Images Dated 14th July 2004

Samuel Hahnemann, German physician

Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), German physician and founder of homeopathy. His theory was that an illness may be cured by administering minute doses of a drug which causes the same symptoms. The symptoms, he reasoned, were an effect of the body's fight against disease. During experiments on himself and his friends he found that the smaller the administered dose, the greater its effectiveness. In 1811, he published his results in Homeopathic Materia Medica. He used his methods with some success during a typhus epidemic in France in 1812. Although his results were criticised, homeopathy spread rapidly in the ensuing decades

© SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

False colour scanning EM, head of bulldog ant

False-colour scanning electron micrograph of the head of a bulldog ant. This is probably a Black bulldog ant, Myrmecia forficata, found in coastal Australia and Tasmania. Bulldog ants can be up to two centimetres long, and their powerful jaws (shown here in red) produce a very painful and unpleasant bite. They live in fairly small colonies of a few hundred in underground nests. The adults feed on the sweet juices of plants, but they hunt aggressively for insects and spiders to feed to their larvae in the nest. Magnification: x12 at 6x6cm size

© DR JEREMY BURGESS/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Jean Fournier, French dermatologist

Jean Alfred Fournier (1832-1914), French dermatologist. Fournier studied medicine in Paris and worked at the Hopital du Midi, the Hotel-Dieu and the Hopital Saint Louis. He mainly worked on the venereal disease syphilis, and described the condition of congenital syphilis in 1883. Several medical conditions are named after him including Fournier's gangrene (infection of the scrotum commonly associated with diabetes), Fournier's sign (scars around the mouth caused by lesions in congenital syphilis), and Fournier's tibia (thickening and bowing of the tibia in congenital syphilis)

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