Two major medical discoveries or inventions:
I choose x-ray and stethoscope. Two historic people I believe were instrumental to modern medicine:
E. COWLES "COKE" ANDRUS Gertrude B. Elion
The stethoscope impacted medical practice because no other symbol identifies a doctor more than a stethoscope. For centuries physicians relied on percussion and auscultation listening to chest sounds and heartbeats by pressing the ear to the chest to assess cardiac health. Invented by Rene Laennec in 1816, the stethoscope was groundbreaking because it led to better descriptions of heart sounds and improved ability to distinguish among various murmurs and rhythmic disturbances, as well as respiratory and gastrointestinal functions. The stethoscope has become the singular symbol of physicians and has become one of the most trusted tools that physicians use for physical diagnosis.
The x-ray impacted medical practice because it’s a machine that also transformed the way doctors diagnosed and treated diseases is the X-ray. Discovered by Wilhelm Roentgen in 1895, X-rays allowed physicians to peer deep into the body without exploratory surgery. The use of x-rays quickly expanded, including to the treatment of cancer, until it was found that the radiation cause severe burns and was linked to actually causing cancer. Safety measures were developed and soon scientists were building off the technology to create other devices such as computerized tomography, also known as CT or CAT scans, magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, ultrasound, and positron emission Tomography (PET).
Recent medical discovery within the past twenty years:
Face transplant:
The first partial face transplant was done in Amiens, France, in 2005.Five years later, doctors in Spain completed the world’s first full-face transplant on a man severally damaged his face in an accident giving him a new nose,lips,teeth and cheekbones during 24 hours of surgery. The firstfull-facetransplant done in the United States was performed on monnie cul, seen here, in 2008.
FIGURE 1: Photographs showing the change undergone by three patients who had full facial transplantation surgery under Dr. Bohdan Pomahac in Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts. Photographs were taken before and after the procedure and during recovery at four months (patient 1), three months (patient 2) and two months (patient 3). Even at this early stage, patients 1 and 2 regained some basic motor functions, including smiling and pouting.
History of Medicine
I consider facial transplant to be the single most important discoveries in medical history.
While 19 people worldwide have undergone successful face transplants, their long-term follow-up may be under-reported, according to reconstructive surgeons. Their results, presented at the 2012 American College of Surgeons Annual Clinical Congress, evaluate the use of a scoring system called the “FACES score,” which helps to assess a patient’s ability to resume normal living.
The FACES score was originally developed by Dr. Chad Gordon, who was a plastic surgery fellow on the 2008 Cleveland Clinic surgical team that had performed the nation’s first facial transplant on a woman. This score is a five-pronged assessment to predict successful outcomes.
However, Gordon and colleagues found that out of the world’s 19 face transplants, only eight patients had postoperative evaluations after their operation that detailed their return to society.
“Plastic surgeons are trained to report form and function, but not necessarily how well patients function in everyday life,” said Gordon, now the clinical director of Johns Hopkins’ facial transplant program. “Face transplant is a marriage between transplant surgery and reconstructive surgery, so we have to think more like transplant surgeons.”
FACES scores evaluate a patient’s preoperative functional status, severity of injury, depth of the wound, additional medical problems,
