Imagine for one moment that you are living in the 1800’s and are in need of medical help. During this time surgeons were known for the treating of wounds, amputations, and treatment of broken bone. Picture yourself lying on a dirty cot, or soiled table waiting for the surgeon to come in. When he finally enters he is wearing a bloody, dirty apron and informs you that the only option is to remove your limb. He calls in for help in holding you down and picks up a stained saw and prepares to remove your leg. Your mind flashes back to the numerous people who came before you and died shortly after having this procedure done. Will you die during the operation or like so many others survive only to succumb to fever and gangrene and die after? Thanks to a man named Joseph Lister your chances of survival are greater that those who came before.
Joseph Lister was born into the Society of Friends, a Quaker community, to Joseph Jackson Lister and Isabella Harris on April 5, 1827 in Upton, England. His father was a scientist who was known for his invention of the achromatic microscope. Lister was one of five children and showed a marked interest in the study of botany and zoology. While attending school among the Quakers he became fluent in the languages of French and German both of which were being used in medical research. Later in 1844, Lister
gained entrance into the University of London. This is important because during this time all those wishing to attend a university had to swear an oath to the king and church of England which as a Quaker he could not do. Lister graduated with a Bachelor in Medicine and went on to attend the Royal College of Surgeons at the age of 25. During his internship at the University Hospital in London he ...
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...own his medical practice. Thanks to the help and encouragement of his friends he accepted the Secretaryship of the Royal Academy. Lister seemed to revive with acceptance of this position and gained pleasure from corresponding with other scientists around the world. Lister also became active in politics and state matters until his death in 1912 from pneumonia.
As you can see Joseph Lister made great strides in the area of surgery and antiseptic. Without his research and experiments hospitals would still be places where most people went to die. Thanks to Lister and many others hospitals are now the clean and safe places that we go to heal. We no longer need to fear dying from simple procedures or looking up to see a doctor dressed in bloody clothes preparing to perform surgeries. Is it any wonder that Joseph Lister gained the title of the Father of Modern Medicine?
In 1615 at the age of 37 Harvey became the Lumleian Lecture specializing in Surgery. William Harvey discovered his finding of the Circulation of Blood by ignoring medical textbooks and dissecting animals. He gained all or most of his learnings from observations of cutting open veins and arteries of living animals. Many people of this modern time thought because there weren’t any anesthetics that Harvey was cruel for cutting open living animals. I think that if it wasn’t for William Harvey and all of his studies and dissections that we wouldn’t be able to learn teach and save as many people as we can today. We as people have learned a lot from the many studies and dissections throughout Harvey’s lifetime. We have learned that blood, arteries, and veins are all within the same origin, blood in the arteries sent to the tissues are not stay there, the body‘s circulation mechanism was designed for the movement of liquid and that blood carrying air is still blood, the heart moves all movements of blood not the liver, hearts contract the same time as the pulse is felt, ventricle’s squeeze blood into main arteries, the pulse is formed by blood being pushed into arteries making them bigger, there are no vessels in the heart’s septum, lastly there is no to in from of blood in the veins there is only
From July 1851 to March 1852, Dr. Wythe practiced medicine in Philadelphia, where upon he moved to Port Carbon, Pennsylvania, and practiced until 1857. He next became surgeon in the collieries of Carbon County, a post he held until 1860.23 Dr. Wythe was practicing in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania during the succeeding two years, when the Civil War began and he received his commission from Abraham Lincoln to assume the position of Assistant Surgeon of the United States Volunteers. In July 1862, he was promoted to Surgeon and five months later organized the Camp Parole Hospital near Alexandria, D. C., for sick and wounded paroled soldiers. On February 28, 1863, Dr. Joseph Henry Wythe was promoted to the full rank of surgeon. After the Civil War, Wythe moved to the Pacifi...
Brazelton attended many schools throughout his life. He attended a prep school in Alexandria, Virginia (Episcopal High School), after that he attended New Jersey’s Princeton University, following the pre-medical curriculum. While he was in Princeton he enjoyed acting a in a few number of college theatre productions. Brazelton was then considering of accepting a role on Broadway. However his parents did not like the idea of him accepting the role in Broadway. His parents said if he’d wish for them to pay for medical school in the future he would have to focus on his pre-medical studies. With an offer like that from Brazelton took his parents advice, leaving behind Broadway and concentrate in pre-medical school. Brazelton received his A.B. from Princeton in 1940, then he continued to earn his M.D. from the College of Physicians and surgeons at New York City’s Columbia University. After, that he did his internship through Columbia University, at Roosevelt Hospital. Then he served the United States Naval Reserve for a year. By 1945, Brazelton began a medical residency at Massachusetts General Hospital. His training as a pediatrician began in...
botany. In 1811, he was admitted at Harrow School and went to Trinity College in 1817, after 2 years he became a scholar. He accomplished the Porson University Prize in Greek poetry. He happened to be the twelfth Wrangler and achieved the s...
He was one of the first doctors to observe his patients, and believed humans should lead simple and stable lives to keep them healthy and their humours balanced. Dissection was still looked down upon, and even forbidden, in these times, and therefore this held back medical studies from progressing further. People trained under these beliefs were recognised as doctors instead of priests. This was a huge development in medical history as beliefs in supernatural causes began to die out, and women who were not slaves were also allowed to train as do...
John Hope Franklin’s childhood had a huge impact on his life and scholarship. His parents were a primary influence in his education and much of the subjects he was passi...
...ies at college, Elizabeth Blackwell became the first doctor and reformer by focusing on change and reformation in the medical field.
How Watson and Crick’s Discovery of the Structure of DNA Influenced American Industries and Scientific Development in the United States
During this period a deep cut could lead to infection, and the only treatment for infections was amputation and cauterization. However, hospitals and medical instruments were hardly if ever sanitized, so one could often come out of the hospital worse than when one went in (Bloodwiki). It was not uncommon for a person to survive a surgery only to be set upon by diseases such as hospital gangrene and septicaemia (Youngson 29). Youngson describes hospitals as “dark and overcrowded, ill-run and insanitary. It was not uncommon to see in the same ward, at the same time, cases of, (let us say) typhoid fever, erysipelas, pneumonia, rickets, dysentery; nor was it uncommon to see two patients in the same bed” (Youngson 24). Anesthesia was not used in surgeries until 1846, so prior to that the patient was completely conscious when they operated on him or her, unless the patient passed out from pain. Patients were uneager to be cut into while they were awake: “Dragged unwillingly or carried from the ward to the operating theatre by a couple of hospital attendants (in Edinburgh a large wicker basker was used for this purpose) the patient was laid on the operating table and if necessary strapped down” (Youngson 27). The tools used in surgeries can be seen here.
Throughout medicine, there have been heroes, villains, and people in between. Which category they are put in depends on the beholder. However, whether the person in question is seen as a good or bad person, they still could have contributed to medicine’s history. This is the case with Karl Brandt, a physician who worked under Hitler during World War II. While he may have practiced medicine in an unconventional way, he was a major figure who made an impact.
Resection was a process that “involved cutting open the limb, sawing out the damaged bone, and then closing the incision” (Jones, 1). Resection allows the patient to keep his limbs but it requires a great ordeal of time and skill. This also contributed to the common practice of amputation during the war. But there were cases where surgeons did use this method. Terry J. Jones said in his NY Times article, “resections were used more frequently after surgeons learned that amputations had a much higher mortality rate” (Jones, 1). In another article by Corydon Ireland, it describes Mitchell Adam’s, a Harvard lecturer, grandfather who served as a volunteer surgeon during the Civil War. In the article, “Adams was not a champion of hasty amputations, but argued for excision and other limb-saving measures. And he describes the everyday pressures of a country practice in Framingham, Mass” (Ireland, 1). This meant that not all surgeons at the time only wanted to amputate but strived for alternate methods. This new knowledge shows that some surgeons were more dedicated to thinking about the well-being of their patients than others and this opens up to other possibilities that may have occurred during the war. This allows an image to come to mind of a surgeon diligently operating on a soldier with care and compassion. However, even though there may be many possibilities, we can’t truly know every event that occurs during a
In addition, Patterson states, “[. . .] I thought that I wanted to become a surgeon [. . .] I thought I would love to perform surgeries and remedy horrible situations for people” (229). The author maintains that at one point he was convinced that a career in medicine was his calling since he aspired to remedy the sick from their afflictions. Nonetheless, he was discouraged after realizing that he would have to be proficient in his studies while being provided a generous loan in order to complete four years of medical school. Furthermore, the author insists that if he became a doctor his schedule would prevent him from any leisure for himself and his family. He acknowledges that, “[he has] always been interested in English and sharing stories with people” and therefore decides to strive for a position as an English professor (230). In short, Patterson concludes that his grandfather’s input along with the knowledge he gained throughout his life and the realizing the reality to become a surgeon propelled him down a road towards a position in English that would allow him in a way that he could not have accomplished in
...ways to clean and heal wounds. He realized the importance of cleaning the wounds. He also designed prosthetic limbs and the truss, which is designed to keep hernias from growing ( “Medicine”).
William Harvey was a distinguished physician of the seventeenth century. Harvey was educated by some of the great scientists of his time and was highly knowledgeable of the scientist theories preceding his time. Harvey was greatly intrigued by the views of the ancient Aristotle and developed a number of his own ideas based on Aristotle’s theories. It was from Aristotle’s theory of the primacy of blood that allowed Harvey to make breakthroughs about circulation and generation of animals. His advancements greatly enhanced the study of anatomy. Harvey also revolutionized the means by which science was performed through the use of innovative, investigational techniques. William Harvey became a well-known name in science because he made profound accomplishments that changed the way scientists performed and the way people viewed the human body.
Hippocrates, often called the “father of medicine” was one of the earliest contributors to modern science. He was called the father of medicine because through his medical school, he separated medical knowledge and practice from myth and superstition basing them instead of fact, observation, and clinical ...