Human health timeline: 1900s

Treatment for rickets

Rickets is a condition that affects bone development in children. It causes the bones to become soft and malformed, which can lead to bone deformities.

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Corneal transplants

A cornea transplant is an operation used to remove all or part of a damaged cornea and replace it with healthy cornea tissue from the eye of a suitable donor.

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Local anaesthetics

At about the same time that nitrous oxide in cylinders replaced the use of chloroform, Koller13 demonstrated that cocaine applied to the eye of a rabbit could induce loss of sensation, thus paving the way for use of cocaine as a local anaesthetic in eye surgery.

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Discovery of vitamin C

Axel Holst and Theodor Frølich, two Norwegian physicians studying shipboard beriberi in the Norwegian fishing fleet, wanted a small test mammal to substitute for the pigeons then used in beriberi research. They fed guinea pigs their test diet of grains and flour, which had earlier produced beriberi in their pigeons, and were surprised when classic scurvy resulted instead.

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