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Period: to
1900
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First electrocardiograph machine
the First electrocardiograph machine was invented in the start of the 19th century by Alexander Muirhead. -
first mordern respiratior
Philip Drinker and Louis Agassiz Shaw were the two people who built the first modern practical respirator. They were both Harvard medical researchers. -
artificial cardiac pacemaker
In 1926, Dr Mark C Lidwell of the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital of Sydney, supported by physicist Edgar H Booth of the University of Sydney, devised a portable apparatus which "plugged into a lighting point" and in which "One pole was applied to a skin pad soaked in strong salt solution" while the other pole "consisted of a needle insulated except at its point, and was plunged into the appropriate cardiac chamber". -
dialysis
Dr. Willem Kolff, a Dutch physician, constructed the first working dialyzer in 1943 during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. -
soft contact lens
In 1949, the first "corneal" lenses were developed.These were much smaller than the original scleral lenses, as they sat only on the cornea rather than across all of the visible ocular surface, and could be worn up to sixteen hours per day. PMMA corneal lenses became the first contact lenses to have mass appeal through the 1960s, as lens designs became more sophisticated with improving manufacturing (lathe) technology. -
First artificial hip replacement
English surgeon John Charnley applies engineering principles to orthopedics and develops the first artificial hip replacement -
human gnome project
The project began with the culmination of several years of work supported by the US Department of Energy, in particular workshops in 1984 and 1986 and a subsequent initiative of the US Department of Energy. This 1987 report stated boldly, "The ultimate goal of this initiative is to understand the human genome" and "knowledge of the human is as necessary to the continuing progress of medicine and other health sciences as knowledge of human anatomy has been for the present state of medicine. -
First cochlear implant surgery
In 1972, a speech processor was developed to interface with the House 3M single-electrode implant and was the first to be commercially marketed. More than 1,000 of these devices were implanted between 1972 to the mid 1980s. In 1980, the age criteria for use of this device was lowered from 18 to 2 years. ). During the 1980’s, several hundred children had been implanted with the House 3M single channel device.
