Accidental Medical Discoveries: Tales of Tenacity, Sagacity, and Plain Dumb Luck

Some important advances in medicine have come about as a result of chance conversations, fortuitous accidents, or plain dumb luck. Accidental Medical Discoveries tells the stories of the origins of more than twenty-five of these major medical advances where chance or serendipity played a crucial role – including the following: • An RAF eye surgeon, who sees a tiny plastic shard in the eye of a wounded pilot and is inspired to develop the first artificial lens; • An Italian doctor fascinated by the swimmers in a polluted ocean discovers a new class of antibiotics, the cephalosporins; • An unemployed orthopedic surgeon, preparing to teach a subject he knows little about, instead devises an experiment to isolate insulin; • A Dutch bacteriologist observes a similarity between a disorder in chickens and one in man, which leads to the discovery of Vitamin B1; • A gifted chemist looking for the cause of sweet clover disease in cattle, discovers the first anti-coagulant, dicumerol; • A chance conversation with a zookeeper about lion cubs leads to the prevention of rickets in infants and children; • London weather played a crucial role in the discovery of penicillin; • A four-day lab holiday clarified the cause of stomach ulcers; • Viagra, which had originally been developed as a treatment for coronary heart disease, went on to be a world-wide best-seller due to its unexpected side-effects. Accidental Medical Discoveries is neither a medical nor a pharmacology treatise. Rather, it provides insight into how the famous discoveries described in this book actually came about. They all occurred by chance, and they all occurred because of a prepared mind grasped the significance of what had been discovered. In the words of Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Györgyi, “Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.”