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 ...
... middle of paper ...
...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?
Popular television paint a glorified image of doctors removing the seriousness of medical procedures. In the non-fiction short story, “The First Appendectomy,” William Nolen primarily aims to persuade the reader that real surgery is full of stress and high stakes decisions rather than this unrealistic view portrayed by movies.
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...
Modern technology has helped with the growth of many medical discoveries, but the original ideas all had to start from somewhere. One of the most famous surgeons in the medical world, Ambroise Pare is responsible for many of this generation’s practices. Ambroise Pare was born in 1510. He was a French surgeon, and later advanced to do his work as a royal surgeon for kings Henry II, Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III. From there, he went on to become one of the most influential people in medical work this world has seen. Because of him, many are still able to learn and grow from his teachings. Ambroise Pare impacted many people and ideas of medicine because of the innovative ideas he shared, the lives he saved, and the legacy he left behind.
Dr. Joseph Henry Wythe (1822-1901) was born in Manchester, England on March 19, 1822, the son of Joseph Wythe and Mary Chamberlain. In 1832, JH Wythe accompanied his parents to America, and began his education in the private schools of Philadelphia where the family had settled. Through his own efforts and supplemented by private instruction, he became proficient in the natural sciences and the languages of Greek, Hebrew and Latin. In 1842, JH Wythe became an ordained Methodist minister at the early age of nineteen. Two years later, in 1844, he received the honorary degree of Master in Arts (M. A.) from Dickinson College Seminary, Carlisle Pennsylvania. .22 Two years later, in 1850, JH Wythe graduated with a medical degree (M. D.) from the Philadelphia College of Medicine and Surgery. In 1851, Dr. JH Wythe published the first edition of his book The Microscopist, or a Complete Manual on the Use of the Microscope, one of the earliest American texts on the subject.
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
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
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
In the early 1800’s, before the use of anesthesia, many patients with life threatening issues would forgo surgery and choose the permanent path of death rather than undergo a painful, emotionally scarring procedure such as surgery before anesthesia. When surgeries did take place, they would be performed on the top floors of hospitals so that the other patients couldn’t hear the screams. More than 8,000 anesthesia-free operations were performed in the Ether Dome at Mass General Hospital, coincidentally the birthplace of the first surgery “without pain” (Mass General).
Although medicine has come along way especially in recent years, there were medicine men and wom...
...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”).
The man I’m talking about is Hippocrates and he is the one who brought many benefits and a new intricate network of varied ways to help those in sickness.
A remarkable breakthrough in medicine occurred in the late 1800s through the work of Louis Pasteur. Pasteur's experiments showed that bacteria reproduce like other living things and travel from place to place. Using the results of his findings, he developed pasteurization, which is the process of heating liquids to kill bacteria and prevent fermentation. He also produced an anthrax vaccine as well as a way to weaken the rabies virus. After studying Pasteur's work, Joseph Lister developed antisepsis, which is the process of killing disease-causing germs. In 1865 before an operation, he cleansed a leg wound first with carbolic acid, and performed the surgery with sterilized (by heat) instruments. The wound healed, and the patient survived. Prior to surgery, the patient would've needed an amputation. However, by incorporating these antiseptic procedures in all of his surgeries, he decreased postoperative deaths. The use of antiseptics eventually helped reduce bacterial infection not only in surgery but also in childbirth and in the treatment of battle wounds. Another man that made discoveries that reinforced those of Pasteur's was Robert Koch. Robert Koch isolated the germ that causes tuberculosis, identified the germ responsible for Asiatic cholera, and developed sanitary measures to prevent disease. (1)
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 ...