The Vaccine Act of 1813 was an Act of the Twelfth Congress of the United States to encourage vaccination against smallpox. It was passed  February 27, 1813.  On the back of a 1821 outbreak of smallpox in North Carolina, the act was repealed May 4, 1822 handing the authority to regulate vaccines back to the states.  This Act was the first federal law in America concerning consumer protection and pharmaceuticals. [1, 2]

In 1811 the city of New York purchases Kips Bay farm and constructs a new almshouse, which becomes known as the Bellevue Establishment, the hospital facility opens on April 29, 1816.  Two years later in 1818 it is the first hospital that requires a qualified physician to pronounce death. [1]

Bellevue Hospital lays claim to being the oldest hospital in the US as it traces back to March 31, 1736, when on the present site of City Hall, the Almshouse Hospital was established.  It started as the “Publick Workhouse and House of Correction of the City of New York”. 

Dutch immigrant, Dr. Johannes van Beuren, “through the influence of the governor of the colony” was appointed as the first physician, he stayed there until his death in 1755.  His son Dr Beekman van Beuren who took over in 1765 until 1776, “is credited with the introduction of inoculation for smallpox in the public institutions of the city”.  van Beuran’s are ancestors to the 8th President the of the U.S.

In 1825 “Bellevue Hospital” officially gets it’s name by the Common Council of NYC. “In a medical staff reorganization, the office of visiting physician is abolished, and the position of ‘resident’ physician is created”. In 1847, the hospital is separated from the Almshouse Authority. A board of visiting physicians and surgeons takes charge and a permanent Medical Board is created, a medical and a surgical division are also formed.  This happens the same year the American Medical Association is established.

On March 2, 1849 the operating theatre and clinical lecture room of the hospital was formally opened and “dedicated to the united interests of science and humanity”. That day in the amphitheatre, to “give a practical illustration” of the teaching facility, Dr. William van Beuren performed a the first public clinic, performing a “lithotomy” (removal of bladder stone) on a 67 year old man who was anaesthetised by chloroform and ether.  Eight days later “Dr. Van Buren ampulated the arm of a man whose wrist and hand had been rendered useless, and a source of constant irritation by phlegmonous erysipelas” a bacterial inflammation, so they cut it off and solved the problem! [2]

Bellevue  claims many medical historical firsts, one being the recipient of Andrew Carnegie’s, first public gift of $50,000 in 1884.  Carnegie’s Foundation funded The Flexner Report!

“In 1830, homoeopathy was introduced in England by the noble family of Shrewsbury, who had become acquainted with it during their travels on the Continent. Soon after Lady Shrewsbury was married to the Italian prince, Doria Pamphili, who was followed to England by his body physician, the homoeopath Dr. De Romano. He opened a clinique on the family estate ” Alton Tower,” in Derbyshire, and was assisted by Drs. Daniellsand Roch.

In February, 1830, they were mentioned — not in the most Mattering terms — by the British and Foreign Review, (Forbes) but in 1839 that Journal had very much changed its tone, because meantime, the Queen Dowager Adelaide, after having been given up by her allopathic physicians, was saved… by Dr. Stapf, [Johann Ernst Stapf] an eminent homeopathic physician in Naumburg, who had been expressly sent for to Germany [in 1835]. This cure opened the mansions of nobility to the new system, and gained many friends for it.”  Wikipedea makes no mention of this “cure”. [1, 2]

Dr. Frederick Hervey Foster Quin (1799-1878) physician to King Leopold of Belgium, set up practice in London in 1832 and was the Founder and President of the British Homoeopathic Society in 1844 and in October 1849 he founded The London Homoeopathic Hospital (later The Royal London).  Quin is said to have introduced Homeopathy to England late 1820s. [3]

Homeopathy has  been popular amongst England’s royalty, including late Queen Elizabeth II and now King Charles III, who in 2019 became patron, which caused an uproar.

By January 8, 1835 the United States national debt reaches $zero for the first time in history, after President Andrew Jackson, keeping his promise pays off remaining debt to the private central bankers. [1]

The British bankers respond in retaliation, causing the financial crisis called the “Panic of 1837“, and Jackson gets blamed!

• The next government bail-out happens in 1907 by JP Morgan, America’s “informal central banker, in the absence of a central bank,” a crisis he created, which leads to the creation of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913.

“Homeopathy began growing in the New World shortly after Dr Johannis Gram, a Dutch homeopath, emigrated to the United States in 1825. It expanded so rapidly that the homeopaths decided to create a national medical society.” [1, 2] Or was  it Danish physician Hans Burch Gram who settled in Boston, New York in 1828! [4]

On April 10, 1844 the American Institute of Homeopathy was formed, thus becoming America’s first national medical society, and was seen as a threat by Allopathic medical men.  This day marks the birthday of the founder of homoeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, a year after his passing.

At the time homeopathy was popular among the “educated and upper classes,” and some hospitals and insane asylums were exclusively ran by homeopaths, most often curing those that allopathic practitioners deemed “incurable“.  Homeopathy was a “significant competitor” to orthodox/allopathic medicine, which at the time still used ‘barbaric’ treatment techniques such as blood letting and use of leeches along with medicines containing toxic mercury, lead, and arsenic!  [3]

The allopathic practitioners tried to attribute homeopathic success [9] to the “over-dosing of patients by the ordinary practice” [?] or “the imaginations of a susceptible class of patients” (the placebo effect), even though the evidence did not concur!

Three years later, on May 7, 1847 orthodox medicine followed suit and organised to formed the American Medical Association  with the purpose of reforming medical training and establishing a code of ethics, and in turn systematically eliminated their competition!

Each organisation referred to each other as quacks!  They did not get along. [5]

Have we “lost” the art of homeopathy?  Was it ahead of its time, that only quantum physics could explain?

At the February 1845 New York State Medical Society meeting, Dr Nathan Smith Davis  “earnestly” recommend that a National Convention of Delegates from Medical Societies and Colleges in the whole Union… convene in the city of New York on the first Thursday in May, in the year 1846…”, the purpose begin to form a national medical association to “raise standards of medical education and of medical ethics”.

At this time medical school was “not exactly rigorous” nor costly. Dr Nathan Smith Davis (N.S.D) wrote about the sub-standard education in the Nov 1845 volume of the NY Journal of Medicine (NYJM) dated Sept. 22, 1845:

“All the young man has to do is gain admittance in the office of some physician, where he can have access to a series of ordinary medical text-books, and see a patient perhaps once a month, with perhaps a hasty post-mortem examination once a year; and in the course of three years thus spent, one or two courses of lectures in the medical colleges, where the whole science of medicine, including anatomy, physiology, chemistry, materia medica, pathology, practice of medicine, medical jurisprudence, surgery, and midwivery are all crowded upon his mind in the short space of sixteen weeks…and his education, both primary and medical, is deemed complete.” [1, 2]

The following year at the May 5, 1846 convention, Dr Davis was elected “chairman of the Committee on Correspondence relative to Medical Education and Examination” to summon the 1847 convention.  The committee visited medical societies and colleges around the country presenting their proposal.  It was because of his involvement Davis became known as the Founder of the AMA.

On May 7, 1847, at The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the National Medical Convention was held, attended by “250 delegates representing more than 40 medical societies and 28 colleges”.  The delegates “approved a resolution to establish the American Medical Association (AMA) and elect Dr. Nathaniel Chapman as its first president.” [3, 4]

The AMA aimed to “establish both uniform educational requirements and a medical code of ethics” [8], which in 1903 became The Principles of Medical Ethics. [5, 6]  They deemed homeopathy as “quack remedies” which at the time were “flourishing’.

Members of the AMA “had great animosity towards homeopathy and decided to purge all local medical societies of physicians who were homeopaths” or had any association with with them. [7]

• In 1883, when Dr Davis was 66, he became the first editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), – the weekly periodical replaced the AMA’s yearly Transactions.
• On April 20, 1905 the AMA formed the Council on Medical Education, Ttey held 4 confernces, 1905, 1906, 1907 , and May 1908, before the Carnegie Foundation in November 1908, led by Abraham Flexner took over the task of reforming medical education in the US.

In 1861, Pasteur published his germ theory [3].  The “Germ theory states that specific microscopic organisms are the cause of specific diseases…. The theory was developed, proved, and popularized in Europe and North America between about 1850 and 1920″,  following closely the manufacture of fine optical microcopes from early 1850‘s.  Microorganisms had already been discovered.

The Spencer [1, 2] microscopes were manufactured in the United States.

The first compound microscope (and telescope) is credited to Zacharias Janssen, the son of Hans Janssen, a spectacle maker from Middleburg, Holland, in the 1590s when Zach would have been a teenager.  At this time eyeglasses were beginning to be popular. Though poor in image quality is a seminal advance in scientific instrumentation and discoveries. [3]

In 1853 “Lord Lyttelton, as a private member, brought in a bill to parliament to make vaccination compulsory in England.  The bill passed through both Houses without opposition, and with hardly any debate except on points of detail”. This became the first compulsory Vaccination Act 1853. [1, 2]

Stunningly the “Act of Parliament of 1853 had no section devoted to the “Definition of Terms”; there was no definition of cowpox or genuine vaccine, an omission all the more remarkable that variolous matter was then being used as vaccine, on the pretext that it had “ passed through the cow. Although a medical dogma was therein established by the State, the doctrine was not formulated.”  The Act was “simply a notorious empirical practice that was established under pains and penalties”, not of any principle of epidemiology or pathology.

“…The vaccinated are safe against smallpox because they, in fact, have had it ”

• In 1853 the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League (ACVL) was formed in London.  By 1860s a national anti-vaccination movement had formed  By 1870s ACVL had 103 branches and up to 200,000 members and sympathizers in Britain alone. “Many became actively involved when their child was injured or killed by a smallpox vaccine. The present-day anti-vaccination movement is no different” [3]

The Vaccination Act of 1840 made variolation the method of inoculating with smallpox (variola), illegal.  Inoculation with the same procedure but instead using cowpox (vaccinia) contaminated pus, the process called vaccination, was legal and under the Poor Law Act was administered free. [?]

The history of the Red Cross begins with an initiative of a man named Henry Dunant (from Geneva, Switzerland) who, with the help of local women, helped care for wounded soldiers at the battle of Solferino in 1859.   Dunant then lobbied political leaders to take more action to protect war victims. His two main ideas were for a treaty that would oblige armies to care of all wounded soldiers and for the creation of national societies that would help the military medical services.” [1]

Dunant put down his ideas in a campaigning book, A Souvenir of Solferino, published in 1862. The Geneva Public Welfare Society formed a working group which first met in February 1863. An international conference with 16 nations convened in October 1863, to formalize the concept of national societies.  National Red Cross Societies formed and the Committee of Five in Geneva eventually became the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

The standard emblem to identify medical personnel on the battlefield as agreed to be a red cross on a white background, the reverse of the Swiss flag.

On August 22, 1864, delegates from a dozen countries signed the first Geneva Convention, the founding text of contemporary international humanitarian laws, this convention made it compulsory for armies to care for all wounded soldiers, whatever side of the battle they were on.

“Dunant died in 1910. By then, in Europe, North and South America, Asia and Africa, the Red Cross and the Geneva Conventions had taken root. Both were to be put to a severe test during the First World War.” [3]

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) was founded in 1919 in Paris in the aftermath of World War I. Originally called the League of Red Cross Societies, we were the brainchild of Henry Davison, the president of the American Red Cross War Committee.  It’s mission to ” improve the health of people in countries that had suffered greatly during the war. It also sought to improve existing Red Cross Societies and promote the creation of new ones around the world.” [2]

“Within months of its creation, the League had launched a campaign to counter a massive typhus epidemic in Eastern Europe. Shortly after, it launched appeals in the wake of the Russian famine of 1921 and the Great Kanto earthquake in Japan in 1923.”  And so begins the coordinatied “war on disease”.

Today Geneva, Switzerland is still the home of international organisations.

In December of 1864 it was documented that a London Life Insurance Company began offering life insurance to Homeopathic patrons at a 10% discounted premium, because they were less likely to die than patrons who relied on Allopathic medicine. The insurance actuaries collected comparitive data that proved “the superiority of Homoeopathic treatment.” [1]

Though as early as 1855 it was reported in British Journal that two life insurance companies that offered “peculiar advantages to insurers who habitually employ homoeopathy for the cure of their maladies” [2]

The mortality under homeopathic treatment was lower, and sometimes substantially lower than for patients under the “regular” medical practice.  Allopathic doctors were taught to ridicule and discount the practice of homeopathy as “quack” treatment, the truth was hidden from them.

Hidden Knowledge series – READ

In 1867, Johns Hopkins, a Baltimore merchant and bachelor, arranged for the incorporation of The Johns Hopkins University and The Johns Hopkins Hospital, and for the appointment of a 12-member board of trustees for each. Hopkins died on Christmas Eve 1873, without seeing the end result, but left $7 million in his estate to be divided equally between the two institutions. It was, at the time, the largest philanthropic bequest in U.S. history. [1, 2]

The land on which The Maryland Hospital stood, was purchased by Johns Hopkins in 1872, just before he died. [4]

It wasn’t until:

• 1889 The Johns Hopkins Hospital opened
• 1893  The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine opened

“Johns Hopkins ushered in a new era marked by rigid entrance requirements for medical students, a vastly upgraded medical school curriculum with emphasis on the scientific method, the incorporation of bedside teaching and laboratory research as part of the instruction, and integration of the School of Medicine with the Hospital through joint appointments.” [3]

Hopkins recruited William H. Welch, William Osler, William S. Halsted and Howard Kelly – the so-called Big Four – by offering them rare and tempting research opportunities. The basic scientists and later the clinicians were free to do research by a full-time salary, and idea sold by Abraham Flexner, a departure from the tradition of employing part-time local practitioners to teach classes.

Johns Hopkins host many pandemic simulations (and more) including the coronavirus pandemic simulation “Event 201” in October 2019.

In the mid-to-late 1800 period great change was occuring within the areas of public health and sanitary reform. The UK passed the Public Health Act of 1875 on August 11, 1875, the following year the Sanitary Institute was established (1876) which was renamed the Royal Sanitary Institute in 1904. In 1955, the name was changed to Royal Society of Health. [1, 2]

“During its first fifty years, the (Royal) Sanitary Institute became the leading public health organization both in the United Kingdom and the rest of the world.”

Begining in 1856 the British Public Health Medical Society was established which in 1892 was incorporated as the British Institute of Public Health, and in 1897 when Queen Victoria became the patron, the name was changed to Royal Institute of Public Health. In 1937, it merged with the Institute of Hygiene which was established in 1903.

Then in October of 2008 the two institutes: the Royal Institute of Public Health (RIPH) and the Royal Society of Health (RSH) merged to be come the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH) to be “an independent campaigning and educational charity dedicated to improving and protecting the health of people… both in the United Kingdom and around the world.” [3]

Still in operation today it he longest-established public health organisation in the United Kingdom. It is incorporated by Royal Charter said to be “completely independent of government and of any special interest.” [4]

Sometime in 1884 Andrew Carnegie makes his first public donation in the amount of $50,000, to Bellevue Medical College in New York, the funding is to establish the Carnegie Laboratory which is America’s “first laboratory for teaching and investigation of bacteriology and pathology.” [1]

“The directors are Dr. Edward G. Janeway, who becomes a NYC health commissioner, and Dr. Frederick S. Dennis, who reports on the first investigations carried out at the laboratory on the action of micro-organisms on surgical wounds.”

Five years later in 1889, Bellevue hospital “physicians, Dr. Hermann Michael Biggs and Dr. Alfred Loomis, are the first to report that tuberculosis is a preventable disease. Dr. Biggs, the first crusader for community public health, writes that ‘no duty of society, acting through its government, is paramount to the obligation to attack the removable cause of disease.’ Dr. Biggs originates the first bacteriological laboratory in the US at Bellevue.” and develops bacteriological diagnostic techniques.  In 1914 he becomes the NY State Medical Officer.

Following the examination of sputum from 31 patients who had died in 1889-90 flu epidemic, German bacteriologist Richard Pfeiffer discovered a new type of bacterium which “appear as tiny little rodlets”, it was reported in the British Medical Journal in January 1892. Pfeiffer was chief of the Scientific Section of the Berlin Institute for Infectious Diseases and a protégé of Robert Koch, as such people believed his findings. [1]

As the bacteria we found only in flu victims he considered himself “justified in pronouncing the bacilli …to be the exciting causes of influenza“.  He named the bacterium Bacillus influenzae, but it was commonly referred to as Pfeiffer’s bacillus.

Pfeiffer’s bacillus was thought to be the causal agent for influenza during the early part if the 1918 pandemic, an “influenza vaccine” was even made, though dispute arose as the “bacilli” could not be isolated from all influenza cases or victims, and was found in asymptomatic persons. [3, 4, 5, 6]

Today the gram-negative coccobacillus is classified as Haemophilus influenzae in honour of it’s mistaken connection to influenza. [2] In 1995 H. influenzae is the first living organism (other than a virus) to have its genome fully sequenced. [7]

In 1898 Dmitri Ivanovski a Russian botanist, and Martinus Beijernick, a Dutch microbiologist and botanist, were independently given credit for the discovery of tobacco mosaic virus (TMV). The porcelain Chamberland filter apparatus use in the day excluded bacteria, and the resultant “poison” solution was said to contain “filterable virus“. Today this is deemed the begining of viruses as infectious agents smaller that bacteria. [1]