In an age where surgeons wore the same stained coats as proof of experience, Ignaz Semmelweis noticed a horror no one else dared to trace — that doctors themselves were carrying death from dissecting rooms into delivery wards. He proved handwashing could save mothers, watched the mortality rate collapse almost overnight… and was laughed at for it. Semmelweis didn’t fail — his century did. Only after his death did medicine turn back and recognize the man it once dismissed as

Insulin did not arrive as a single spark — it was a relay. A Romanian physiologist in Bucharest, Nicolae Paulescu, isolated a pancreatic extract that lowered sugar in diabetic dogs and published his findings in 1921. Months later in Toronto, Frederick Banting and his team refined a similar extract into something far more powerful — safe enough to inject into a dying boy, strong enough to pull him back from the edge. One man revealed the hormone. Another made it save lives.

A New and Terrifying Illness In the early nineteenth century, Europe was struck by the arrival of a mysterious disease that spread with...