Thank a White Male
Google Images Henry Ford
Do you like internal combustion engines?
Thank a few white men. (Jean Lenoir, Nikolaus Otto, Karl Benz, Rudolf Diesel, Gottlieb Daimler, Emil Jellinek, Henry Ford among others.)
Are you a fan of flush toilets and indoor plumbing?
Thank white males Alexander Cumming, Thomas Twyford, and Isaiah Rogers
Toilet paper?
Thank Joseph Gayetty, W.M.
How about washing machines and dryers?
Thank white males Alva Fisher and J. Ross Moore.
“When you’ve got your health, you’ve got just about everything” ran the tag-line in a famous Geritol commercial from the 1970s, and the guys we most have reason to be grateful for are undoubtedly those who’ve developed the medical practices and the drugs and devices that have transformed our lives over the past hundred fifty years.
Before the turkey gets carved, it’s worth taking a moment to remember a few of these brilliant, persistent, and lucky men, and recall their accomplishments. Even when they’ve won Nobel Prizes in Medicine, their names are virtually unknown. They’re not mentioned in the Core Curriculum or celebrated by Google on their birthdays.
Pain
If you ever had surgery, did you opt for anesthesia?
If so, thank a few more white males, beginning with William Clarke in New York and Crawford Long in Georgia who both used chloroform in minor surgeries in 1842. A paper published four years later by William Morton, after his own work in Boston, spread the word. Ether replaced chloroform during the next decade. There are now scores of general and regional anesthetics and sedatives and muscle relaxants, administered in tandem. The first local anesthetic has also been superseded. It was cocaine, pioneered by a Viennese ophthalmologist, Carl Koller, in 1884.
Ever take an analgesic?
Next time you pop an aspirin, remember Felix Hoffmann of Bayer. In 1897, he converted salicylic acid to acetylsalicylic acid, much easier on the stomach. Aspirin remains the most popular and arguably the most effective drug on the market. In 1948 two New York biochemists, Bernard Brodie and Julius Axelrod, documented the effect that acetaminophen (Tylenol), synthesized by Harmon Morse in 1878, had on pain and fever. Gastroenterologist James Roth persuaded McNeil Labs to market the analgesic in 1953.
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