Hanaoka Seishu

A stamp depicting the image of Hanaoka Seishu.

Hanaoka Seishu (1760-1835), Japanese physician and pioneer of anesthetic surgery. Hanaoka studied traditional Sino-Japanese medicine, as well as what was then known about Western surgery in Japan. For over two decades he experimented with various drugs. Ultimately he created mafutsusan, an anesthetic compound made from six traditional plant-based drugs, including the alkaloids aconite (from the monkshood plant) and datura (from jimsonweed). In 1805, using mafutsusan as an anesthetic, Hanaoka removed a tumor during breast cancer surgery. This was the world's first recorded successful surgical operation with anesthesia. Later, Hanaoka used the drug for other surgical operations, developing techniques for bladder stone removal and for amputation. Hanaoka attracted many students, and his surgical techniques became known as the Hanaoka method.

Galen

Galen, the most outstanding physician of antiquity after Hippocrates. His anatomical studies on animals and observations of how the human body functions dominated medical theory and practice for 1400 years. Galen was born of Greek parents in Pergamum, Asia Minor, which was then part of the Roman Empire. A shrine to the healing god Asclepius was located in Pergamum, and there young Galen observed how the medical techniques of the time were used to treat the ill or wounded. He received his formal medical training in nearby Smyrna and then traveled widely, gaining more medical knowledge. About 161 he settled in Rome, where he became renowned for his skill as a physician, his animal dissections, and his public lectures. About 169, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius appointed Galen as the physician to his son Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus. Most of Galen's later life was probably spent in Rome.

Galen dissected many animals, particularly goats, pigs, and monkeys, to demonstrate how different muscles are controlled at different levels of the spinal cord. He noted the functions of the kidney and bladder and identified seven pairs of cranial nerves. He also showed that the brain controls the voice. Galen showed that arteries carry blood, disproving the 400-year-old belief that arteries carry air. Galen also described the valves of the heart and noted the structural differences between arteries and veins, but fell short of conceiving that the blood circulates. Instead, he held the erroneous belief that the liver is the central organ of the vascular system, and that blood moves from the liver to the periphery of the body to form flesh.

Galen was also highly praised in his time as a philosopher. In his treatise On the Uses of the Parts of the Body of Man he closely followed the view of the Greek philosopher Aristotle that nothing in nature is superfluous. Galen's principal contribution to philosophic thought was the concept that God's purposes can be understood by examining nature.

Galen's observations in anatomy remained his most enduring contribution. His medical writings were translated by 9th-century Arab thinkers and became highly esteemed by medical humanists of Renaissance Europe. Galen produced about 500 tracts on medicine, philosophy, and ethics, many of which have survived in translated form.

Gabriello Fallopio

Gabriello Fallopio (1523?-1562), also known as Gabriello Fallopio and Gabriel Fallopius, Italian anatomist, physician, botanist, and surgeon. Born in Modena, Fallopio studied medicine at the University of Ferrara, and after receiving his degree he worked and studied at various European medical schools. Fallopio became professor of anatomy at Ferrara in 1548 and professor of surgery and anatomy at the University of Pisa about a year later. In 1551 Cosimo I dè Medici, grand duke of Tuscany, called him to a similar post at Pisa to succeed Andreas Vesalius, the Belgian anatomist. There he also held the chair of botany and materia medica and was superintendent of the botanical gardens.

Fallopio's work dealt primarily with cranial anatomy and he added considerably to the knowledge of the ear. He was the first to use the ear speculum instrument to diagnose diseases of the ear and the first to show the connection between the mastoid, a part of the skull that houses the ear, and the middle ear.

His discoveries included the sphenoidal sinuses; the chorda tympani; the canal through which the facial nerve passes after it leaves the auditory, called the Fallopian aqueduct; and the ducts leading from the ovaries to the uterus known as the fallopian tubes. He also named the hard palate, the soft palate, the placenta, and the vagina. 

In addition to his work as a surgeon and educator, Fallopio was also a distinguished botanist, and he made important contributions to practical medicine. He was a strong opponent and vocal critic of the theories of Galen, the Greek physician who proposed that the liver is the central organ of the vascular system. His writings included treatises on tumors, ulcers, surgery, the composition of drugs, simple purgatives, thermal waters and baths, a commentary on Wounds in the Head by the Greek physician Hippocrates, and a study on syphilis, De morbo gallico (1564). His best known work was Observationes anatomicae (1561), and his complete works appeared for the first time in Venice in 1584.

Forestry

Forestry is the art and science of managing forests, tree plantations, and related natural resources. The main goal of forestry is to create and implement systems that allow forests to continue a sustainable continuation of environmental supplies and services. The challenge of forestry is to create systems that are socially accepted while sustaining the resource and any other resources that might be affected.

Silviculture, a related science, involves the growing and tending of trees and forests. Modern forestry generally embraces a broad range of concerns, including assisting forests to provide timber as raw material for wood products, wildlife habitat, natural water quality management, recreation, landscape and community protection, employment, aesthetically appealing landscapes, biodiversity management, watershed management, erosion control, and preserving forests as 'sinks' for atmospheric carbon dioxide. A practitioner of forestry is known as a forester.

Forest ecosystems have come to be seen as the most important component of the biosphere, and forestry has emerged as a vital field of science, applied art, and technology.

Lorentz contraction

Lorentz contraction (lôr`ĕnts), in physics, contraction or foreshortening of a moving body in the direction of its motion, proposed by H. A. Lorentz on theoretical grounds and based on an earlier suggestion by G. F. Fitzgerald; it is sometimes called the Fitzgerald, or Lorentz-Fitzgerald, contraction. The Lorentz contraction hypothesis was put forward in an attempt to explain the negative result of the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 designed to demonstrate the earth's absolute motion through space (see ether; relativity). The hypothesis held that any material body is contracted in the direction of its motion by a factor 1−v²/c², where v is the velocity of the body and c is the velocity of light. Although the Lorentz contraction did not succeed entirely in reconciling the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment with classical theory, it did serve as the basis for the mathematics of Einstein's theory of relativity. The equations used in relativity theory to change from a coordinate system, or frame of reference, in which the observer is at rest to a second system that is moving at constant velocity with respect to the first system are known as the Lorentz transformation. The Lorentz transformation will result in a stationary observer recording an effect equivalent to the Lorentz contraction when observing an object in uniform motion relative to his system of coordinates. Einstein showed, however, that this effect is due not to the actual deformation of the body in question, as Lorentz had originally supposed, but to a change in the way space and time are measured.