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

19th and 20th 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

19th 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.

19th Century Advances

• American Red Cross was founded by Clara Barton in 1881

• The average life expectancy went up

20th 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

20th 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

21st Century – The Future

What’s next?

21st 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.