This Month in History
March 1, 1841: On this day in history, Dorothea Dix went to a Massachusetts jail to teach a Sunday-school class. There, she saw mentally ill patients caged in prisons and poorhouses in unsanitary and unheated rooms. Dix dedicated herself to lobbying for the establishment of hospitals to treat and care for these people. She successfully convinced 12 state legislatures to fund asylums in one seven-year period. Dix also tended to the medical needs of the Union armies during the Civil War.
March 1, 2009: March is Women's History Month
March 1, 1963: On March 1, 1963, Dr. Thomas E. Starzl performed the first liver transplant in humans.
March 1, 1910: Archer John Porter Martin, born March 1, 1910, won a Nobel Prize for his invention of partition chromatography.
March 3, 1918: Arthur Kornberg, born on March 3, 1918, won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of ribonucleic acid and deoxyribonucleic acid.
March 7, 1938: David Baltimore, born March 7, 1938, won a Nobel Prize for his discoveries concerning the interaction between tumour viruses and the genetic material of the cell.
March 8, 1886: Edward C. Kendall, born on March 8, 1886, won a Nobel Prize for his discoveries relating to the hormones of the adrenal cortex, their structure and biological effects.
March 10, 1867: Lillian Wald (born March 10, 1867) organized nursing classes for immigrants on New York's Lower East Side after seeing the inadequate health services available to these people. Wald established the Nurses' Settlement House on Henry Street, which became one of the most noted institutions devoted to improving life in immigrant ghettos.
March 17, 1881: Walter Rudolf Hess, born on March 17, 1881, won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of the functional organization of the interbrain as a coordinator of the activities of the internal organs.
March 20, 1944: Erwin Neher (born March 20, 1944) and Bert Sakmann developed the "patch-clamp" technique, which detects and measures the movement of small amounts of substances through cell membranes. This technique gives insight into diseases involving ion channels including diabetes, multiple sclerosis and cystic fibrosis. Their research won the 1991 Nobel Prize.
March 20, 1904: Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born March 20, 1904. He came up with the operant conditioning theory.
March 21, 1932: Walter Gilbert, born on March 21, 1932, won a Nobel Prize for his contributions concerning the determination of base sequences in nucleic acids.
March 24, 1917: John Cowdery Kendrew, born on March 24, 1917, won a Nobel Prize for his studies of the structures of globular proteins.
March 26, 1916: Christian Anfinsen, born on March 26, 1916, won a Nobel Prize for his contribution to the understanding of the connection between chemical structure and catalytic activity of the active centre of the ribonuclease molecule.
March 28, 1892: Corneille Jean Francois Heymans, born on March 28, 1892, won a Nobel Prize for the discovery of the role played by the sinus and aortic mechanisms in the regulation of respiration.
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