Doctors and patients today benefit from years of innovative ideas.
One of mankind's greatest assets is his capacity to identify with another's suffering and want to help him. Man is unique among the animals in his ability to care for the sick and injured to help heal them, as opposed to simply letting nature run its course. A number of ideas have helped advance health care through innovative new ways of delivering aid to the most needy and ways of diagnosing injuries and treating ailments
Vaccinations
Vaccines have saved an uncountable number of lives by preventing illnesses that were once death sentences to those who contracted them. The idea of preventing an illness by infecting a healthy individual with that same illness is almost entirely counter-intuitive. However, In 1796, Dr. Jenner, an English physician, became the first man of science to systematically test an idea that had previously been merely folk wisdom: that individuals who became sick with a weaker form of smallpox, cowpox, never suffered from smallpox. His testing proved that folk wisdom correct and led to the development of vaccines. This bolstered an individual's immune system against a disease by exposing it to a weakened form of that disease.
X-Ray Diagnostics
Radiologic imaging literally allows doctors to see inside the living human body. While magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides doctors with levels of detail that doctors in the early 20th century could only have dreamed of, the first of these imaging techniques was the X-ray. This technique was developed by Marie Curie in 1914 to adapt the purely scientific research she and her husband performed in earlier years on radioactive materials to the need for doctors in World War I to see inside their patients' bodies. Sadly, her research that went on to save so many lives ended up costing her own life in 1934. Her lifetime of working with radioactive materials contributed to her developing leukemia.
Organ Transplants
When a machine breaks, a mechanic replaces the appropriate parts so it starts ticking again. Applying the same idea to the machine known as the human body may seem macabre; history has shown it to be effective and to have saved countless lives that would otherwise have been lost. This idea became a reality in 1954, when Dr. Joseph Murray and Dr. David Hume performed the first successful kidney transplant in Boston.
The Red Cross
Just as humans can devise increasingly effective ways of saving each other's lives, they are just as capable of using that ingenuity to advance the art of inflicting harm on one another. The development of the Red Cross sought to bring a measure of humanity to the inhumanity of battlefields. The first instance of organization was founded in 1863 in Switzerland as a result of the humanitarian outrage towards the suffering and maltreatment of wounded soldiers on the battlefield that Henry Dunant witnessed and wrote about. He sought to simply treat and care for the wounded, no matter whose uniform they were wearing. His humanitarian writings led to the formation of the Red Cross. This organization grew from a battlefield organization to an international force that cares for the sick and needy all around the world.
Tags: folk wisdom, have saved, human body, radioactive materials
