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Cocaine was isolated in 1860 and first used as a local anesthetic in 1884. Its first clinical use was by Sigmund Freud to wean a patient from morphine addiction. The fictional character Sherlock Holmes was supposed to be addicted to cocaine by injection.
More than 34,000 trademarked medication names and more than 10,000 generic medication names are in use in the United States.
Cancer has been around as long as humankind, but only in the second half of the twentieth century did the number of cancer cases explode.
People with high total cholesterol have about two times the risk for heart disease as people with ideal levels.
When Gabriel Fahrenheit invented the first mercury thermometer, he called "zero degrees" the lowest temperature he was able to attain with a mixture of ice and salt. For the upper point of his scale, he used 96°, which he measured as normal human body temperature (we know it to be 98.6° today because of more accurate thermometers).