English obstetrician William Smellie introduces scientific midwifery as a result of his researches into childbirth

Austrian physician Joseph Leopold Auenbrugger describes his new diagnostic technique – percussion, or listening to a patient's chest and tapping

Captain Cook publishes his discovery of a preventive cure against scurvy, in the form of a regular ration of lemon juice

Benjamin Franklin, irritated at needing two pairs of spectacles, commissions from a lens-grinder the first bifocals

William Withering's Account of the Foxglove describes the use of digitalis for dropsy, and its possible application to heart disease

In Berkeley, Gloucestershire, Edward Jenner inoculates a boy with cowpox in the pioneering case of vaccination

German physician Samuel Hahnemann coins the term 'homeopathy' and describes this new approach to medicine

René Laënnec, reluctant to press his ear to the chest of a young female patient, finds a solution in the stethoscope

William Burke and William Hare murder 16 victims and sell their bodies to the Edinburgh Medical School for anatomical study

The USA suffers the first of several cholera epidemics, spanning the sixty years to 1892

A dentist in Boston, William Morton, uses ether as an anaesthetic while surgeon John Collins Warren removes a tumour in a patient's neck

Scottish obstetrician James Simpson uses anaesthetic (ether, and later in the year choloroform) to ease difficulty in childbirth

James Young Simpson is the first to deliver a baby (christened Anaesthesia) using chloroform

German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz invents the ophthalmoscope, making it possible for a doctor to examine the inside of a patient's eye

The hypodermic syringe with a plunger is simultaneously developed in France and in Scotland

William Baikie, on an expedition up the Niger, protects his men from malaria by administering quinine

English physician John Snow proves that cholera is spread by infected water (from a pump in London's Broad Street)

Florence Nightingale, responding to reports of horrors in the Crimea, sets sail with a party of twenty-eight nurses

Jamaican-born nurse Mary Seacole sets up her own 'British Hotel' in the Crimea to provide food and nursing for soldiers in need

Florence Nightingale opens a training school for nurses in St Thomas's Hospital, establishing nursing as a profession

Hungarian physician Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis publishes his discovery that deaths from puerperal fever can be dramatically reduced by a strict hand-washing routine

English surgeon Joseph Lister introduces the era of antiseptic surgery, with the use of carbolic acid in the operating theatre

An outbreak of measles in Fiji, brought to the islands by British visitors, kills a quarter of the population

German bacteriologist Robert Koch announces his discovery of the bacillus that causes tuberculosis

Louis Pasteur uses rabies inoculation to save the life of 9-year-old Joseph Meister, bitten by a rabid dog