Africa the mother of Medicine

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In 1879, for example, one British traveller, R.W. Felkin, witnessed cesarean section performed by Ugandans. The healer used banana wine to semi-intoxicate the woman and to cleanse his hands and her abdomen prior to surgery. He used a midline incision and applied cautery to minimize hemorrhaging. He massaged the uterus to make it contract but did not suture it; the abdominal wound was pinned with iron needles and dressed with a paste prepared from roots. The patient recovered well, and Felkin concluded that this technique was well-developed and had clearly been employed for a long time. Similar reports come from Rwanda, where botanical preparations were also used to anesthetize the patient and promote wound healing.
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/cesarean/part2.html

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Penicillin - Antibiotics in ancient Nubia

A Chemical analysis of the bones of ancient Nubians shows that they were regularly consuming tetracycline, most likely in their beer. The finding is the strongest evidence yet that the art of making antibiotics, which officially dates to the discovery of penicillin in 1928, was common practice nearly 2,000 years ago.
The research, led by Emory anthropologist George Armelagos and medicinal chemist Mark Nelson of Paratek Pharmaceuticals, Inc., is published in theAmerican Journal of Physical Anthropology."We tend to associate drugs that cure diseases with modern medicine," Armelagos says. "But it's becoming increasingly clear that this prehistoric population was using empirical evidence to develop therapeutic agents. I have no doubt that they knew what they were doing."
Armelagos is a bioarcheologist and an expert on prehistoric and ancient diets. In 1980, he discovered what appeared to be traces of tetracycline in human bones from Nubia dated between A.D. 350 and 550, populations that left no written record. The ancient Nubian kingdom was located in present-day Sudan, south of ancient Egypt.
Armelagos and his fellow researchers later tied the source of the antibiotic to the Nubian beer. The grain used to make the fermented gruel contained the soil bacteria streptomyces, which produces tetracycline. A key question was whether only occasional batches of the ancient beer contained tetracycline, which would indicate accidental contamination with the bacteria.
Nelson, a leading expert in tetracycline and other antibiotics, became interested in the project after hearing Armelagos speak at a conference. "I told him to send me some mummy bones, because I had the tools and the expertise to extract the tetracycline," Nelson says. "It's a nasty and dangerous process. I had to dissolve the bones in hydrogen fluoride, the most dangerous acid on the planet."
The results stunned Nelson. "The bones of these ancient people were saturated with tetracycline, showing that they had been taking it for a long time," he says. "I'm convinced that they had the science of fermentation under control and were purposely producing the drug."
(The yellow film in the flask above shows tetracycline residue from dissolved bones.)
Even the tibia and skull belonging to a 4-year-old were full of tetracycline, suggesting that they were giving high doses to the child to try and cure him of illness, Nelson says.
The first of the modern day tetracyclines was discovered in 1948. It was given the name auereomycin, after the Latin word "aerous," which means containing gold. "Streptomyces produce a golden colony of bacteria, and if it was floating on a batch of beer, it must have look pretty impressive to ancient people who revered gold," Nelson theorizes.
The ancient Egyptians and Jordanians used beer to treat gum disease and other ailments, Armelagos says, adding that the complex art of fermenting antibiotics was probably widespread in ancient times, and handed down through generations.
The chemical confirmation of tetracycline in ancient bones is not the end of the story for Armelagos. He remains enthused after more than three decades on the project. "This opens up a whole new area of research," he says. "Now we're going to compare the amount of tetracycline in the bones, and bone formation over time, to determine the dosage that the ancient Nubians were getting."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100902094246.htm

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Onesimus (fl. 1706 - 1717), slave and medical pioneer, was born in the late seventeenth century, probably in Africa, although the precise date and place of his birth are unknown. He first appears in the historical record in the diary of Cotton Mather, a prominent New England theologian and minister of Boston’s Old North Church. Reverend Mather notes in a diary entry for 13 December 1706 that members of his congregation purchased for him “a very likely Slave; a young Man who is a Negro of a promising aspect of temper” (Mather, vol. 1, 579). Mather named him Onesimus, after a biblical slave who escaped from his master, an early Christian named Philemon.

...in 1721 Cotton Mather used information he had learned five years earlier from his former slave to combat a devastating smallpox epidemic that was then sweeping Boston. In a 1716 letter to the Royal Society of London, Mather proposed “ye Method of Inoculation” as the best means of curing smallpox and noted that he had learned of this process from

“my Negro-Man Onesimus, who is a pretty Intelligent Fellow” (Winslow, 33). Onesimus explained that he had
undergone an Operation, which had given him something of ye Small-Pox, and would forever preserve him from it, adding, That it was often used among [Africans] and whoever had ye Courage to use it, was forever free from ye Fear of the Contagion. He described ye Operation to me, and showed me in his Arm ye Scar.” (Winslow, 33)

Reports of similar practices in Turkey further persuaded Mather to mount a public inoculation campaign. Most white doctors rejected this process of deliberately infecting a person with smallpox--now called variolation--in part because of their misgivings about African medical knowledge. Public and medical opinion in Boston was strongly against both Mather and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, the only doctor in town willing to perform inoculations; one opponent even threw a grenade into Mather’s home. A survey of the nearly six thousand people who contracted smallpox between 1721 and 1723 found, however, that Onesimus, Mather, and Boylston had been right. Only 2 percent of the six hundred Bostonians inoculated against smallpox died, while 14 percent of those who caught the disease but were not inoculated succumbed to the illness.

It is unclear when or how Onesimus died, but his legacy is unambiguous. His knowledge of variolation gives the lie to one justification for enslaving Africans, namely, white Europeans’ alleged superiority in medicine, science, and technology. This bias made the smallpox epidemic of 1721 more deadly than it need have been. Bostonians and other Americans nonetheless adopted the African practice of inoculation in future smallpox outbreaks, and variolation remained the most effective means of treating the disease until the development of vaccination by Edward Jenner in 1796.

http://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/dubois/projects/african-american-national-biography/sample-entries/onesimus-fl-1706-1717-slave-and

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More here: http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/10/17/how-african-slave-helped-boston-fight-smallpox/XFhsMMvTGCeV62YP0XhhZI/story.html

Mather had come close to choosing a career in medicine, and devoured the scientific publications of the Royal Society in London. As the society began to turn its attention to inoculation practices around the world, Mather realized that he had an extraordinary expert living in his household. Onesimus was a “pretty Intelligent Fellow,” it had become clear to him. When asked if he’d ever had smallpox, Onesimus answered “Yes and No,” explaining that he had been inoculated with a small amount of smallpox, which had left him immune to the disease. Fascinated, Mather asked for details, which Onesimus provided, and showed him his scar. We can almost hear Onesimus speaking in Mather’s accounts, for Mather took the unusual step of writing out his words with the African accent included—the key phrase was, “People take Juice of Small-Pox; and Cutty-skin, and Putt in a Drop.”


Excited, he investigated among other Africans in Boston and realized that it was a widespread practice; indeed, a slave could be expected to fetch a higher price with a scar on his arm, indicating that he was immune. Mather sent the Royal Society his own reports from the wilds of America, eager to prove the relevance of Boston (and by extension, Cotton Mather) to the global crusade against infectious disease. His interviews with Onesimus were crucial. In 1716, writing to an English friend, he promised that he would be ready to promote inoculation if smallpox ever visited the city again.

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CONSTANTINE THE AFRICAN

by John H. Lienhard

Click here for audio of Episode 2097.

Today, Constantine the African. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
Salerno was a part of the Kingdom of Sicily, in AD 1060. It'd been under Moslem rule for over a century. That year, even before the Battle of Hastings, the Normans invaded Sicily and conquered it. Now Southern Italy, and especially Salerno, was a great cultural mixing bowl of Mediterranean civilizations. Salerno had already been, and it remained, better defined by its cosmopolitan intellectual energy, than by any ruling group.
Just after the Normans came, a Carthaginian merchant/scholar visited Salerno, Constantine the African, a Moslem fluent in Arabic as well as Greek and Latin. Constantine was a medical-book collector, and Salerno was the best-known European center of medical learning. Constantine saw that Salerno was far behind the Arabs.
So, when he was suspected of practicing magic and exiled from Carthage three years later, he loaded his library on a ship bound for Salerno. It included Arabic translations of lost Greek and Latin medical works -- Hippocrates, Galen, and others. It also included the more advanced treatises of later Arab doctors.
The voyage was marred by a storm that rose up and destroyed many of the books. But Constantine saved a great deal. Then he converted to Christianity and set up shop translating this literature into Latin in the Monastery at Monte Cassino (North of Salerno). Well, maybe translate is not quite the right word. Much of his writing consisted of new books based upon the old works, with ideas moved around and added to.
He's been called a plagiarist, yet what he was doing was no secret. He set out to create a medical literature adapted to bring the West up to speed. Another wrinkle in the plagiarism debate is that he was writing in a region recently retaken from the Moslems by Christians -- a region where it was politically unwise to rub his patron's noses in his Islamic sources.
And he succeeded: In the following century, Salerno became home of what we call the first medical university. And it all came to rest on a voluminous infusion of medical literature (whether translations or original writings) by Constantine the African.
By way of emphasizing the great openness of that intellectual era, another influential medical writer was born in Salerno just about the time Constantine died. This writer produced a body of work called The Trotula. To the best of our knowledge the writer was a woman named Trocta -- an important doctor and teacher whose works, like Constantine's were read and used for centuries.
People speak of a medieval renaissance in those years. It was a time of invention, freedom of ideas, and mental animation -- with cities like Paris and Salerno serving as its centerpieces. And, in the case of Salerno, a major part of its ascendancy was the arrival of an African scholar who looked at the place, and said to himself, these people are backward; something must be done about it.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work.
http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2097.htm