This timeline relates to the rise of today’s Western/American medical establishment and its prevailing paradigm

Date

Event

Human Population Statistics

> 4 million BC

First erect protohumans appear in Africa, differentiating from their great ape cousins.

Human population = 0

> 2 million BC

Large-brained bipedal hominids, of the genus homo, appear in Africa.

< 2 million BC

Homo erectus begins migrating from Africa, and fire was first used as a tool.  The African ape diet was partly abandoned as fruit, blossoms, seeds and leaves were less available beyond the tropics, meaning more meat eating. 

Human population <100,000

c. 400,000 BC

Fire consistently used.  First regular food processing practiced – cooking.

>100,000

c. 130,000 - 100,000 BC

First anatomically modern humans appear in Africa and migrate across Asia, eventually displacing other hominid species.

c.  40,000 BC

Advances in hunting skill and technology allow humans to hunt larger animals.  Boats invented.  Modern humans first appear in Europe and Australia.

c. 30,000 BC

Extinction of most large animals in Australia possibly caused by human over-hunting.  Humans probably first appear in North and South America.  Cave murals are first drawn, in European caves.  One of the earliest artistic works, and possibly a religious artifact, the Venus of Willendorf, is made in central Europe.  It, and many works like it, is evidence that goddess-based religion flourished from humanity’s earliest days. 

c. 25,000 BC

Pottery first appears, in Europe. 

c.  23,000 BC

Bow and arrow invented, probably in Europe.

c. 11,000 BC

Methods for processing and storing food appear in Fertile Crescent.

c. 10,000 BC

Extinction of most large mammals in the Americas, also possibly caused by human over-hunting, probably also influenced by climate changes.  Dogs are the first domestic animals, appearing in the Fertile Crescent region.

c. 8500 - 8000 BC

Hunter-gatherer lifestyle is increasingly unsustainable.  Domestication revolution begins in Fertile Crescent and the Americas.  Wheat, peas and olives domesticated in Fertile Crescent.  Squash and pumpkins first domesticated in Mesoamerica. 

4 million

c. 7500 BC

Domestication revolution begins in east Asia. 

c. 7000 BC

Sheep and goats begin domestication in Fertile Crescent region.

c. 6500 BC

First large human communities, such as Catal Huyuk, appear in present-day Turkey.  The clearing of forest to make farm fields, and the resultant puddles, led to the spread of malaria, probably originating in Africa. 

c. 6000 BC

Cattle and pigs begin domestication in Fertile Crescent region.  Chicken and rice begin domestication in east Asia. 

c. 5500 BC

Agricultural communities appear along the Nile river.

c. 5000 BC

Civilization begins forming in the Fertile Crescent.  Early societies are egalitarian.  The agricultural societies have goddess-based religions, while the pastoral, herd-tending societies develop male-based religions.  The mobile pastoral societies begin invading the sedentary agricultural societies.  Irrigation is first used in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and in Nile river valley.  Metallurgy first practiced near mountains of Eastern Europe.  Copper weapons developed by herder societies of steppe regions.  People of Greece and the southern Balkans adopt agricultural practices. 

5 million

c. 4500 BC

First large religious facilities built at site of today’s Iraq.  Stratification of early society begins, with elites - priest class, craftsmen, rulers and probably the first medical doctors. 

c. 4000 BC

Horse domesticated in steppe region north of Black Sea.  Llama and Alpaca domesticated in South America.  Camel first domesticated near Fertile Crescent.  Invasions from steppe regions wash across Europe, Fertile Crescent and Middle East.  Warfare practiced on large scale. 

c. 3500 BC

Migrating farmers from Fertile Crescent settle Indus valley in present day Pakistan.  Bronze age begins in Fertile Crescent, and plow agriculture begins there.  Soil salination begins affecting Mesopotamian agriculture, and salt resistant barley is raised in place of wheat, comprising half of southern Mesopotamian grain production.  Siltation of river water from upstream deforestation also contributes to environmental degradation.  The wheel is invented in Mesopotamia.  By this time, corn, potatoes, manioc, beans and turkeys are domesticated in the Americas.

c. 3000 BC

Sumeria becomes the world’s first literate society.  History begins.  State bureaucracy and military establishment are developed.  The earth-based Mother Goddess begins being replaced by thunderous, male, sky gods in Middle Eastern mythology. 

14 million

c. 2600 BC

Imhotep is credited with building the world’s first large stone building, a step pyramid in Egypt.  Imhotep was also a physician.  He was later deified, and was probably the model for the Greek god of medicine, Asclepius.   

c. 2400 BC

Crop yields continue declining in Sumerian fields.  Wheat yields decline by 42% between 2400 and 2100 BC. 

c. 2100 BC

Ur abandons wheat cultivation.  Wheat comprises only 2% of Sumerian crops. 

c. 2000 BC

Great migration wave of pastoral societies from steppe regions (generally between the Caspian and Black Seas) into the Fertile Crescent, India and Europe.  Third Dynasty of Ur collapses.  Violent, male, sky-god religion accompanies the invaders.  Feminine, earth-based religion and mythology in the Fertile Crescent, Mediterranean region and Europe are eventually overthrown by the invaders, replaced with male, sky-god religions.  Helen of Troy becomes a famous female healer and mythological figure, but female healers begin disappearing from medicine at this time.  Intense deforestation of the region from Morocco to Afghanistan commences.  Today, only about 10% of that forest remains; much has turned to desert.

c. 1900 BC

Indus valley society collapses.  Declining food production due to soil salination probably led to population decline and internal collapse, combined with foreign invasion.

c. 1700 BC

Wheat yields in Sumeria decline by 65% since 2400 BC.  Fields turn white from salt.  Sumer declines as a power, and the center of Mesopotamian civilization shifts north.

c. 1500 BC

A four hundred year period of chaos and warfare begins to sweep Europe, the Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean region.  The violent, male sky-gods come to dominate religion, including one named Jehovah. 

38 million

c. 1400 BC

Iron first smelted by Hittite civilization in present-day Turkey.  Agriculture begins in Japan. 

c. 1200 BC

Iron made into weaponry.  Iron weapons rapidly replace bronze and become common throughout Europe, the Fertile Crescent, Egypt and elsewhere.  The feminine-friendly Minoan civilization on Crete collapses, as does Mycenaean civilization. 

c. 1000 BC

Agriculture collapses in central Mesopotamia due to soil salination.  In 1990, Iraq imported 70% of its food.  The anti-feminine culture of ancient Greece develops, known as Greece’s “dark age.”  Women are gradually excluded from public life.  Although male gods dominated Greek mythology, women were also present, if subservient. 

50 million

c. 900 BC

Asclepius lives at this time, and eventually became “sainted” in Greek culture and became the Greek god of healing during its classical period.  The mythological Asclepius was the son of Apollo, who was the son of Zeus.  Hygeia and Panacea were Asclepius’ daughters. 

c. 700 BC

A village that began with shepherd’s huts, eventually known as Rome, is growing. 

c. 650 BC

Expanding Greek settlements begin causing noticeable environmental degradation. 

590 BC

Solon argues against agriculture on steep slopes in Greece because of rapid erosion. 

560 BC

Peisistratus becomes tyrant of Athens, and pays bounty for farmers to plant olive trees, as they can survive on the badly eroded land, and put down roots to penetrate the exposed rock. 

c. 500 BC

Celts begin invading the British Isles, absorbing the Iberians.  Women enter the healing profession in Danish Celtic culture.  Pythagoras, the world’s first mathematician and the West’s first vegetarian, dies.  His followers taught that the earth orbited the sun.  Etruscan civilization is at its peak influence, to eventually fall to neighboring states. 

432 BC

Peak of the Greek classic period.  Hippocrates, Socrates, Thucydides and Aristophanes are alive.  During Peloponnesian War (begun in 431 BC), war-crowded Athens is afflicted with a plague (probably smallpox or typhus) in 430 that lasts three years, killing about a third of the population and leading to Athens’ decline.

c. 400 BC

Centuries of Greek deforestation and agricultural practices devastate the environment and soils, remarked upon by Plato and other observers.  The degraded environment led to falling crop yields and Greece’s decline, as had been happening to other empires for thousands of years.  Rome begins rising as a power, eventually defeating the Etruscans of today’s northern Italy, and incorporate Etruria’s cultural and technical achievements.  By the time of Jesus, Etruscan culture was almost entirely absorbed into Roman culture. 

334 BC

Alexander the Great of Macedonia conquers Persia and tries uniting East and West.  The short-lived Macedonian Empire helps pave the way for the Roman Empire.  Alexander supposedly said that he “died by the help of too many physicians.”

264 BC

After subduing Italy, Rome engages in its first war against Carthage.  Italy and Sicily are rapidly deforested to meet Rome’s needs.

202 BC

Rome defeats the forces of Carthaginian general Hannibal, ending the second Punic War.  

197 BC

Rome invades Greece and conquers them.  Rome would incorporate much of Greek culture into its own, borrowing its gods and technology, although denigration of Greek physicians and medicine was typical. 

146 BC

Greek resistance to Roman rule leads to the complete destruction of Corinth and the sale of its inhabitants into slavery.  That same year, Rome does the same to Carthage.  The Roman Republic begins expanding across Europe, northern Africa and the Middle East. 

58 BC

Rome begins handing out free food.  Eventually, hundred of thousands of Rome’s citizens received free food for political reasons.  Intensive agricultural exploitation of imperial lands are undertaken to feed the empire.  Places such as today’s Libya are forced to become farms for Rome, with the agricultural practices eventually turning Libya into the desert nation it is today. 

1 AD

Jesus is alive.  Much of Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and surrounding regions are deforested by Rome, eventually turning it into desert. 

World population: 170 million.

C. 30 AD

Roman writer Celsus translates works of Hippocrates, writes a mammoth series of books, and the eight devoted to medicine have survived. 

Roman Empire’s population: 50 million

66 AD

First Jewish revolt against Roman rule.  Rome responds with typical brutality, the revolt ending with the mass suicide at Masada in 73 AD.  Jews begin their dispersal from Palestine. 

132 AD

Jews revolt against Roman rule again.  Rome responds in standard fashion, completely destroying the Jewish state in 135 AD and laying waste to the entire region.  Hundreds of thousands of Jews die, the survivors sold into slavery, and dispersed across the Roman Empire and beyond. 

165 AD

The Antonine plague, probably smallpox, sweeps through the Roman Empire, brought back by returning soldiers from Syria.  It rages for 15 years, killing about five million people, or about a quarter to a third of all of those exposed to the disease, including Emperor Marcus Aurelius in 180, as it did his predecessor in 169. 

c. 169 AD

Marcus Aurelius appoints Galen to be personal physician to his heir, Commodus.  Galen writes prodigiously, his work guiding Western medicine until the 1500s. 

c. 200 AD

200 million

251 AD

An epidemic again sweeps through the Roman Empire until 270, killing 5000 of Rome’s citizens each day during the epidemic’s peak, including the Emperor Claudius in 270.  Rome was forced by the population loss to recruit barbarian troops.  The first mass conversions to Christianity were apparently a consequence of the epidemic. 

476 AD

Western Roman Empire falls.  Germanic peoples invade the Roman Empire’s lands in Europe during the late 400s, including the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain.  The Eastern Roman Empire lasts nearly continually for the next 1000 years, with Constantinople (earlier named Byzantium and later Istanbul) as its capital city.  Europe, however, fell into its Dark Ages.  Ancient Greek texts were burned as pagan, including Hippocrates’ works.  The Roman Catholic Church largely took over medicine, and Galen’s work became dogmatized by the Church.  That situation would dominate Western medicine for more than 1000 years. 

541

First recorded instance of bubonic plague, beginning in Egypt and racing to Constantinople, where it killed off as many as 10,000 people per day and 40% of the population.  Epidemic diseases would periodically sweep Europe and Asia, with cites such as Rome suffering greatly. 

562

32-year drought begins to afflict the Moche culture in South America.  El Niño cycles regularly affect South American civilization, and elaborate food production and storage systems are designed to cope with them, as well as other environmental challenges.  That region’s people become the world’s greatest agricultural experimenters. 

250 million

711

Islamic armies invade the Iberian Peninsula.  Jews live under Moorish rule in Iberia, and it is their golden age in Europe, lasting for 300 years.  Learning was an Islamic ideal, and Islamic scholars kept the teachings of the ancient Greeks alive in the West.  Influential doctors such as Abu’l Qasim (936-1013) and Maimonides (1135-1204) came from Moorish Iberia. 

C. 800

Mayan civilization begins its collapse.  It attained a peak population of several million, before its overtaxed environment failed to support the population.  Famine, war and disease accompanied the collapse of the Mayan population to perhaps a million before 1000 AD, similar to Fertile Crescent dynamics.  The forest recovers and covers the Mayan ruins. 

c. 1050

Northern and central Europe, especially the Germanic lands, engage in great age of deforestation, making way for civilization, clearing about a third of the forest in a couple of centuries.  By 1900, about 25% of the forest remains.

1056

Ferdinand I, who proclaimed himself the Emperor of Spain, undertakes “Reconquest” of the Iberian peninsula.

1066

William the Conqueror leads the Norman invasion of Britain. 

1096

Christian Europe makes its first united act: the first Crusade to Palestine.  The first wide-scaled Jew slaughters in Europe take place as a warm-up for the first Crusade, in France and Germany.  Jews would no longer be safe in Europe, and warfare would be the European way of life until World War II ended. 

c. 1200

Polynesian people begin colonizing New Zealand.  The Islamic culture attains the world’s highest standard of living. 

1244

Massacre at Montségur, the last stronghold of the Cathars.  The Catholic Church eliminates the greatest threat to its religious monopoly, until Martin Luther posts his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517.

360 million

1314

Europe is gripped by major famine that lasts until 1317. 

1346

The Black Death probably originated in China.  In 1347 it swept across Asia to Europe.  The death toll for Europe and Asia was about 50 million people by 1351, wiping out one quarter to one-third of Europe’s population, and periodically recurring for the next three centuries.  Epidemiology being what it was in those days, Jews were accused throughout Europe of causing the plague, and 50,000 Jews were consequently killed.  War and death imagery would become prevalent in European art.

Europe’s population declines from about 75 million to 50 million.  It would not regain 1345 levels until the 16^th century.

c. 1385

Turkish ruler Tamerlane’s armies catapult plague victims into cities they are besieging, in perhaps history’s first instance of biological warfare.

Late 1300s

Beginning in northern Italy’s city-states, a multifaceted phenomenon begins which is now called the Renaissance.  Humanism takes root, which eventually undermines the Catholic Church’s influence. 

1399

The Black Death makes a final visit to Europe, and then disappears for many years. 

1400

After a century of unrelenting epidemics, warfare and calamity, Europe’s population is about half of what it had been in 1300.

400 million. 

1418

Portugal begins colonizing the Madeira Islands, the Azores in 1427 and the Cape Verde Islands in 1450.  The prominent cash crop is sugar, which played to the biological predisposition of humans to sweet food, reflecting the distant ape past in Africa, when fruit comprised most of the diet.  Settlers to Madeiran island of Santo Porto introduce two rabbits, and soon they rapidly reproduce and denude the entire island. 

1444

Portugal enters the African slave trade. 

c. 1450

“Little Ice Age” begins, and runs for four centuries, until about 1850. 

1453

Ottoman armies capture Constantinople, which puts an end to the Eastern Roman Empire, controls Europe’s trade route to the Orient, and inspires effort to find another European route. 

1474

Paolo Toscanelli of Florence suggests to Prince Alfonso V of Portugal that the quickest way to the Indies (spice trade) is sailing across the Atlantic.  Toscanelli was wrong.  Christopher Columbus eventually obtains the letter from Toscanelli that makes the suggestion. 

1479

Portugal cedes Canary Islands to Castile, and Queen Isabella I mounts their invasion.  The conquest of the Guanche was complete in 1496, and the Guanche became an extinct culture by 1600. 

1488

Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias rounds the southern tip of Africa, and Portugal abandons the idea of reaching Asia by crossing the Atlantic Ocean.  Columbus, who made a living in the Portuguese slave trade, takes his plan to sail across the Atlantic Ocean to Castile, which the experts thought was an impossible plan because the distance to Asia would be too great.  Columbus had badly miscalculated the earth’s circumference.  His early attempts to convince the Castilian court fail.

1492

The Spanish “Reconquest” of the Iberian peninsula ends in January with the conquest of Granada, the last city held by the Moors.  Jews are given the options of conversion, expulsion or death.  In April, Columbus finally gets authorization for his doomed plan to reach Asia via the Atlantic Ocean.  He stumbles into the New World in October, enslaving the first humans he meets. 

World population: 470 million, at least half in East Asia and India.  Population in the Americas: 50 to 100 million (this site uses 80). Europe’s population: 70 to 80 million.  Taino population: 2 to 10 million. At least one million on Española (this site uses 2)

1496

The genocide of the Taino is well underway on Española. 

1511

Portuguese traders capture Malacca, in today’s Malaysia, establishing themselves in the spice trade. 

1517

Martin Luther publishes his Ninety-Five Theses, which leads to the Protestant Reformation. 

1518

First New World smallpox epidemic begins, wiping out most of the surviving Taino on Española, who were already only about 1% of their 1492 population.

1520

Smallpox epidemic that began on Española in 1518 comes across with the Cuban governor’s army, probably killing several million people in Mesoamerica. 

1525

European epidemic sweeps through Incan Empire, kills emperor and ignites civil war.

1535

Native American medicine man cures Jacques Cartier’s crew of scurvy on Saint Lawrence River with evergreen foliage and tree bark tea, which was high in vitamin C.

1537

Ambroise Paré accidentally ends the practice of pouring boiling oil on battlefield wounds and initiates more gentle treatment.

1543

Nicolas Copernicus’ posthumously published work theorizes that the earth orbits the sun, re-establishing what Pythagoras thought 2000 years earlier.  Considered the first work of the scientific revolution.  Andreas Vesalius’ De Humani Corporis Fabrica is considered the first work of modern scientific medicine.  It challenges a thousand years of dogma based on Galen’s work.  The Catholic Church increases its efforts to ban books. 

Taino population on Española: 200

1553

Michael Servetus publishes an accurate description of pulmonary circulation.  Escapes Spanish Inquisition to only be burned at the stake in Calvin’s Geneva for his heresies.

1559

Catholic Church publishes its index of banned books.  Index survives until the 1960s.  Tristán de Luna expedition goes where de Soto’s went, hoping to find rich lands to plunder as de Soto did, and finds the region depopulated from aftermath of de Soto expedition. 

c. 1570

Hiawatha and Deganawidah form the Great Law of Peace and the Iroquois Confederation, which influences the creation of the U.S. Constitution.

1585

Walter Raleigh establishes the ill-fated Roanoke colony, to try growing tobacco for export.  

1593

South Pacific islanders cure Richard Hawkins’ crew of scurvy with citrus fruit.

1599

Bubonic plague visits Spain, carrying off 10% of its population.  Spain ends the 16^th century probably worse off than it began it. 

Native population of the Americas: 8 million

1600

Giordano Bruno burned at the stake for his heresies, notably for stating that the earth orbits the sun.

1604

King James I publishes A Counter-Blaste to Tobacco, and tours England to warn of its dangers.

1610

Galileo Galilee publishes his discovery of Jupiter’s moons, using the newly invented telescope.

1614

Squanto is captured by John Smith’s men.

1618

Thirty Years’ War, Europe’s last great religious war, begins.

1619

Squanto returns as interpreter with English, and discovers that his entire tribe had been wiped out by European disease.  The Puritans would settle on that tribe’s land. 

1620

Puritans land at Plymouth, and Squanto teaches them how to survive in the New World.  Squanto dies in 1622 of disease. 

1628

William Harvey publishes his research on function of human heart.

1638

Three million pounds of tobacco per year are exported from present-day Virginia, reaching 17 million in 1672.  Caribbean sugar growing becomes a business on Barbados, the great period of New World sugar growing begins.

1650

By this time, the Dutch have taken the Asian spice trade from the Portuguese. 

1668

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek invents the microscope. 

1682

Frenchman La Salle explores Mississippi river, finds it deserted, depopulated by disease left by de Soto’s expedition. 

1687

Isaac Newton’s Principia is published. 

1750

The Enlightenment begins in France at about this time. 

1754

James Lind’s experiments aboard HMS Salisbury prove that citrus fruit cures scurvy.

1763

Lord Jeffrey Amherst suggests deliberately introducing smallpox amongst the Native Americans who resisted the English invasion.  The subsequent epidemic kills more than 100,000 natives.

1769

James Cook visits New Zealand and claims it in the name of Great Britain.  The Maoris had eliminated about a third of New Zealand’s forests by that time, and large animals, such as the Moa, were about extinct.  In the first century after the European invasion, more than 75% of the Maori population dies off.  Similar population collapse accompanies the Europeans wherever they appear in the South pacific.  James Watt patents the modern steam engine. 

1770

British exploitation of Bengal leads to a great famine that killed one-third of Bengal’s peasantry.  Famines always greatly increased wherever Europe had colonial dominance. 

1776

American Revolution begins.  Adam Smith published his Wealth of Nations. 

1778

James Cook “discovers” the Hawaiian Islands.  His crew’s venereal disease rapidly spreads through the islands, quickly depopulating Hawaii.  The Hawaiian population possibly approaches one million inhabitants.  Within 100 years, fewer than 50,000 Hawaiians were alive. 

1881

William Halsted begins his surgical career in the United States.

1786

Because of the American Revolution, England can no longer ship its criminals to North American penal colonies.  Australia is picked as the next English penal colony.  The population of the aborigines in southeastern region of Australia (site of the penal colony) declines by about 95% in 60 years. 

1788

Britain claims Tasmania, and the 5000 aboriginal inhabitants are rendered extinct in only 40 years.

1789

French Revolution begins.

1793

Benjamin Rush begins era of “heroic” medicine in U.S. during yellow-fever epidemic.

1794

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier is beheaded in France.  His work with oxygen, combustion and respiration founds modern chemistry. 

1795

260 years after Jacques Cartier’s crew is cured of scurvy, and more than one million preventable deaths later, the British navy begins issuing citrus juice to its sailors.

1796

Samuel Hahnemann first uses the term homeopathy to describe a new system of medicine that he was developing.  Edward Jenner performs first smallpox inoculation. 

1825

Homeopathy comes to the United States.

Humanity passes 1 billion

1835

Charles Cagniard-Latour works with yeast, and theorizes that it is alive.  Theodor Schwann, the father of histology, confirms Cagniard-Latour’s work at about the same time and takes it further.  

1839

Three million Americans use Samuel Thomson’s brand of medicine. 

1844

American Institute of Homeopathy founded.  Anesthetic properties of nitrous oxide first used by American dentist Horace Wells.

1845

American Medical Association (AMA) founded.  Irish potato famine begins. 

1847

Ignaz Semmelweis invents Western medicine’s first sterile practices, used in maternity wards. 

1848

Louis Pasteur discovers molecular chirality, beginning his career.  Revolution sweeps Europe.  Marx presents his Communist Manifesto. 

1854

Antoine Béchamp begins his Beacon Experiments.  German parasitologists have documented parasitic pleomorphic life cycles, ending the spontaneous-generation controversy regarding parasites.

1858

Rudolf Virchow publishes his Cellular Pathology. 

1859

First American oil well drilled.  Charles Darwin publishes his Origin of the Species. 

1861

American Civil War begins.  Calomel is the standard medicine for the troops.  Antiseptic surgery is not yet invented.  Pasteur tried taking credit for discovery of Béchamp.  Semmelweis publishes his great work on sanitary practices. 

1863

John Rockefeller enters the oil industry and concentrates on taking over oil refining. 

1864

Pasteur publicly takes credit for overturning spontaneous-generation theory.  The germ theory of disease follows from his work.  The AMA steps up its anti-abortion campaign.

1866

Béchamp calls the sub-cellular life forms that he discovered microzyma. 

1870

Joseph Lister produces his first report of the success of sterile surgical procedures. 

1876

El Niño-caused drought that lasts three years, combined with European export crop imperialism, devastates India, China and Brazil, causing as many as 30 million deaths from starvation and disease.  William W. Keen begins using Joseph Lister’s sterile surgical procedures at the St. Mary’s Hospital in Philadelphia.

1878

Yellow-fever epidemic begins in New Orleans.  People treated with homeopathy have less than half the death rate of the general population.  Congress is impressed.  One million American families use homeopathy.

1880

Homeopathy movement splits in United States, leading to its demise.  John Rockefeller’s empire controls 95% of U.S. oil refining. 

1881

William Halsted begins his surgical career in the United States.

1884

New York Cancer Hospital opens.  Later named Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the world’s most influential cancer research organization. 

1887

John Rockefeller begins rebuilding a Baptist seminary into the University of Chicago.

1896

Emil Grubbé invents X-Ray treatment of cancer. 

1899

George Simmons hired by the AMA.  He soon takes it over. 

1.6 billion

1910

Flexner Report is issued, and directs Carnegie and Rockefeller “philanthropic” funding of medical schools. 

1913

Ludlow Massacre committed by Rockefeller strikebreakers.  Rockefeller founds American Cancer Society predecessor organization.  Morris Fishbein is recruited to the AMA by Simmons. 

1914

Pasteur Institute confirms bacterial pleomorphism. 

1924

Divorce scandal forces Simmons to step down at AMA.  Fishbein takes over.  He tries to buy out Hoxsey’s cancer treatment and begins persecuting Dinshah Ghadiali. 

1927

John Rockefeller begins funding the Memorial Hospital, later named Sloan-Kettering.  Rockefeller’s Empire enters into its first cartel agreement with I.G. Farben.

1929

American Tobacco Company begins campaign to addict American women to tobacco.  Wall Street collapses later that year. 

1930

2.0 billion

1931

The findings of Royal Rife’s microscopes begin generating great scientific interest, and Thomas Rivers of the Rockefeller Institute tries discouraging it.  Three independent studies conclude that the fluorine ion is responsible for tooth mottling.  

1935

Under Fishbein’s guidance, Phillip Morris launches an ad campaign for its cigarettes, making a health claim to do so, quickly becoming the biggest U.S. cigarette seller.  JAMA’s pages are filled with cigarette ads for a generation.

1939

After hearing of miraculous success with Rife’s treatment, Fishbein tries buying into Rife’s company.  When that fails, the AMA wages lawsuit, destroying Rife’s company.  Nazi Germany is in midst of anti-smoking campaign led by Hitler, as well as beginning World War II.

1942

The FDA has Dr. William Koch thrown into jail. 

1946

Dr. Max Gerson presents recovered cancer patients using his treatment to a U.S. Senate committee. 

1947

Oscar Ewing, ALCOA’s lead counsel and the world’s largest fluoride polluter, heads government effort to fluoridate America’s water supplies. 

1949

In the wake of Harry Hoxsey’s victory in court, Morris Fishbein is dumped from the AMA, ending his 25-year reign.  Fishbein goes to work for cigarette-maker Lorillard.

1950

Right after Fishbein’s fall, JAMA publishes its first report on the link between smoking and cancer.  ALCOA is selling its sodium fluoride refining waste to municipal water districts in the most profitable hazardous waste disposal program in history. 

1952

With Fishbein’s well-paid help, Lorillard begins an ad blitz promoting its asbestos cigarette filter, using research that Fishbein helped design. 

1953

Fitzgerald Report finds that organized medicine wiped out a dozen alternative cancer treatments, including Krebiozen and Hoxsey’s treatment. 

1954

JAMA finally discontinues running cigarette ads, because the drug advertisers complained. 

1957

Wilhelm Reich dies in a U.S. federal penitentiary.  His work was burned, in U.S. and Nazi Germany.

1960

John Crane thrown into prison for pursuing Rife’s work. 

3.0 billion

1964

American Surgeon General releases report that makes smoking hazard clear.  The AMA and tobacco companies produce their own “research” that attempts to counter the Surgeon General’s report.  Gaston Naessens is run out of France. 

1977

Sloan-Kettering rejects laetrile as a cancer treatment, although its famous chemotherapy researcher Kanematsu Sugiura found positive results.  It fires Ralph Moss for making that contradiction public. 

1983

Dr. Ernst Krebs, the discoverer of laetrile, goes to jail. 

1984

5.0 billion

1989

Gaston Naessens is put on trial. 

1991

Jimmy Keller is kidnapped by U.S. Justice Department from Mexico. 

1996

Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski is put on trial.  

1998

Charles Pixley is released from prison.  His crime was trying to make 714X a legal import.  Jimmy Keller is put back into prison. 

1999

6.0 billion

2001

714X treatment making news in the U.S.  Keller gets outs of prison again, has stroke.