What Are Adrenal Glands and What Is Their Function?
There is a little chunk of tissue over each of your kidneys called adrenal glands. Of the adrenal glands’ many functions, one of which is to make the titular adrenaline, another is to make corticosteroids, so named because they are made in your adrenal’s cortex (tissue). Steroids are manufactured by the adrenal to tone down your immune response, to temper it, so it doesn’t go wild, and the first one isolated was cortisone (hydrocortisone), which snagged a Nobel Prize.
Topical Steroids
How Do Topical Steroids Work?
Topical steroids work by being absorbed through the skin to its cells and into each nucleus where they affect the synthesis—either positively or negatively—of proteins there. In this way, proteins are manipulated so that inflammatory processes can be inhibited and anti-inflammatory processes enhancedi.
Medicinal Use For Eczema and Psoriasis
Topical steroids are an i ...
Who Discovered Penicillin And When Was It Discovered?
Perhaps nothing as important had been discovered that so impacted the life expectancy of the population as a whole. Except the toothbrush—that is, dental hygiene. If you can’t eat, you can’t live!iii
The story of an old mold
In 1928, Dr. Alexander Fleming, the bacteriologist at a Scotland hospital, returned from vacation to find his lab unkempt while he was gone. In fact, he noted that a mold had contaminated his culture dishes. Upon using a microscope to inspect the mold, he found the staphylococci culture he had was not growing well amid this mold. He wrote a paper published in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology, which was duly noted then ignored until a professor of pathology at Oxford came across iti.
But Who Invented Penicillin?
This professor, Dr. Howard Florey, in 1938—ten years after the mold incident—decided to apply the Fleming article’s information to a p ...
