Health: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 5

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DriveHealth

The Jaipur Foot, a low-cost artificial foot of rubber and wood made in India since 1968, lets people who have lost a leg walk barefoot, squat and sit cross-legged.

It was designed in 1968 in Jaipur by P. K. Sethi, head of orthopaedics at Sawai Man Singh Medical College, and Ram Chandra Sharma, a local craftsman. Imported artificial feet were expensive and made for people who wore shoes and sat on chairs; they did not let wearers go barefoot, squat, sit cross-legged or work in muddy fields, all part of daily life for many poorer Indians. The Jaipur Foot has a wooden ankle and a rubber core under a vulcanised rubber skin shaped like a real foot. It costs about 45 US dollars to make and lasts roughly two to five years. The charity Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti (BMVSS) fits it free of charge, with financial help from the Indian government.

Science Museum / SmithsonianRead card

DriveScience

Cities are often a few degrees warmer than the countryside around them, an effect called the urban heat island. Asphalt, concrete and dark roofs soak up the sun's heat and give it back slowly, while streets without trees get no shade.

The effect was first described in the 1810s by Luke Howard, a London manufacturing chemist and amateur meteorologist, who found that the centre of London stayed about 2°C warmer at night than the surrounding countryside. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency puts the typical difference at roughly 0.5 to 4°C by day and 1 to 3°C at night. The gap is often widest after dark, when concrete and asphalt release the heat they stored during the day. Cities respond with pale, reflective pavements and roofs, green roofs and street trees, because shade and light-coloured surfaces measurably lower local temperatures. The heat also falls unevenly: neighbourhoods with fewer trees and more paving are usually the hottest.

U.S. Environmental Protection AgencyRead card

StillnessHealth

Living for years with loud road, rail or aircraft noise can harm health. It is linked to broken sleep, poorer learning in children and a higher risk of heart disease, and the body keeps reacting even after people stop noticing the sound.

In 2020 the European Environment Agency estimated that at least 113 million people in Europe live with long-term road traffic noise of 55 decibels or more, averaged over day and night; that is the level the European Union uses to report harmful noise, and the World Health Organization recommends keeping road noise below 53. Studies link such exposure to disturbed sleep, raised stress hormones, poorer reading and memory in children near airports and busy roads, and more high blood pressure and heart disease. People do get used to a sound in the sense that they notice it less, but sleep studies show that heart rate still jumps when a lorry or plane passes at night.

WHO / European Environment AgencyRead card

StillnessScience

Light pollution, the glow from artificial light we do not need at night, now hides the Milky Way from about a third of humanity. It also blurs the darkness that birds, insects, plants and people rely on to rest, find their way and tell night from day.

The figure comes from a world atlas of night-sky brightness published in 2016, which found the Milky Way hidden from about 60 per cent of Europeans and nearly 80 per cent of North Americans. Night-migrating birds partly steer by the stars and are drawn towards lit towers and buildings, where many circle until exhausted or fly into glass; US estimates for deaths at towers alone run from four or five million birds a year to ten times that. Insects swarm and die around lamps, and artificial light can shift when some plants come into bud. Programmes such as Toronto's Fatal Light Awareness Program ask building owners to switch off lights during migration.

NASA / DarkSky InternationalRead card

DriveHealth

Oral rehydration solution, clean water with measured amounts of salts and sugar, treats the dangerous dehydration caused by diarrhoea. This simple drink has saved millions of lives, most of them children's.

It works because glucose and sodium are absorbed together in the small intestine, and water follows them into the body even during severe diarrhoea. The Indian physician Hemendra Nath Chatterjee reported treating mild cholera this way in The Lancet in 1953. In 1971, during the Bangladesh Liberation War, intravenous fluid ran out in refugee camps in India; the physician Dilip Mahalanabis had families give an oral solution instead, and 3.6 per cent of those patients died, against about 30 per cent of those on drips. In 1978 The Lancet called the discovery behind it potentially the most important medical advance of the century, and in 1980 the WHO began a global programme to spread it. The mix must be measured, since too much salt can be harmful.

World Health Organization / UNICEFRead card

DriveTechnology

Tactile paving, the raised studs and bars set into pavements and station platforms, lets blind and partially sighted people feel their way. Underfoot or through a cane, the pattern warns of a crossing or platform edge, or shows the way ahead.

Tactile paving was invented in Japan in 1965 by Seiichi Miyake, who was inspired by braille. The first blocks were laid in 1967 on a street in Okayama, near a school for the blind, and they spread across Japan's streets and stations. Other countries followed; Australia fitted them at every venue of the 2000 Sydney Olympics. In the most common system, rows of rounded studs mean 'stop and take care', while long parallel bars mean 'walk this way'. Countries use their own variations, so consistent layout matters: tiles in the wrong place can mislead the people they are meant to guide.

UK Department for TransportRead card

DrivePhilosophy

The capability approach, developed by the economist Amartya Sen, judges how well people live by what they are actually able to do and be, not only by how much money or resources they have.

The same income can mean very different lives depending on health, safety, education, disability, gender, transport and social freedom: a wheelchair user needs more resources than others to get around the same city. Sen set out the idea in a 1979 lecture, 'Equality of What?', and developed it through the 1980s. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum extended it in 2000 into a list of ten central capabilities, such as health, play and a say in political decisions, that she argued every government should secure. The approach also shaped the United Nations Human Development Index, created in 1990 by the economist Mahbub ul Haq with Sen, which ranks countries by health and education as well as income.

Amartya Sen / Martha NussbaumRead card

WonderScience

North America's wood frogs can survive winter with much of their body water frozen, no heartbeat and no breathing, then thaw in spring and carry on as normal.

In Alaska, wood frogs in the wild have been recorded staying frozen for about 193 days in a row, at temperatures down to about −15°C. As ice starts to form, the frog's liver turns glycogen, the body's stored sugar, into large amounts of glucose. Together with urea, this glucose works like antifreeze: it limits how much water the cells lose and makes ice form mostly in the spaces between cells rather than inside them, where crystals would tear them apart. Up to 65 to 70 per cent of the body's water can freeze. The wood frog is the only North American frog found north of the Arctic Circle, and researchers study it for clues to storing human organs for longer before transplant.

Cryobiology (wood frog)Read card

WonderHealth

Most people are slightly taller in the morning than in the evening, because the soft discs between the vertebrae soak up fluid overnight and are squeezed flatter through the day.

Each disc has a tough outer ring and a soft, gel-like centre that is mostly water, and together the discs make up roughly a quarter of the length of the spine. When you stand, sit or walk, your body weight slowly presses fluid out of them, so by evening most people are around a centimetre shorter than when they got up. Lying down takes the load off, and the discs soak fluid back up during the night. In space nothing presses down on the spine at all, so it lengthens: NASA reports that astronauts can grow by up to 3 per cent, roughly 5 centimetres, during a long mission. They shrink back to their usual height soon after returning to Earth.

Human anatomyRead card

WonderHistory

Coffee grows wild in the highlands of Ethiopia, but it first became a popular drink in Yemen by the late 15th century. Coffeehouses then spread across the Ottoman world and reached Istanbul in 1554.

The first coffee drinkers on record were Sufi mystics in Yemen, who used it to stay awake through night-time devotions. The popular tale of a goatherd who noticed his goats grow lively after eating coffee berries first appears in writing in 1671 and is best treated as legend. According to the Ottoman chronicler İbrahim Peçevi, Istanbul's first coffeehouse opened in the Tahtakale district in 1554, run by two Arab merchants, Hakem from Aleppo and Şems from Damascus. Coffeehouses soon became places where people talked, played games and swapped news, and their popularity worried rulers: Selim II in 1567 and Murad III in 1583 tried taxes and restrictions, and Murad IV later closed them altogether.

Cultural history (coffee)Read card

WonderScience

The naked mole-rat, a mouse-sized rodent from East Africa, can live for more than 30 years in captivity, remarkable for a rodent its size. Cancer is rare in the species, but not absent.

Naked mole-rats live underground in the dry grasslands of Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia, in colonies that average about 75 to 80 animals and can top 300. Like ants and bees, they are eusocial: a single queen and one to three males do all the breeding, while the rest dig tunnels, gather roots and tubers, and care for the young. They are almost hairless, feel little pain from acids, and in experiments survived 18 minutes without any oxygen. A 2013 study linked their cancer resistance partly to an unusually long form of hyaluronan, a sugar that fills the spaces between cells. Tumours have since been found in a few zoo animals, so scientists describe cancer in the species as rare rather than absent.

Zoology (naked mole-rat)Read card

DriveProverbs

Go gently and you'll go safely and far.

In Italian: 'Chi va piano, va sano e va lontano', 'whoever goes slowly goes safely and goes far'. It echoes the old Latin motto festina lente, 'make haste slowly'; the Roman historian Suetonius says the emperor Augustus often repeated it, in Greek. The Venetian printer Aldus Manutius later used it with his dolphin-and-anchor emblem. Aesop's fable of the tortoise and the hare makes the same point.

Italian ProverbRead card

WonderHealth

In 2025 a baby in Philadelphia, known as KJ, became the first person to receive a gene-editing treatment made just for him, designed to correct the single genetic error behind his rare inherited disease.

KJ Muldoon was born in August 2024 with severe CPS1 deficiency: his liver lacked an enzyme needed to turn ammonia, a toxic by-product of digesting protein, into harmless urea, and the build-up can damage the brain. He was too young for a liver transplant. Doctors at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine used base editing, a refined form of the CRISPR technique that changes a single DNA letter instead of cutting through the DNA, and designed a treatment for his exact mutation in about six months. He received the first dose on 25 February 2025 and went home in June, eating more protein and needing less medicine. He is not cured, but the danger has greatly eased.

Children's Hospital of Philadelphia / Penn MedicineRead card

WonderHealth

In 2025 a man in the United States lived for a record 271 days with a gene-edited pig kidney, the longest anyone has lived with an organ from a pig.

Tim Andrews received the kidney at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston in January 2025. It came from a pig bred by the company eGenesis with 69 genetic changes: some pig genes switched off, some human genes added and dormant pig viruses disabled, so that the human body would be less likely to attack the organ. It worked for 271 days, more than double the previous record for a pig kidney, before it was removed in October 2025 as its function declined; he returned to dialysis and received a human kidney in January 2026. The longest any animal organ has worked in a person is still 273 days, set by a chimpanzee kidney in 1964. With far too few human donors, pig organs are now entering small clinical trials.

Massachusetts General Hospital (2025)Read card

WonderHistory

The 1904 Olympic marathon in St Louis was run in heat of about 32 °C on dusty roads, with a single well for water. The first man home had ridden 18 km in a car; the real winner, Thomas Hicks, had been dosed with strychnine and brandy by his trainers and was carried over the line.

Of 32 starters only 14 finished, the lowest share in any Olympic marathon. Fred Lorz dropped out with cramp after about 14 km, rode in a car, rejoined the race when the car broke down, and was being hailed as the winner before officials found out. Hicks's trainers gave him strychnine, a stimulant in tiny doses and a poison in larger ones, mixed with brandy and raw egg white, and he finished barely conscious. Félix Carvajal, a Cuban postman, ran in cut-down street clothes, ate spoiled apples on the way, lay down for a nap and still came fourth. Len Taunyane, one of two South Africans in the race, was chased well off course by a dog and finished ninth.

Olympic historyRead card

WonderHistory

In 1847 the Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis showed that deaths among new mothers in Vienna fell sharply once doctors washed their hands in chlorinated lime before examining them. Many colleagues rejected the idea, and he died in an asylum 18 years later.

At Vienna General Hospital, mothers on the ward run by doctors and medical students died of childbed fever, an infection caught during or after birth, two to three times as often as those on the midwives' ward. Semmelweis noticed that the doctors came straight from dissecting corpses, and made them clean their hands in a chlorinated lime solution; deaths fell to one or two in a hundred. He could not explain why it worked, since germs had not yet been discovered, and many senior doctors refused to accept that they themselves spread disease. He moved to Pest in Hungary and published his findings in 1861. In 1865 he was committed to an asylum in Vienna and beaten by guards; he died two weeks later of an infected wound on his hand. The work of Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister later proved him right.

Medical historyRead card

WonderScience

Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity in Paris in 1896, thanks to cloudy weather. He meant to test whether sunlight made uranium salts give off rays that darken a wrapped photographic plate, but the sky stayed grey, so he shut everything in a drawer. Days later he developed the plate anyway: the uranium had exposed it on its own.

A few months earlier Wilhelm Röntgen had discovered X-rays, and Becquerel suspected that glowing minerals might give off similar rays after absorbing sunlight. The cloudy days of late February 1896 showed that the uranium needed no light at all. Marie Curie took up the puzzle, found that thorium behaved the same way, coined the word radioactivity and, with Pierre Curie, discovered two new elements, polonium and radium. Becquerel and the Curies shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. The discovery opened the way to nuclear physics, radiotherapy and radioactive dating, and to decades of learning how dangerous radiation can be. The international unit of radioactivity, the becquerel, is named after him.

Physics historyRead card

WonderHealth

Warfarin, one of the world's most widely used blood thinners, grew out of a farm mystery: in the 1920s North American cattle bled to death after eating mouldy sweet-clover hay. The cause was dicoumarol, a natural substance that stops blood clotting; research on it produced warfarin, first sold as rat poison.

In February 1933 a Wisconsin farmer, Ed Carlson, drove about 300 km through a blizzard to the University of Wisconsin in Madison with a dead heifer, a milk can of blood that would not clot and a load of spoiled hay. The biochemist Karl Paul Link took up the problem, and by 1940 his team had isolated the culprit, dicoumarol. A stronger relative they made was named warfarin, after the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation that funded the work. It was sold first as rat poison, from 1948, because rats that eat it die of internal bleeding, and was approved for people in 1954. President Eisenhower was treated with it after his 1955 heart attack, which reassured the public. In carefully measured doses it still prevents strokes and dangerous clots in millions of people.

Medical historyRead card

WonderTechnology

In 1942 chemist Harry Coover was looking for a clear plastic for gun sights when his team made a compound that stuck to everything, and they set it aside as useless. In 1951 he met it again and realised it was an instant glue: what we now call superglue.

The compound was a cyanoacrylate, a liquid that hardens within seconds when it meets the slightest moisture, even the water on skin or in the air. In 1951 Coover was leading chemists at Eastman Kodak in Tennessee who were testing heat-resistant plastics for jet cockpit canopies. When a chemist in the group ruined an expensive laboratory instrument by gluing its parts together, Coover saw a glue that needed no heat or pressure. Kodak put it on sale in 1958 as Eastman 910. During the Vietnam War, medics used a cyanoacrylate spray to slow bleeding in wounded soldiers until they reached hospital, and related glues are still used to close cuts and surgical wounds.

Invention historyRead card

WonderHistory

In the hot summer of 1858, the Thames, full of London's raw sewage, smelled so bad that Parliament soaked its curtains in chloride of lime, a disinfectant, to block it. This Great Stink pushed MPs to approve a new sewer system in just 18 days.

For years London's toilets and drains had emptied into the Thames, and cholera had killed tens of thousands; most doctors blamed the smell itself, a belief called miasma theory. In the heat of June 1858 business in Parliament was disrupted, and moving it to Oxford or St Albans was discussed. Engineer Joseph Bazalgette then built 132 km of large brick sewers and about 1,800 km of street sewers, carrying waste east, away from the city. He is said to have made the pipes far wider than the calculations required, which helped the network cope as London grew. Built to remove bad air, the system also kept sewage out of drinking water, and London's last cholera epidemic, in 1866, struck an area not yet connected.

London MuseumRead card

WonderHealth

In 1854 London doctor John Snow mapped the deaths in a cholera outbreak in Soho and saw that they clustered around a single public water pump on Broad Street. He persuaded the parish to remove the pump's handle, and gave strong evidence that cholera spreads through dirty water.

More than 600 people died in the outbreak, over 300 of them in its first ten days. Most doctors then blamed 'miasma', bad air from rotting matter. Snow, also a pioneer of anaesthesia, drew a map with a bar for each death and talked to families, helped by the local curate Henry Whitehead. He noticed that workers at the nearby brewery, who were given beer instead of water, escaped the disease. The pump handle came off on 8 September, but the outbreak was already fading. Whitehead later found the likely source: a cesspit about a metre from the well, into which water from a sick baby's nappies had drained. Officials refitted the handle and rejected Snow's idea; he died in 1858, before it was accepted.

London MuseumRead card

WonderHealth

Viagra began as sildenafil, a Pfizer drug first tested on volunteers in Wales in the early 1990s as a treatment for angina, chest pain caused by narrowed arteries. It did little for angina, but it had an unexpected side effect, and Pfizer developed it for erectile dysfunction instead.

Sildenafil was made by a team led by Simon Campbell at Pfizer's research centre in Sandwich, Kent. It relaxes the muscle in blood vessel walls, which widens the vessels, and the hope was that this would improve blood flow to the heart. The early trials, the first of them at Morriston Hospital in Swansea, showed little effect on angina, but men reported erections as a side effect. A much-repeated story says some volunteers did not want to hand back their leftover tablets. Pfizer changed course, and the drug was approved as Viagra in 1998. Under the name Revatio, sildenafil also treats pulmonary arterial hypertension, dangerously high blood pressure in the arteries of the lungs.

Pharmaceutical historyRead card

DriveArt

Henri Matisse had cancer surgery in 1941, aged 71, and afterwards often worked from his bed or a wheelchair. He had used cut paper since the 1930s to plan compositions; in the years that followed he made it his main medium, cutting shapes from painted paper with scissors, and produced some of the boldest work of his career.

Matisse had surgery for abdominal cancer in 1941 and nearly died of the complications; he called the years that followed his 'second life'. Assistants painted large sheets of paper with gouache, an opaque watercolour, and he cut shapes from them freehand, then directed where they should be pinned on the walls of his rooms in Nice and Vence. He called this 'drawing with scissors', because a single cut gave line and colour at once. Works from this period include the book Jazz (1947), the Blue Nudes (1952) and The Snail (1953), now at Tate Modern. He also designed the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence. He died in 1954.

TateRead card

DriveArt

Rheumatoid arthritis twisted Pierre-Auguste Renoir's hands so badly that he could no longer grip a brush. He kept painting for about twenty more years, with brushes placed between his bandaged fingers.

Rheumatoid arthritis is a disease in which the immune system attacks the joints, causing pain and, over time, deformity. Renoir's began around 1892. By his sixties his joints had stiffened and twisted, and in his last years he used a wheelchair. In 1907 he moved to Les Collettes, a house at Cagnes-sur-Mer on the warm Mediterranean coast. Assistants wrapped his hands to protect the skin and set a brush between his fingers, and he painted by moving his arm and shoulder. From 1913 he also made sculpture by directing the hands of a young sculptor, Richard Guino. Asked why he kept painting through the pain, he is said to have replied that the pain passes, but the beauty remains.

Art historyRead card