Medicine Through Time Assignment - Greek, 19th Century and 20th Century Medicine

By WalkingEncyclopedia

  • Smallpox Vaccine

    On May 14, 1796, Jenner took fluid from a cowpox blister and scratched it into the skin of James Phipps, an eight-year-old boy. A single blister rose up on the spot, but James soon recovered. On July 1, Jenner inoculated the boy again, this time with smallpox matter, and no disease developed. The vaccine was a success.

  • Stethoscope

    Invention of it in 1816, René Laennec

  • Animals are cells

    Theodor Schwann (Germany: 1839) realised that animal matter was made up of cells, not 'humours'. This was the vital breakthrough of knowledge that at last destroyed belief in the old 'humoral' pathology of the Greeks.

  • Anaesthetics

    Thomas Green Morton
    1) Discovers anaesthetics.
    2) In Boston, we have the first use of it in 1846.

  • 1st Woman Doctor

    Elizabeth Blackwell – English born female.
    1) First women doctor after graduating medical school in the USA in 1849.
    2) First women to be added to British Medical Register.

  • Nursing

    Florence Nightingale/ Mary Seacole
    Nursing no longer was inferior to being a doctor.
    2) Improved sanitation and death rates fell from cholera in the Crimean War 1853-56.

  • Cholera

    Dr John Snow
    Considered pioneer of modern epidemiology – the science of why, and how often, particular diseases affect different groups of people.

  • Antiseptic

    Joseph Lister - British surgeon
    Introduces antiseptic in 1865

  • Staining Bacteria

    Robert Koch
    1) Finds a new way of staining bacteria to identify them.

  • X-Rays

    Professor Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen
    Discovered X-rays.

  • X-ray through food

    Walter Cannon (America) used a barium meal with x-rays to track the passage of food through the digestive system.

  • Babies dying IMR

    1) The number of the mother dying from postnatal infection went from 20% to 4.7%.
    2) 1899 -more than 16% of babies born alive died by the age of 1.

  • Blood Types

    Dr Karl Landsteiner, Austrian biologist in 1901 discovered blood types.

  • First Hormone

    Starling and Bayliss (England: 1902) discovered the first hormone.

  • IMR Rule 1

    1902: Midwives had to be qualified,

  • Invention of Electrocardiogram

    Willem Einthoven was a Dutch doctor and physiologist. He invented the first practical electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG) in 1903 and received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1924 for it.

  • IMR Rule 2

    1906: Cheap school meals to be given to children

  • IMR Rule 3 and 4

    1907: Medical inspections to be made at schools
    1907: Health visitors to be informed about all births

  • IMR Rule 5

    1909: Back to back houses outlawed,

  • Magic bullet Salvarsan

    1) Paul Erlich and his team had tried 605 varieties of an arsenic compound to cure syphilis, a common venereal disease. The 606th killed the bacteria. They named it Salvarsan 606.(1909). The magic bullet.

  • Histamine

    Henry Dale (Britain) discovered the chemical histamine, which is produced by the body during an allergic reaction. This allowed him to understand allergic response and surgical shock.

  • Vitamins

    Casimir Funk (Poland: 1912) discovered the first vitamins, and realised that some diseases were caused simply by poor diet.

  • Preventing blood from clotting

    Richard Lewishohn, American physician in 1915 found out that adding sodium citrate prevented blood from clotting.

  • IMR Rule 6

    1918: Antenatal and postnatal clinics established

  • IMR Rule 7

    1919: New houses to be built for the working class

  • Insulin

    Canadian scientists Fredrick Banting and Charles Best isolate the hormone insulin in 1921.

  • Oestrogen

    Edgar Allen (America) discovered oestrogen (the hormone that powers femaleness)

  • Digestive System

    William Beaumont
    1) Studied the digestive system of Alexis St Martin (Canadian), who had an open hole in the stomach.
    2) Put food through the hole every day.
    3) Published his findings in a book.

  • 1st experiments with Penicillin

    Fleming tries to find an antibacterial agent capable of killing invading bacteria. Experiments on staphylococcus bacteria. He cannot achieve the breakthrough he requires and abandons his research.

  • IMR Rule 8

    1930: Slum housing to be cleared.

  • Sulphonamides

    1) With the aid of the new powerful electron microscopes that had been used since the early 1930s, we discovered an active ingredient called sulphonamide, which came from coal tar.
    2) This discovery of sulphonamides led to the development of drugs which cured gonorrhoea, pneumonia, meningitis and scarlet fever.

  • Electron Microscope

    The invention of the electron microscope allowed doctors to see bacteria and viruses for the first time.

  • Magic bullet Prontosil

    Gerhard Domagk found the second magic bullet called Prontosil, a red dye. He tried it on mice and then his daughter, who was affected by the streptococcal infection.

  • Homes

    1) 1918: After the First World War, the British Prime Minister Lloyd George promised the soldiers returning from the battlegrounds of Europe 'homes fit for heroes'. The government set itself a target of building half-a-million decent homes by 1933.

  • Free School Milk Act

    Although the economic depression of the 1930s caused government to cut back on spending, it passed the Free School Milk Act and encouraged local councils to give poor children free school meals.

  • Testosterone

    Ernst Laqueur isolated testosterone, the hormone that creates maleness.

  • Rhesus Factor

    Dr Karl Landsteiner, Austrian biologist in 1937 discovered Rhesus factors.

  • Achieve a breakthrough with Penicillin

    In 1939, Howard Florey, an Australian-born physiologist and chemist Ernst Boris Chain –refugee from Nazi Germany – achieve a breakthrough and save a lot of lives during WWII.

  • NHS Suggestion

    2) 1942 - William Beveridge suggests a free NHS.

  • Nobel Prize for Penicllin Developers

    Fleming, Florey and Chain are awarded for Nobel Prize in Medicine.

  • NHS Founded

    1) The NHS was founded on the 5th July 1948 by Aneurin Bevan, who was a Welsh Labour Party Politician.

  • DNA

    Rosalind Franklin, James Watson Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins

  • Contraceptic pills

    The Mexican company Syntex developed norethisterone, which prevents ovulation - leading to production of the first contraceptive pills.

  • Vaccine against Polio

    American doctor Jonas Salk introduces a vaccine against polio – an epidemic disease that can cause death or paralysis in children.

  • Stem Cells

    Leroy Stevens (America) discovered stem cells.

  • Kidney Transplant

    First successful kidney transplant in Boston, the USA in 1954

  • Clean Air Act

    The Clean Air Act imposed smokeless zones in cities and reduced smog

  • Ministry of Health

    1) A Ministry of Health was set up to look after sanitation, health care and disease, as well as the training of doctors, nurses and dentists, and maternity and children's welfare.

  • Gray's Anatomy

    Henry Gray (Scotland: 1858) wrote 'Gray's Anatomy', which had over 1,000 illustrations. Many people bought a copy to own at home. After the 1870s, pupils started studying anatomy in schools.

  • Nobel Prize for DNA Scientists

    Produced an image, discovered DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) was a double helix and received a Nobel Prize in 1962.

  • Heart Transplant

    Christiaan Barnard, pioneering South African heart surgeon, in 1967, December the 3rd, completed a heart transplant on 59-year-old Louis Washansky, a road accident victim.

  • Endoscope

    Endoscopes - fibre optic cables with a light source - enabled doctors to 'see' inside the body.

  • CT Scanning

    1) Computed Tomography (CT) scanning is used for the first time in 1972.

  • CAT Scanner

    Geoffrey Hounsfield (Britain) invented the CAT scanner, which uses x-ray images from a number of angles to build up a 3D image of the inside of the body.

  • Smallpox Eradicated

    Smallpox vaccine makes smallpox become the first disease to become completely eradicated in 1977.

  • IVF

    1) Louise Joy Brown is best known for being the first ‘test tube baby’, who was born via IVF on the 25th July 1978.
    Patrick Steptoe (Britain) developed IVF fertility treatment

  • MRI Scanning

    MRI scans were developed to monitor the electrical activity of the brain.

  • Keyhole Surgery

    1) 1980 sees the use of keyhole surgery to look inside the body.

  • Black Report

    The Black Report stated that huge inequalities in health still existed between the rich and the poor in Britain.

  • AIDS

    Recognised as new disease

  • Legs for Athletes

    American athlete/amputee Van Philips introduced the Cheetah, C-shaped carbon graphite feet.

  • HIV

    3 years after AIDS is recognised as a new disease, French scientist Luc Montagnier identifies HIV, the virus that causes it by weakening the defence system.

  • Visible Human Project

    In the Visible Human project undertaken in the US, the bodies of two criminals (a male and a female) were frozen, cut into 1mm slices, stained, photographed and stored as 3-d images on the internet.

  • Human Genome Project

    The Human Genome project undertaken in the US mapped all the genes in the human body - 40,000 of them. Humans share their gene make-up with much of the natural world, leading scientists to joke that because of the genes we share, human beings are 60 per cent banana!

  • Cloning of sheep

    In 1997 Scottish researchers bred Dolly, the first cloned sheep.