Medical Discovery Timelines

Medical Discovery Timeline 1. Germs:
In 36BC Marcus Terentius Varro discovered that “there are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and there cause serious diseases.”
In Vienna in the late 1840s, Ignaz Semmelwies asked surgeons to wash their hands before operating. For this he was fired from three hospitals and put into a lunatic asylum where an inmate murdered him.
In 1859 Louis Pasteur suggested that germs cause disease. People laughed at him. His smallpox and rabies vaccines took 52 years from first demonstration in 1885. A medical discovery timeline of almost 2,000 years.

Medical Discovery Timeline 2. Blood circulation:
In 1242 Ibn al-Nafis discovered the circulation of blood through the body.
In 1628 William Harvey wrote that blood was pumped from the heart and moved around the body through arteries. He was ridiculed. The medical discovery timeline lag of this idea to gain acceptance was over 400 years.

Medical Discovery Timeline 3. Ether:
Valerius Cordus discovered ether in the 16th century and thought it could help in operations. Nobody else though so until 1846, when the idea finally caught on. 

Medical Discovery Timeline 4. Vitamin C:
In 1535 the French explorer Jacques Cartier's ships were frozen in the ice off the St. Lawrence River. Twenty five crew died of scurvy, and most of the others were pronounced terminal. Friendly Indians showed them the simple remedy - tea made of a local tree bark and needles. Almost all recovered. European doctors dismissed the story.
In 1740 a British expedition of 2,000 men set off on a world exploration. In 1744 1,000 returned. The rest had died of scurvy. A commission finally recommended ships' crew to eat limes (hence our sailors were called limeys). The casualty list of the British Navy alone was over one million sailors since Jacques Cartier had been ignored.

Medical Discovery Timeline 5. Vitamin B:
In the early 1900s, large portions of the American Southeast were decimated by the dread disease of pellagra. Many physicians of the time said that it was a contagious disease and probably caused by a yet to be discovered virus. In 1914 Dr. Joseph Goldberger drank body fluid from pellagrans to prove it wasn't catching and later showed that it could be prevented by eating liver or yeast. But it wasn't until the 1940s that the medical world accepted that pellegra was a vitamin B deficiency. 

Medical Discovery Timeline 6. Nuts:
Notice some big numbers on my timeline of a time lag between medical discovery and acceptance? You ain't seen nothing yet.
On the 6th day of creation God told Adam and Eve: "Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed ... and every tree ... yielding seed; to you it shall be meat" (Genesis 1.29).
In Persia, the surgeon Avicenna (980-1037 A.D.) recommended the use of apricot bitter almond oil in the treatment of cancer tumours.
In 1949, Ernest T. Krebs, Jr. said that cancer is a dietary deficiency disease and eating seven apricot kernels a day not only prevented cancer; it could cure it. He named the active compound laetrile and designated it as Vitamin B17. The establishment refuses to believe that the answer could be so simple.
Seventh Day Adventists follow God’s advice to eat nuts and have 50% fewer tumours than other Americans - it should presumably be 0%, but they also have some bad American habits.
Might nuts be the answer to cancer? Could the time from the 6th day of creation until a date not yet reached turn out to be the biggest medical discovery timeline lag of all?