History of Healthcare
Objectives: You Will Be Able to Identify
at Least 10 Discoveries/inventions in
Health Care and Describe Several
Advances in Different Time Periods
Question
• How many of you have ever been in the
hospital and had an IV? (Put your head down)
• How many of you were born by c-section?(Put
your head down)
• How many of you have taken antibiotics?(Put
your head down)
• Now look around, if this had been 100 years
ago, chances are that at least ½ of you would
have died!
Advances in Healthcare
• Due to advances in medicine and technology
in healthcare we can now treat many of the
diseases that formerly would have been fatal.
• We are going to study advances that have
occurred since primitive man. Understanding
the hardships that went along with the
discoveries can help us appreciate the
advances in healthcare in the past 5000 years!
Early Beginnings
Primitive Man
What Was It Like?
• No electricity, few tools, and poor shelter
• Time was spent protecting themselves
against predators and finding food
• They were superstitious, they believed in
witch doctors
• They used herbs and plants as medicines,
some are still used today!!!!
Medicines
• Digitalis – from foxglove plant – used to
strengthen and slow the heartbeat
• Quinine – from the bark of the cinchona
tree – controls fever, muscle spasms and
helps malaria
• Belladonna & atropine – made from the
poisonous nightshade plant – they relieve
muscle spasms, especially in GI pain
More Early Medicines
• Morphine – made from the opium poppy –
relieves severe pain and is addicting
Ancient Times
Egyptians
What Did They Do?
• They kept accurate records
• They were superstitious
• They learned to identify certain diseases,
used medicines to heal disease
• They used the art of splinting fractures
Chinese
What did they do?
• They did not believe in dissection of the
body, so this limited what they could learn
• They believed in treating the whole body by
curing the spirit, this was early “holistic
care”
• Holistic care is treating the mind, body and
soul, this is the trend in today’s healthcare
Ancient Times
Greeks
What Did They Do?
• First to study the cause of disease
• Kept records on what they observed
• Importance of searching for new
information about disease which helped
eliminate superstition
• Observed and measured the effects of
disease
• Discovered that disease was caused by lack
of sanitation
Ancient Times
Romans
What Did They Do?
• Learned from the Greeks and developed a
sanitation system
• Brought clean water into their cities by
aquaducts
• Built sewers to carry off waste
• Built public baths with filtering
systems(this was the beginning of public
health and sanitation)
Romans continued
• First to organize medical care – they sent
medical equipment and physicians with their
armies to care for the wounded soldiers
• Roman doctors kept a room in their homes for
the ill (beginning of hospitals)
• Public buildings for the care of the sick were
established
Hippocrates
The Father of Medicine
Hippocrates 479 – 377 BC
• Dissection was not allowed during this time period
due to religious beliefs
• Hippocrates based his knowledge of the human
body on observations of the external body
• He kept careful note on signs and symptoms of
diseases
• He wrote the standard of ethics known as the “oath
of Hippocrates” which is still the basis for medical
ethics today. Many graduating doctors recite a
version of this oath at graduation
Dark Ages (AD 400-800) &
Middle Ages (AD 800-1400)
What Happened to Healthcare?
• The roman empire was conquered by
barbarians from the north, the study of
medical science stopped
• Medicine was practiced in convents and
monasteries as basic care for the sick and
dying
• Epidemics caused millions of deaths
Epidemics
• Bubonic plague or Black Death (bacterial
infection caused by flea infested rats that
carried the bacteria)
• Smallpox (virus transmitted only by humans)
• Diptheria ( bacterial infection)
• Syphilis (Bacterial STD)
• Tuberculosis (bacterial infection)
• None of these had any vaccinations
discovered during this period
Renaissance (AD 1350 – 1650)
The Rebirth of Learning
What happened then?
• They started building universities and
medical schools for research
• They accepted dissection of the body for
study (Leonardo da Vinci studied and
recorded the anatomy of the human body
during dissections to paint the human body
more true to form)
• They invented the printing press and began
to publish books
The Sixteenth to Seventeenth
Centuries
Apothecaries
• These were early pharmacists, they made ,
prescribed and sold medicines
Important People
• William Harvey – described the circulation of
blood and pumping of the heart
• Gabriello Fallopious – discovered the
fallopian tubes
• Bartolommeo Eustachus – discovered the
tube leading from the ear to the throat
(eustachian tube)
• Anton van Leewenhook – invented the
microscope
Eighteenth Century
A New Way of Teaching Medicine –
Students Not Only Learned in
Classrooms , but at the Patient’s Bedside
New Discoveries
• Rene Laennec – invented the stethoscope
(made out of wood)
• Joseph Priestly – discovered the element
oxygen
• Benjamin Franklin – invented bifocals and
discovered that colds could be passed from
person to person
• Edward Jenner – discovered a method of
vaccination for smallpox
• Gabriel Fahrenheit - invented the 1st mercury
thermometer
th
19
and
th
20
centuries
Organized advancement of medical
science
Important Discoveries &
Inventions
• Ignaz Semmelweiss – established that
handwashing with chlorinated water was
effective in protecting against the spread of
disease
• Louis Pasteur – discovered that
microorganisms were everywhere and that
they caused disease, he created
pasteurization, he developed a vaccine for
rabies
Inventions and Discoveries
• Joseph Lister – he began to use carbolic acid on
wounds to kill germs and prevent infections, he
became the first doctor to use antiseptics during
surgery
• Ernst von Bergmann – Developed asepsis
• Robert Koch – known as “Father of
Microbiology” discovered many disease causing
organisms
• Wilhelm Roentgen – discovered x-rays in 1895
More Inventions and Discoveries
• Paul Ehrlich – discovered the effects of
medicine on germs, discovered a treatment
for syphilis after 605 experiments
• Gerhard Domagk – discovered
sulphonamide drugs
• Ivanovski – Russian scientist who
discovered that some microorganisms were
too small to be seen with a regular
microscope, he called them viruses
Even More Discoveries
• Sigmund Freud – discovered that the mind
has a conscious and unconscious realm, his
studies are the basis for psychology and
psychiatry
• 1928 Alexander Fleming – discovered
penicillin
• Jonas Salk – discovered a vaccine against
the polio virus
th
19
Century Advances
• Anesthesia was introduced by using ether,
nitrous oxide(laughing gas) and chloroform
• 1st successful blood transfusion in 1818
• Elizabeth Blackwell was the 1st female
physician in the U.S. in 1849
• Florence Nightingale was the founder of
modern nursing, she began professional
education for nurses.
th
19
Century Advances
• American Red Cross was founded by Clara
Barton in 1881
• The average life expectancy went up
th
20
Century
• The most advances in healthcare were made
in the this century!
• Development of health insurance plans
• Home Health began for rural Kentuckians
in 1925
• The heart lung bypass machine was used for
open heart surgery in 1953
• The first successful kidney transplant in
1954
th
20
•
•
•
•
•
•
century
Medicare and Medicaid started in 1965
1st heart transplant in 1968
CAT scan invented in 1975
InVitro fertilization (test tube baby) 1975
AIDS identified in 1981
HIV was discovered as the cause of AIDS
in 1984
• Sheep cloned in 1997
st
21
Century – The Future
What’s next?
st
21
century
• Stem cell research
• New medications to prolong the lives of
patients with HIV
• New medications for Stroke and Heart
attack patients
• More research on the artificial heart
• Complex separations of conjoined twins
What’s next?
•
•
•
•
•
•
Human cloning?
A cure for AIDS?
A cure for cancer?
Drugs that slow the aging process?
Transplant of the brain?
Regeneration of nerves in paralyzed
patients?
• New antibiotics that are resistant proof?
Assignment
• Choose one
advancement in
healthcare you feel
was most important,
research it and write a
summary on the facts
and why you feel it
was important.