Medicine is advancing at great strides. Maybe slower than our health needs, but enough to guarantee more years of life for human beings. Thanks to new discoveries, new techniques and a lot of scientific research, diseases that plagued the population are controlled, if not extinct.
The coronavirus pandemic was yet another moment when the importance of the area became evident, acting quickly to prevent the death toll from rising. It is worth diving into history and remembering some advances in medicine that were fundamental in making our life expectancy grow. Check.
1. Vaccines
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This list would not have been written and you wouldn’t be here reading it if it weren’t for vaccines. And that was well before the coronavirus vaccine. They were invented at the end of the 18th century. It was up to Edward Jenner to discover the logic of vaccination when he observed that people who had been infected with cowpox were no longer contagious.
Evolution would come in the same century, with Louis Pasteur and the vaccines against cholera and anthrax. However, it is the 20th century that follows the greatest evolution of vaccines and their effectiveness, saving millions of lives around the world. For this reason, anti-vaccine movements need to be fought. They and the diseases, yes, kill.
2. Antibiotics
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We owe the discovery of antibiotics to chance and to the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming. In 1928, Fleming accidentally created penicillin. Working in London, the bacteriologist had been carrying out research for years in an attempt to kill or prevent the growth of bacteria in infected regions of the human body.
It took some time for Fleming’s discovery to reach be used, which occurred throughout the 1940s, but it was a crucial step forward in saving many lives. And this step was taken thanks to the work of Howard Fleorey and Ernst Chain, who in Oxford resumed Fleming’s research and made antibiotics a fundamental part of medicine.
3. Imaging Technologies in Medicine
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Have you ever imagined the world without computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, ultrasound or the x-ray? Well, medicine has benefited enormously from the evolution of diagnostic imaging.
In addition to ensuring that doctors and researchers see body parts in people still alive, it was fundamental in ensuring diagnoses for health problems that would be unthinkable without their existence.
It all started with Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, a German physicist responsible for the (accidental) invention of the x-ray. Little did he know that medicine would advance so much from that. By the way, progress in this segment has not stopped. Long live science.
4. Organ transplantation
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Sometimes parts of our body stop working as they should and the only solution is the search for a compatible donor to attempt an organ transplant. And this is one of the great advances in the history of medicine. The first took place in 1954, a procedure conducted by David Hume and Joseph Murray, who transplanted a kidney.
Eight years later, the first lung was transplanted; another three years, a pancreas, and so on. Today, techniques have advanced, managing to reduce rejection rates and even allowing people to survive with organs from other animals or artificial ones.
5. Hemodialysis
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Hemodialysis is a treatment that removes fluid and substances considered toxic from the blood, making the role of filtering and purifying substances, as if it were an artificial kidney. In fact, it is precisely because of functioning problems in this organ that people need to undergo hemodialysis.
It is not a perfect solution to the problem, but the creation of Dr. Willem Johan Kolff was instrumental in ensuring that the lives of patients without a perfectly healthy kidney continued to be possible.
