authority, power, regulation and order. Without defining it, the MRC appended the word to their own studies in the interwar years, using it as a rhetorical device in the battle for authority to adjudicate therapeutic efficacy.

By the time the MRC’s trial of streptomycin in tuberculosis – reckoned by many trial historians to be the first randomised controlled trial – was published in 1948, the MRC had successfully co-opted the word as applying exclusively to its own studies. It offered the streptomycin trial as an exemplar of how therapeutic trials should be conducted, describing the methodology as ‘the controlled trial’. By then, ‘controlled’ referred technically to the presence of a control group, though the other powerful associations of the word continued to resonate.

We have depended on the ‘controlled trial’ ever since. The MRC’s adoption of the potent word ‘control’ arguably began with insulin. Had it not been for MRC control of British insulin supply, might we simply refer nowadays to a ‘randomised trial’?

This text is an abstract of a talk given to a session of the Apothecaries’ History of Medicine Fellows 8/12/2021 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the discovery of insulin.

References/further reading:

  1. A Landsborough Thomson, Half a Century of Medical Research vol. 2: The Programme of the Medical Research Council (UK) (London: HMSO 1975) pp 40, 230
  2. Liebenau, ‘The MRC and the Pharmaceutical Industry: The Model of Insulin’, in J, Austoker and L. Bryder (eds), Historical Perspectives on the Role of the MRC (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) 163-80
  3. Edwards, Control and the Therapeutic Trial: Rhetoric and Experimentation in Britain 1918-48 (Amsterdam: Rodopi Publishing, 2007)

Jenner, Fewster and Jesty

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Jenner vaccinating (Gillray) – Courtesy Wellcome Images

On the 14th May 1796 Edward Jenner carried out the first stage of his now famous vaccination experiment and inoculated a young boy named James Phipps with cowpox. To this day Jenner’s name is associated with the discovery of vaccination as a concept, and the worldwide eradication of smallpox. However, there were others who helped light the path to Jenner’s discovery, and even carried out that same experiment decades before Jenner.

Vaccination could not have happened without the development of variolation; the process of inoculating healthy individuals with smallpox matter in order to confer immunity against the disease. It was based on the observations that a primary attack of smallpox often provided a degree of immunity against contracting the disease again in the future. It was introduced to Britain in the early eighteenth century by Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu, who had come across the concept of ‘smallpox parties’ whilst living in Turkey. Following the successful variolation of her own son, she also had her daughter inoculated with smallpox matter in 1721 by the surgeon Charles Maitland. Others soon followed suit, including a royal variolation when George II had his two daughters inoculated with smallpox, at the request of his wife Caroline, Princess of Wales.

The concept gradually spread across the country, but it was not until it reached the county of Suffolk and the ears of a young surgeon named Robert Sutton, that it truly took off. Sutton advertised variolation as a service, including bed and board with the added incentive of ‘tea, wine, fish and fowl’ all for a monthly fee. Gradually inoculation houses started to appear across the country, inspired by the likes of Sutton and his business enterprise.

It was at one of these inoculation houses that in 1768 John Fewster, a Gloucestershire surgeon and apothecary, recognised that a great number of patients could not be infected with smallpox. On enquiry he discovered that they had all previously been infected with cowpox. He made note of this and communicated it to a small medical society of which he as a member at the time. It just so happened that Edward Jenner was also present at this society meeting, as a young apprentice to another local surgeon named Daniel Ludlow. Fewster was a strong supporter of the Suttonian method of variolation and he did not recognise the importance or see the need at the time for the development of inoculation with cowpox.

It would be wrong to talk about the history of vaccination without mentioning Benjamin Jesty (1736-1816), a dairy farmer from Yetminster, in Dorset. Not only did he recognise the protective effect that cowpox had over smallpox, but he also went so far as to vaccinate his wife and children with cowpox in 1774, at least twenty years prior to Jenner’s famous experiment. Furthermore he tested his vaccination trial in 1789 when his two sons were variolated by their local doctor and they did not go on to exhibit any signs of a reaction. Jesty unfortunately did not go on to publish his results, and perhaps due to the public outrage that ensued when the locals discovered that he had inoculated his family with animal matter, did not go out of his way to publicise them either. However, his experiment did not go unrecognised, and he was invited to attend George Pearson’s Original Vaccine Pock Institute in 1805. The physicians at that institute decided that Jesty’s experiment had pre-empted Jenner’s, and they awarded him with a testimonial scroll stating just this.

It is evident that the history of vaccination is more complex than the well-known story of Jenner, the milkmaid and the cow. The concept of cowpox being protective against smallpox was reportedly widely known throughout the dairy country in England and across the continent in Germany. However, it cannot be disputed that Jenner was the only one to make this fact publicly known and to recognise the importance that this discovery could have in the fight against smallpox. It was his determination and dedication to the subject which subsequently led to the World Health Organisation declaring the eradication of smallpox on 8th May 1980.

More can be discovered about this fascinating subject by paying a visit to Dr Jenner’s House, Museum and Garden in Berkeley, Gloucestershire. https://jennermuseum.com/

Roy Porter, ‘The Prevention of Smallpox’, in The Greatest Benefit to Mankind. A Medical History from Antiquity to the Present.(London: HarperCollins, 1999) 275-6

S.L. Kotar and J.E. Gessler, Smallpox: A History (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2013),18

Robert Jesty and Gareth Williams, ‘Who invented vaccination’, Malta Medical Journal, 23, 2 (2011) 29-32

Lydia Thurston and Gareth Williams, ‘An examination of John Fewster’s role in the discovery of smallpox vaccination’, J R Coll Physicians Edinb,45 (2015) 173-179

Lydia Thurston