June 7 – On This Day in Medical History

Medical milestones, landmark publications, and notable births and deaths associated with June 7.

Events

1847 – William Russ Pugh (1806-1897) carried out the earliest documented use of diethyl ether for surgical anaesthesia in Australia, administering ether he prepared himself using a homemade device (“Pugh’s inhaler”) modelled on an apparatus he’d seen illustrated in the Illustrated London News; he later published his experience in the Australian Medical Journal.

Births

1909 – Virginia Apgar (1909-1974), American anesthesiologist; designed the APGAR scoring system for newborns (1953)

1921 – Bernard Lown (1921-2021) American cardiologist, activist and inventor. Original developer of the DC defibrillator and the cardioverter (1961); Nobel Peace Prize (1985); Lown–Ganong–Levine syndrome (1952)

Deaths

1964 – Rudolf Adriaan Mees (1873-1964), Dutch psychiatrist and physician; described Mees lines (1919)

2013 – Philip Raikes Bromage (1920-2013) was a British anaesthetist; described the Bromage Motor Blockade Score (1965)

2017 – Enno Kleihauer (1927–2017), German paediatrician and haematologist; described Kleihauer–Betke Test (1957)

Further reading
On This Day in Medical History

BA MA (Oxon) MBChB (Edin) FACEM FFSEM. Emergency physician, Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital. Passion for rugby, medical history, medical education, and asynchronous learning #FOAMed evangelist. Editor-in-Chief and Webmaster of Life in the Fast lane, LITFL | On Call 4e| Eponyms | Books | Horology |