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 Worldwide, about four babies are born every second; advanced medical care has helped halve the infant mortality rate since 1960 |
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Though their contributions were made in eras far apart, the
Hippocratics, Galen and Vesalius all shared the same messianism
that still characterizes today's outstanding medical achiever.
Their discoveries were only the beginning of their
contributions. Public demonstrations, the writing of treatises
and books and the teaching of both colleagues and students
became the vehicles for their individual crusades to better the
state of medical care. Among them, like a constantly humanistic
refrain playing softly in the background, the credo of the
ancient Greek physicians prevailed. Nowhere is that principle
more eloquently expressed than in the memorable words found in
Precepts, one of the books of the Hippocratic Corpus: "Where
there is love of humankind, there is also love of the art of
medicine."
If medical theory and practice are based on an ever expanding body of knowledge handed down from one generation to the next, it follows that progress will occur only when additions are made to that knowledge. Although this is true for the most part, every era sees a few marked departures from the acquired wisdom--departures somes so radical as to create entirely new ways of looking at the evidence gleaned from the study of nature and disease. The notion that disease originates in cells rather than tissues or organs, introduced in the mid-19th century by the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow, brought on just such a radical change in perspective. So too did the germ theory, based on British surgeon Joseph Lister's application of Louis Pasteur's work to prevent wound infections. Each was the result of thousands of meticulous observations made over many years. Virchow's studies were done in a university setting; Lister's in a laboratory that he and his wife set up in the kitchen of their home, where they worked tirelessly until they were ready to test their conclusions on a series of patients.
| 2,397 Years of Progress | |