Early Clinics - Sexual Health

Impact of Britain's early sexual health service - Birb > .

The first UK clinics for venereal disease (VD) were established during the interwar years. These clinics were available to anyone, you could walk in off the street or be referred by a GP and importantly they were also free at the point of use... they changed the way that British people thought about their relationship with state-provided healthcare. The VD clinics are by no means a precursor to the NHS, but they did provide a blueprint for modern health services.

Endell Street Military Hospital - WW1

Spanish Flu Influenza Pandemic 1918 - 1920 - tgw > .

The Women Doctors Who Fought to Serve in World War I:

“No Man’s Land” tells the story of the Endell Street Military Hospital, which treated the casualties of war pouring into London during World War I — and which, except for the occasional male orderly, was staffed entirely by women.
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This was as shocking as it was revolutionary. Women doctors were almost unheard-of. Barred from studying at most institutions except for the London School of Medicine for Women, they were relegated to low-status, low-paying jobs in schools, prisons and asylums; most treated only other women and children. None of the men who would come to the Endell Street hospital had ever been treated by a woman before.

Two pioneering doctors — Louisa Garrett Anderson, a 41-year-old surgeon whose mother, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, was the first woman ever to qualify as a doctor in Britain, and Flora Murray, 45, an exacting Scottish anesthesiologist — saw a vacuum, and rushed to fill it. The upending of conventions necessitated by the war, as well as the desperate need for new hospital beds to treat the tens of thousands of injured and sick soldiers converging on London, offered the perfect opportunity to prove that women were equal to men.

Both women were also passionate suffragists, and the struggle for the vote went hand in hand with the struggle for professional acceptance. (They also lived together, though their careers were so interesting that their sex lives seem almost beside the point.)

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The first casualties arrived in May, 1915, in convoys of up to 80 men at a time; by the end of the first week, all 520 beds were filled. Typically, between 400 and 800 new patients would arrive each month, many needing immediate surgery (much of it performed by Anderson), many with grievously infected wounds, many suffering from acute shell-shock, “more wounded in their minds than in their bodies.”

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Exhausted, worked to the bone, forced to improvise and develop new techniques on the fly, the women proved themselves capable of handling nearly everything thrown at them during the war. The Spanish flu brought them to the point of despair. It came in three waves during 1918 and 1919 and killed between 3 and 6 percent of the world’s population.

Medical | Endell Street Military Hospital ..

Evolution of Medical Masks

Evolution of Medical Masks - Corp > .
Medical History - Corp >> .

GTN - Glyceryl Trinitrate

Nitroglycerin, also known as glyceryl trinitrate (GTN), is a medication in the nitrate family used for heart failure, high blood pressure, anal fissures, painful periods, and to treat and prevent chest pain caused by decreased blood flow to the heart (angina) or due to the recreational use of cocaine. This includes chest pain from a heart attack. It is taken by mouth, under the tongue, applied to the skin, or by injection into a vein.

Nitroglycerin was written about as early as 1846 and came into medical use in 1878. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines. The drug nitroglycerin (GTN) is a dilute form of the same chemical used as the explosive, nitroglycerin. Dilution makes it non-explosive.

GTN is a prodrug which must be denitrated, with the nitrite anion or a related species further reduced to produce the active metabolite nitric oxide (NO). Organic nitrates that undergo these two steps within the body are called nitrovasodilators, and the denitration and reduction occur via a variety of mechanisms. While the mechanism of action in angina is not entirely clear, it is believed to function by dilating blood vessels.

It was known almost from the time of the first synthesis of GTN by Ascanio Sobrero in 1846 that handling and tasting of nitroglycerin could cause sudden intense headaches, which suggested a vasodilation effect (as suggested by Sobrero). Constantine Hering developed a form of nitroglycerin in 1847 and advocated for its dosing as a treatment of a number of diseases; however, its use as a specific treatment for blood pressure and chest pain was not among these. This is primarily due to his deep rooted focus in homeopathy.

Following Thomas Brunton's discovery that amyl nitrite could be used to treat chest pain, William Murrell experimented with the use of nitroglycerin to alleviate angina pectoris and reduce blood pressure, and showed that the accompanying headaches occurred as a result of overdose. Murrell began treating patients with small doses of GTN in 1878, and the substance was widely adopted after he published his results in The Lancet in 1879.

The medical establishment used the name "glyceryl trinitrate" or "trinitrin" to avoid alarming patients, because of a general awareness that nitroglycerin was explosive.

Glyceryl trinitrate can cause severe hypotension, reflex tachycardia, and severe headaches that necessitate analgesic intervention for pain relief, the painful nature of which can have a marked negative effect on patient compliance. It is contraindicated in conjuction with medications within the sildenafil (PDE5 inhibitor) vasodilator drug family used for erectile dysfunction, such as sildenafil, tadalafil, and vardenafil. 

In 2017, it was the 143rd most commonly prescribed medication in the United States, with more than four million prescriptions.

It is unclear if use in pregnancy is safe for the baby. Overdoses may generate methemoglobinemia.

Healthcare Crisis of 1941

Healthcare Crisis of 1941 - Homefront - WW2 > .