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Eyeglasses
The earliest known document mentioning concave lenses being used for correcting myopia was a letter from the Duke of Milan to his ambassador in Florence ordering three dozen eyeglasses, including "a dozen that are suitable for near vision, that is for the elderly." -
Sethoscope
René Laënnec, a French physician, invented the stethoscope, a trumpet-shaped wooden tube, to examine a very fat woman whose heart he could not hear by pressing his ear to her chest -
Anesthesia
Dr. Crawford W. Long performed the first operation using diethyl ether as an anesthetic. He pressed an ether-soaked towel against the patient's face to put him to sleep, then removed one of two tumors from his neck. He billed the patient $2, itemizing the cost of the ether as well as the operation. -
X-ray
Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, a German physicist, discovered the X-ray, an invention so remarkable that many did not believe the first reports of its use. The New York Times referred to it mockingly as Dr. Röntgen's "alleged discovery of how to photograph the invisible." -
Electrocardiogram
Dr. Willem Einthoven of the Netherlands invented the first practical electrocardiogram. The original weighed 600 pounds, had a water cooling system for its gigantic electromagnets and needed five operators. In 1924 he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his invention. -
Electroencephalogram
Dr. Hans Berger of Germany recorded the first human electroencephalogram, or EEG. His assertion that the brain's electrical impulses could be recorded was generally met with derision, and five years passed before Dr. Berger published his technique for recording the electrical activity of the human brain from the surface of the head -
Pacemaker
Dr. Albert S. Hyman demonstrated a heart pacemaker. The device was about 10 inches long and weighed less than a pound; it supplied the heart with a current with adjustable voltage. The device, Dr. Hyman said, had been used in seven cases, although the results were good in only two of them. -
Cardiac Defibrillation
A Cleveland cardiovascular surgeon, Claude Beck, successfully defibrillated the heart of a 14-year-old boy during cardiac surgery, bringing an apparently dead person back to life. Although the principle of defibrillation had been known for decades, this was probably its first successful clinical application. -
Fetal Ultrasound
Dr. Edward Hon of Yale reported using a Doppler monitor on a woman's abdomen to detect fetal heartbeat. Ultrasound's principles had been known for more than a century (a Swedish physicist, Christian Andreas Doppler, gave his name to the phenomenon in 1842), but this was its first use in prenatal care. -
Adaptive Artificial Knee
The Rheo knee, a plastic prosthetic joint that adapts to a user's walking style and changes in terrain, was produced by the Ossur Corporation.
