Cholera is an acute infectious disease with high mortality if left untreated. Historically, between the 19^th and 20^th centuries seven great pandemics of cholera occurred and worldwide, thousands of people died. Based on an old theory, cholera was considered an air-born disease and the emergence of its outbreaks were attributed to bad weather or miasma.

Six subsequent pandemics killed millions of people across all continents. The current (seventh) pandemic started in South Asia in 1961, reached Africa in 1971 and the Americas in 1991.

https://www.cbc.ca/history/EPISCONTENTSE1EP7CH1PA5LE.html

William Thomas Green Morton was an American dentist and physician who first publicly demonstrated the use of inhaled ether as a surgical anesthetic in 1846.

He Was known for giving the first successful public demonstration of ether anesthesia during surgery.

he was significant because he was the first to show how ether could be used to allay the pain of operations.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1279690/

Elizabeth Blackwell was a British and American physician

As the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States, and the first woman on the Medical Register of the General Medical Council for the United Kingdom.

tshe was known for as the first woman in the United States to earn a medical degree. She became a lifelong advocate for female doctors.

https://wams.nyhistory.org/a-nation-divided/civil-war/elizabeth-blackwell/

He was a British surgeon, medical scientist, experimental pathologist and a pioneer of antiseptic surgery and preventative medicine

Joseph Lister found a way to prevent infection in wounds during and after surgery

He was the first to apply the science of Germ Theory to surgery.

https://www.famousscientists.org/joseph-lister/

Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch was a German physician and microbiologist.

the tuberculosis bacterium he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1905.

Robert Koch is now thought of as the pioneer of microbiology. Robert Koch was born to a mining family in Clausthal in the Harz region of Germany on 11 December 1843.

https://www.rki.de/EN/Content/Institute/History/rk_node_en.html

Louis Pasteur ForMemRS was a French chemist and microbiologist renowned for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation, and pasteurization, the last of which was named after him.

Louis Pasteur is best known for inventing the process that bears his name, pasteurization

He was significant because Pasteur became a pioneer in the development of vaccinations,

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Louis-Pasteur

Lillian D. Wald was an American nurse, humanitarian and author. She strove for human rights and started American community nursing. She founded the Henry Street Settlement in New York City and was an early advocate for nurses in public schools.

What was Lillian Wald known for?

Lillian D. Wald helped to bring health care to the residents of New York's Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century

What did Lillian Wald discover?

Making health care her first priority, Wald pioneered public health nursing

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/lillian-wald

Social Darwinists believe in “survival of the fittest”—the idea that certain people become powerful in society because they are innately better.

Social Darwinism has been used to justify imperialism, racism, eugenics and social inequality at various times over the past century and a half.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/social-Darwinism

The Industrial Revolution shifted societies from an agrarian economy to a manufacturing economy where products were no longer made solely by hand but by machines

Industrialization, along with great strides in transportation, drove the growth of U.S. cities and a rapidly expanding market economy.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/industrial-revolution.asp

Urbanization refers to the concentration of human populations into discrete areas. The US population experienced little growth in urbanization in the first decades of the nineteenth century, with the urbanization rate remaining below 10 percent.

impacted the world because new techniques and institutions of both production and transportation reduced world-wide agricultural prices,.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/269967/urbanization-in-the-united-states/

René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec was a French physician and musician.

Rene Theophile Hyacinthe Laënnec (1781–1826) was a French physician who, in 1816, invented the stethoscope.

Laënnec was a master of clinical diagnosis and using his invention, the stethoscope, perfected the art of physical examination of the chest.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1570491/

Florence Nightingale OM RRC DStJ was an English social reformer, statistician and the founder of modern nursing. Nightingale came to prominence while serving as a manager and trainer of nurses during the Crimean War, in which she organised care for wounded soldiers at Constantinople.

Florence is most widely known for her role during the Crimean War between Great Britain and Russia

she organized a professional training for nurses, wrote the first textbook on nursing (“Notes on Nursing”) and took public positions in favor of health care and philanthropic funding.

https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/florence-nightingale-1

Dorothea Lynde Dix was an American advocate on behalf of the indigent mentally ill who, through a vigorous and sustained program of lobbying state legislatures and the United States Congress, created the first generation of American mental asylums.

During the Civil War, she served as a Superintendent of Army Nurses.

Dorothea Dix played an instrumental role in the founding or expansion of more than 30 hospitals for the treatment of the mentally ill.

Dorothea Dix played an instrumental role in the founding or expansion of more than 30 hospitals for the treatment of the mentally ill. She was a leading figure in those national and international movements that challenged the idea that people with mental disturbances could not be cured or helped.

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/dorothea-dix

Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis was a Hungarian physician and scientist of German descent, who was an early pioneer of antiseptic procedures, and was described as the "saviour of mothers

What is Ignaz Semmelweis famous for?

Ignaz Semmelweis (Figure 1) was the first physician in medical history who demonstrated that puerperal fever (also known as “childbed fever”) was contagious

Ignaz Semmelweis (Figure 1) was the first physician in medical history who demonstrated that puerperal fever (also known as “childbed fever”) was contagious and that its incidence could be drastically reduced by enforcing appropriate hand washing by medical care-givers

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ignaz-Semmelweis

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was a German mechanical engineer and physicist, who, on 8 November 1895, produced and detected electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range known as X-rays or Röntgen rays, an achievement that earned him the inaugural Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.

What is Wilhelm Roentgen famous for?

Few scientific breakthroughs have had as immediate an impact as Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen's discovery of X-rays, a momentous event that instantly revolutionized the fields of physics and medicine.

Röntgen's name, however, is chiefly associated with his discovery of the rays that he called X-rays. In 1895 he was studying the phenomena accompanying the passage of an electric current through a gas of extremely low pressure.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1901/rontgen/biographical/