Benjamin Franklin took a great interest in health-related topics by applying Enlightenment reasoning to his study of various afflictions and came up with some astonishingly accurate hypotheses. Benjamin Franklin insights and productivity was in medicine where he saw the value in vaccination against smallpox and was aware of the placebo effect. He launched the first American medical school and devised a flexible urethral catheter. He also identified lead poisoning as a cause of abdominal pain and peripheral neuropathy. He further accurately described psoriasis well before Robert Willan. These contributions by Benjamin Franklin in healthcare may be said to be significant and satisfactory.
<span>It was Galileo Galili, an Italian
inventor/astronomer/mathematician who observed the solar system using a
telescope he invented. It was in 1610 that Galili concluded that the planets
orbit around the sun, not the earth. In the year 1632, he published his book “Dialogues on the Two Chief
Systems of the World” which brought his
world of science and humanism into a cosmic conflict with the world of
Scholasticism and absolutism (held power in the Catholic Church).</span>
On September 23, 1632, he was
summoned to Rome by the Inquisition and was put on trial. Following the judgment
of the Inquisition, he was forced to renounce his belief in Copernican Theory
and the earth’s motion. He was condemned to life imprisonment but was amended
to house arrest on the next day.
The aftermath is a tragedy. It marks
the end of both Galileo Galili’s freedom and end of the Italian Renaissance.
The Louisiana Purchase is an example of how the political geography of North America was changed by the Napoleonic wars
