Medicine questions

The filiform papillae are the most numerous of the lingual papillae. They are responsible for giving the tongue its texture and the sensation of touch. Unlike the other kinds of papillae, they do not contain taste buds.

This famous phrase is a motto of medicine. Most probably, it is a paraphrase of Hippocrates’ words.

“In vitro” means the medical procedure takes place in the laboratory, opposite to “in vivo” - meaning “in the body”.

REM is a phase of sleep during which a sleeper has dreams. It is observed in mammals and birds.

Tobacco was recognised by Europeans as a medicine soon after it was first imported from the New World, and tobacco smoke was used by western medical practitioners as a tool against cold and drowsiness. During the early 19th century the practice fell into decline, when it was discovered that the principal active agent in tobacco smoke, nicotine, is poisonous. A tobacco smoke enema was employed by the indigenous peoples of North America to stimulate respiration, injecting the smoke with a rectal tube

Erythropoietin is a glycoprotein cytokine secreted by the kidney in response to cellular hypoxia; it stimulates red blood cell production in the bone marrow. Erythropoietin is also produced in perisinusoidal cells in the liver. Liver production predominates in the fetal and perinatal period; renal production predominates in adulthood.

Pedanius Dioscorides (40 – 90 AD) was a Greek physician, pharmacologist, botanist, and author of De Materia Medica - a 5-volume Greek encyclopedia about herbal medicine and related medicinal substances (a pharmacopeia), that was widely read for more than 1,500 years. He was employed as a physician in the Roman army.

Uracil is one of the four nucleobases in the nucleic acid of RNA that are represented by the letters A, G, C and U. The others are adenine (A), cytosine (C), and guanine (G). In RNA, uracil binds to adenine via two hydrogen bonds. In DNA, the uracil nucleobase is replaced by thymine. Uracil is a demethylated form of thymine.

Andreas Vesalius was a Belgian born anatomist and physician, born in 1514 into a family of physicians. He is considered the father of modern anatomy and his work the beginning of modern medicine. In 1543, at the young age of 29, Vesalius published his most important work, De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem (Seven Books on the Fabric of the Human Body), generally known as the Fabrica. The Fabrica is the most famous anatomy book ever written and also the first book on human anatomy to be reasonably accurate.

In the hypothalamus, oxytocin is made in magnocellular neurosecretory cells of the supraoptic and paraventricular nuclei, and is stored in Herring bodies at the axon terminals in the posterior pituitary. It is then released into the blood from the posterior lobe (neurohypophysis) of the pituitary gland.