Medical technology dates back millennia, since people have been trying to heal wounds and cure diseases since prehistoric times. While familiar to us, and now taught as common curriculum in medical schools, these technologies revolutionized medicine in their advent.
Herbal medicine may date back to the time of the caveman, and people compiled medical knowledge at least as far back as 1900 BC. One such compilation was the “Sushruta Samhita” (Sanskrit for “Susruta’s Compendium), a 184-chapter treatise on the surgical and medical knowledge of the 6th century BC. It includes sections on pathology and anatomy and describes a variety of surgical procedures. The scalpel had also been invented by this time.
Visual Aids
The first known visual aid was called a reading stone, and it was developed around 1000 AD. The reading stone was a clear glass sphere that magnified the letters of whatever was being read. Salvino D’Armate of Florence is said to have invented the first eyeglasses in 1284. Five hundred years later, Benjamin Franklin invented the first bifocals. In 1950, a British ophthalmologist, Dr. Harold Ridley, invented the first intraocular lens. It is an artificial lens used to treat patients with cataracts.
Stethoscope
A French physician, René Laënnec, invented the stethoscope in 1816. Before then, doctors had used a technique called immediate auscultation in which they placed their ear directly on the patient’s body to hear their heartbeat and other internal sounds. Unwilling to use this technique on a young woman, Laënnec quickly rolled a piece of paper into an aural tube and found he could hear the patient’s heartbeats very clearly. He later made a wooden stethoscope that resembled a hearing aid called an ear trumpet. In 1851, Arthur Leared, an Irish physician, invented the first bi-aural (designed for both ears) stethoscope.Related articles
X-ray
The X-ray machine was the first kind of imaging device to be developed. Before its invention, doctors treating broken bones, tumors or gunshot wounds could only physically examine their patients. They had no way of looking into their patient to accurately assess the severity of an injury. In late 1895, the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen was conducting experiments studying the effects of electricity on vacuum tubes filled with gas. In the process, he found that certain rays (later dubbed X-rays) could pass through some solids while producing images of others. In one famous experiment, he took an X-ray of his wife’s hand that showed her bones and wedding ring. Doctors were quick to see the potential in Roentgen’s discovery. A year later, a Glasgow hospital opened the world’s first radiology department and took X-rays of a child’s throat with a penny stuck in it, as well as of a kidney stone.
Pacemaker
The pacemaker regulates the heartbeat with electrical impulses. While scientists discovered electrical activity within the heart during the 1800s, it took about another hundred years to develop a pacemaker. Albert Hyman, an American physiologist, developed a crude pacemaker powered by a hand-cranked motor in 1932. Although he tested the device on animals, he never published any of his results, for he feared that he would be accused of trying to revive the dead. After World War II, inventors like Earl Bakken and Paul Zoll experimented with smaller pacemakers that could be worn like necklaces. Wearable pacemakers had wires that connected them to electrodes implanted on the patient’s heart.In 1958, the Swedish inventor Rune Elmqvist developed a pacemaker that could be implanted in the patient. A surgeon, Åke Senning, performed the first pacemaker implantation surgery at the Karolinska Institute. Unfortunately, the pacemaker’s host died three hours later. Its replacement lasted only two days. The patient, Arne Larrson, received 26 pacemakers during his lifetime before dying at 86 in 2001. By that time, he’d outlived both Elmqvist and Senning.
By  Shae Holland | Embed |
Shae Holland is a professional copywriter based out of Bismarck, ND. She writes on a variety of topics and loves learning new things. In her spare time she enjoys reading, gardening, and hunting | |
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