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Thermometer
Link Galileo Galilei invented a simple water thermoscope, which for the first time, granted temperature deviations to be measured. Today, Galileo's invention is called the Galileo Thermometer, even though by classification it was really a thermoscope. It was a container full of bulbs of changing mass, each with a temperature design, the resilience of water changes with temperature, some of the bulbs sink while others float, the lowest bulb showed what temperature it was. -
Microscope
Link Despite popular belief, evidence proves that the first compound microscope appeared in the Netherlands in the late 1500s by two Dutch spectacle makers, Zaccharias Janssen and his son Hans. While testing with numerous lenses in a tube, they found out that close objects seemed greatly enlarged. Their first microscopes, however, were more of a toy than a logical utensil since maximum enlargement was only around 9x and the images were somewhat blurred. -
Ambulance
LinkThe notion of ambulance provision began in Europe with the Knights of St John. The Surgeon-in-Chief of the French Grand Army, "Baron Dominiquie Larrey" made the original official army medical corp. Skilled assistants with gear moved out from the field clinics to give first-aid to the injured onto battlegrounds and carried them back by stretcher, hand-carts and wagons to the field infirmaries. Since then it has been used to transport the sick and the injured to safety. -
Smallpox Vaccine
Link At the time smallpox was considered as one of the most deadly human diseases. The smallpox vaccine was the first effective serum ever to be industrialized and remains the only successful treatment for the smallpox disease. It was finalized by Edward Jenner who studied an observation of his, when milkmaids who had the cowpox virus did not get smallpox. In 1980, the World Health Organization declared smallpox an exterminated illness. It was a small solution to a big problem. -
Hypodermic Needle (syringe needle)
Link Edward Jenner did the first vaccination. In the eighteenth century an English medic named Edward Jenner started to study the relation among smallpox and the lesser disease, cowpox. Edward Jenner published his discoveries and within three years 100,000 people in Britain had been immunized. The first vaccination needle was a thin steel bar with two points at one end. The customary method is to dip the needle in the vaccine, and then rupture a person's arm. -
Stethoscope
linkA French doctor named Rene Theophile Hyacinthe Laënnec at the Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital in Paris invented the first stethoscope. He was reluctant to place his head against a female patient’s chest, which was the common method of the time, so he rolled a sheet of paper into a tube and used it to listen to her heart. He was happy to learn that the heart beats were openly audible, and this discovery later lead to one of the most important inventions in science. -
Contact Lenses
Link The first concept of contact lenses was made by Leonardo da Vinci in 1508, however the inventor of the first contact lense to correct vision was a Swiss physician named Adolf E. Fick. The first lenses were made from ploymethyl methacrylate, and could be worn for over 16 hours. The availabilty of the rigid permeable contacts provided just as sharp or even sharper vision then the current bifocals. The improvement of it led to greater lense choice for broader outlooks, selling over 90 million. -
X-Ray Machine
Link While working late in his laboratory, Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen investigated a peculiar glow coming from a screen of barium platinocyanide. He spent the next month and a half to figure out the cause. This lead to the discovery of the X-Ray. After being tested to see through to the bone it was advertised throughout New York. It later caught on in hospitals and was then improved upon for ultrasounds. -
Band-Aid
Link Employee to Johnson & Johnson, Earle Dickson created on of the most common, but important creations in health, the Band-Aid. It started with his rather clumsy wife Josephine who would always cut herself when cooking. At the time the only badage was cloth and tape; however, it would fall off quickly. To solve this, he took some of the cloth and glue it onto the tape. It was more efficient for small wounds and was mass-produced throughout the world. -
Iron Lung (respirator)
LinkThe first current respirator nicknamed the "iron lung" was created by Harvard medical researchers Philip Drinker and Louis Agassiz Shaw. The inventors used an iron container and two vacuum cleaners to make their sample respirator, the iron lung applied a push-pull gesture on the chest. The device performs the task of the muscles that control breathing. It was the first of several inventions designed to keep people alive who are unable to breathe unaided. -
Cardioverter Defibrillator
Link While studying the effects of shocks on the human heart, William B. Kouwenhoven, he had the ideas for a device that could jump start a heart. The prototype was first used on a dead dog and proved successful. Then after saving a human, it has gone through many improvements and saved many lives. Currently, it is used to regulate a heart beat from suffering cardiac arrest or from heart surgery. -
Pacemaker
Link A Canadian researcher who was a member of the National Research Council, named John Hopps, was experimenting with radio frequency heating to restore body temperature when he made a discovery: if a heart stopped beating, it could be jump started by using motorized or electric means. This sparked his invention of the world's first cardiac pacemaker. However the first form was not perfect and was too immense to be inside a heart. Therefore, it was external rather than the current model. -
Ultrasound Machine
LinkObstetrician Ian Donald and engineer Tom Brown developed the first prototype systems based on the sonar system used on ships. They perfected its clinical use, and by the end of the 1950s, ultrasound was routinely used in Glasgow. It didn’t really take off in Britain until the 1970s, and it was well into the 1970s before it became widely used in America, he said. By the end of the 20th century, ultrasound imaging had become routine in maternity clinics throughout the developed world. -
MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) Vaccine
Link After demonstrating its protection and effectiveness, John Enders and colleagues professed their measles vaccine capable of averting contamination. Their Edmonston-B strain of measles virus was converted into a vaccine licensed in the United States. The universal measles initiative to diminish measles worldwide has had amazing success at plummeting deaths from measles from 733,000 in 2000 to 164,000 in 2008. -
Cataract Laserphaco Probe
LinkPatricia Bath's dedication to the treatment and prevention of blindness steered her to create the Cataract Laserphaco Probe. The probe was made to use the clout of a laser to rapidly and painlessly vaporize cataracts from patients’ eyes, exchanging the current technique of using a crushing, drill-like machine to eradicate the diseases. With another creation, Bath was able to reinstate vision to humas who had been sightless for over 30 years.
