Plague Doctor
is a special doctor who treated people who had the plague. The towns that had large epidemics of the plague hired these doctors, who were often “second rate” doctors who were not trained as surgeons, but instead were struggling to run a practice within a small town. The doctors often wore masks that resembles beaks in order to keep them from inhaling “putrid air, which was seen as the cause of the infection.” These beaks often held scented materials such as ambergris, balm-mint leaves, cloves, rose petals, and storax.
Doomsday: this simple statement refers to the idea of the world ending or drastically changing due to a change in the environment around the world. In this case, doomsday might mean the day that the unknown chemical gets released into the world
In-vitro fertilization: is a process by which a sperm fertilizes an egg outside of the body. This process is a fertility treatment that is used when many other reproductive technologies have not worked. IVF is quite controversial in the medical world, due to the fact that scientist and parents will use preimplantation genetic diagnosis to screen for specific traits, and will either choose to carry on with the process or choose another egg depending on the results. The worry that many biomedical ethicists have is that the world will soon be full of “designer babies”
Sophie Robart-srobart@middlebury.edu