Before you read

460 BCE

Birth of Hippocrates, Greek physician and founder of the first university. Considered the father of medicine. Hippocrates bases medicine on objective observation and deductive reasoning, although he does accept the commonly held belief that disease results from an imbalance of the four bodily humors (an idea that persists for centuries).

c.130 CE

Birth of Galen, considered by many to be the most important contributor to medicine following Hippocrates. Born of Greek parents, Galen resides primarily in Rome where he is physician to the gladiators and personal physician to several emperors. He publishes some 500 treatises and is still respected for his contributions to anatomy, physiology, and pharmacology.

910

Persian physician Rhazes is the first to identify smallpox, as distinguished from measles, and to suggest blood as the cause of infectious disease.

1590

Dutch lens grinder Zacharius Jannssen invents the microscope

1628

William Harvey publishes An Anatomical Study of the Motion of the Heart and of the Blood in Animals, describing how blood is pumped throughout the body by the heart, and then returns to the heart and recirculates. The book is very controversial but becomes the basis for modern research on the heart and blood vessels.

1656

Experimenting on dogs, English architect Sir Christopher Wren is the first to administer medications intravenously by means of an animal bladder attached to a sharpened quill. Wren also experiments with canine blood transfusions (although safe human blood transfusions only became feasible after Karl Landsteiner develops the ABO blood-typing system in 1900).

1670

Anton van Leeuwenhoek refines the microscope and fashions nearly 500 models. Discovers blood cells and observes animal and plant tissues and microorganisms.

1747

James Lind , a Scottish naval surgeon, discovers that citrus fruits prevent scurvy. He publishes his Treatise of the Scurvy in 1754, identifying the cure for this common and dangerous disease of sailors, although it takes another 40 years before an official Admiralty order dictates the supply of lemon juice to ships.

1796

Edward Jenner develops a method to protect people from smallpox by exposing them to the cowpox virus. In his famous experiment, he rubs pus from a dairymaid's cowpox postule into scratches on the arm of his gardener's 8-year-old son, and then exposes him to smallpox six weeks later (which he does not develop). The process becomes known as vaccination from the Latin vacca for cow. Vaccination with cowpox is made compulsory in Britain in 1853. Jenner is sometimes called the founding father of immunology.

1800

Sir Humphry Davy announces the anesthetic properties of nitrous oxide, although dentists do not begin using the gas as an anesthetic for almost 45 years.

1816

René Laënnec invents the stethoscope.

1818

British obstetrician James Blundell performs the first successful transfusion of human blood.

1842

American surgeon Crawford W. Long uses ether as a general anesthetic during surgery but does not publish his results. Credit goes to dentist William Morton.

1844

Dr. Horace Wells, American dentist, uses nitrous oxide as an anesthetic.

1846

Boston dentist Dr. William Morton demonstrates ether's anesthetic properties during a tooth extraction.

1849

Elizabeth Blackwell is the first woman to receive a medical degree (from Geneva Medical College in Geneva, New York).

1867

Joseph Lister publishes Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery, one of the most important developments in medicine. Lister was convinced of the need for cleanliness in the operating room, a revolutionary idea at the time. He develops antiseptic surgical methods, using carbolic acid to clean wounds and surgical instruments. The immediate success of his methods leads to general adoption. In one hospital that adopts his methods, deaths from infection decrease from nearly 60% to just 4%.

1870s

Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch establish the germ theory of disease. According to germ theory, a specific disease is caused by a specific organism. Before this discovery, most doctors believe diseases are caused by spontaneous generation. In fact, doctors would perform autopsies on people who died of infectious diseases and then care for living patients without washing their hands, not realizing that they were therefore transmitting the disease.

1879

First vaccine for cholera

1881

First vaccine for anthrax

1882

First vaccine for rabies

1890

Emil von Behring discovers antitoxins and uses them to develop tetanus and diphtheria vaccines.

1895

German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen discovers X rays.

1896

First vaccine for typhoid fever.

1897

Ronald Ross, a British officer in the Indian Medical Service, demonstrates that malaria parasites are transmitted via mosquitoes, although French army surgeon Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran identified parasites in the blood of a malaria patient in 1880. The treatment for malaria was identified much earlier (and is still used today). The Qinghao plant (Artemisia annua) was described in a Chinese medical treatise from the 2nd century BCE; the active ingredient, known as artemisinin, was isolated by Chinese scientists in 1971 and is still used today. The more commonly known treatment, quinine, was derived from the bark of a tree called Peruvian bark or Cinchona and was introduced to the Spanish by indigenous people in South America during the 17th century.

1897

First vaccine for plague.

1899

Felix Hoffman develops aspirin (acetyl salicylic acid). The juice from willow tree bark had been used as early as 400 BC to relieve pain. 19th century scientists knew that it was the salicylic acid in the willow that made it work, but it irritated the lining of the mouth and stomach. Hoffman synthesizes acetyl salicylic acid, developing what is now the most widely used medicine in the world.

1901

Austrian-American Karl Landsteiner describes blood compatibility and rejection (i.e., what happens when a person receives a blood transfusion from another human of either compatible or incompatible blood type), developing the ABO system of blood typing. This system classifies the bloods of human beings into A, B, AB, and O groups. Landsteiner receives the 1930 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for this discovery.

1906

Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins suggests the existence of vitamins and concludes they are essential to health. Receives the 1929 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

1907

First successful human blood transfusion using Landsteiner's ABO blood typing technique

1913

Dr. Paul Dudley White becomes one of America's first cardiologists, a doctor specializing in the heart and its functions, and a pioneer in use of the electrocardiograph, exploring its potential as a diagnostic tool.

1921

Edward Mellanby discovers vitamin D and shows that its absence causes rickets.

1922

Insulin first used to treat diabetes.

1923

First vaccine for diphtheria.

1926

First vaccine for pertussis (whooping cough).

1927

First vaccine for tuberculosis.

1927

First vaccine for tetanus.

1928

Scottish bacteriologist Sir Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin. He shares the 1945 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Ernst Chain and Sir Howard Florey.

1935

First vaccine for yellow fever.

1935

Dr. John H. Gibbon, Jr., successfully uses a heart-lung machine for extracorporeal circulation of a cat (i.e., all the heart and lung functions are handled by the machine while surgery is performed). Dr. Gibbon uses this method successfully on a human in 1953. It is now commonly used in open heart surgery.

1937

First vaccine for typhus.

1937

Bernard Fantus starts the first blood bank at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, using a 2% solution of sodium citrate to preserve the blood. Refrigerated blood lasts ten days.

1943

Microbiologist Selman A. Waksman discovers the antibiotic streptomycin, later used in the treatment of tuberculosis and other diseases.

1945

First vaccine for influenza.

1952

Paul Zoll develops the first cardiac pacemaker to control irregular heartbeat.

1953

James Watson and Francis Crick at Cambridge University describe the structure of the DNA molecule. Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin at King's College in London are also studying DNA. (Wilkins in fact shares Franklin's data with Watson and Crick without her knowledge.) Watson, Crick, and Wilkins share the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1962 (Franklin had died and the Nobel Prize only goes to living recipients).

1954

Dr. Joseph E. Murray performs the first kidney transplant between identical twins.

1955

Jonas Salk develops the first polio.

1957

Dr. Willem Kolff and Dr. Tetsuzo Akutzu implant the first artificial heart in a dog. The animal survives 90 minutes.

1962

First oral polio vaccine (as an alternative to the injected vaccine).

1964

First vaccine for measles.

1967

First vaccine for mumps.

1967

South African heart surgeon Dr. Christiaan Barnard performs the first human heart transplant.

1970

First vaccine for rubella.

1974

First vaccine for chicken pox.

1977

First vaccine for pneumonia.

1978

First test-tube baby is born in the U.K.

1978

First vaccine for meningitis.

1980

W.H.O. (World Health Organization) announces smallpox is eradicated.

1981

First vaccine for hepatitis B.

1982

Dr. William DeVries implants the Jarvik-7 artificial heart into patient Barney Clark. Clark lives 112 days.

1983

HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is identified.

1992

First vaccine for hepatitis A.

1996

Dolly the sheep becomes the first mammal cloned from an adult cell (dies in 2003).

1998

First vaccine for lyme disease.

2007

Scientists discover how to use human skin cells to create embryonic stem cells.