Key individuals Flashcards
Hippocrates - impact
- 4 humours
- careful observation
- hippocratic oath
Hippocrates - significance
- encouraged observation
- encouraged finding rational causes for disease over superstition
- hippocratic oath still present today
- his ideas about the 4 humours stood for over 1000 years
Galen - impact
- theory of opposites (treatment based on 4 humours theory)
- proved that it was the brain not the heart that controlled speech
- made several anatomical mistakes due to dissecting apes
Galen - significance
- ideas approved by christian church so was not challenged meaning is mistakes were not corrected for over 1000 years
- his ideas were tough in medical schools
Avicenna - impact
- wrote the Canon of Medicine
- listed the medical properties of 760 drugs
Avicenna - significance
- the Canon of Medicine became the standard European medical textbook and was used to teach doctors in the West
Roger Bacon
- encouraged doctors to learn from their own experiments
- the Church threw him in prison for challenging Galen
John Hunter - impact
- collective and studied 3000 anatomical specimens
- proved that it was possible to have two different diseases in the same part of your body
- developed a treatment for aneurysms
- removed facial tumours
John Hunter - significance
- inspired others to continue his work
- had new surgical ideas
- controversial figure as he used grave robbers
-taught hundreds of other surgeons in his scientific approach - development of aneurysm reduced the number of amputations needed
- appointed surgeon to the King
Vesalius - impact
- published the ‘Fabric of the Human Body’
- dissected humans to find correct human anatomy
- proved Galen wrong
Vesalius - significance
- carried out public lectures to show evidence on why Galen was wrong
- forced to leave his job as a professor at Padua because he challenged Galen’s ideas
- in the long term, other surgeons shared and translated his work
- formed the basis of all surgeons’s understanding
- lead to more detailed research on human anatomy
Paré - impact
- Paré ran out of hot oil so he improvised and used a rose oil cream proving that gun shot wounds were not poisonous and didn’t need to be burned out using hot oil
- Paré used ligatures instead of cauterisation
- he designed false limbs for wounded soldiers
Paré - significance
- ligatures stopped bleeding more effectively than cauterisation
- these new treatments took longer so surgeons on the battle field were more reluctant to use them where treatment needed to be quick
- in the long term he disproves the idea that gunshots wounds weren’t poisonous
- later, his books are widely circulated throughout Europes
Harvey - impact
- he proved that blood could only go through the circulatory system in one direction by pumping it in the opposite direction through valves
- he studied the human heart and the hearts of cold-blooded animals to understand how the muscles worked
- he dissected and studied human hearts
Harvey - significance
- another example of Galen’s work being proved incorrect this encouraged other doctors to continue to question and challenge ancient ideas
- his work led to doctors attempting blood transfusions but these were unsuccessful as blood groups had not been discovered - the first transfusion wasn’t until 1901
- in the longer term, his work was significant in allowing the first blood transfusion but not until 1901
- today, understanding the blood and it circulation is significant a it allows us to test and diagnose illness and to carry out advanced surgery like organ transplants
Why was Harvery’s work criticised?
- his work was ignored and Harvey was not believed as he didn’t know enough to back up his findings like:
1. why the blood circulated
2. why there was different coloured blood in the arteries and veins
3. how the blood got from the arteries to the veins - he was also criticised as he went against Galen and he was challenging the idea of bloodletting to balance the humours
Jenner - impact
- discovered that cowpox could be used as a vaccination against smallpox
Jenner - short-term significance
He was not believed due to:
- he could not explain how vaccination worked
- many doctors were profiting from smallpox inoculation
- attempts to repeat his experiment failed; for example in a London Smallpox Hospital cowpox was tested nut their equipment was contaminated and a patient died
- Jenner was not a fashionable city doctors so was not respected by some
Jenner - long-term
- members of the royal family were vaccinated
- parliament acknowledged Jenner’s research with a £10,000 grant
- the smallpox vaccination was made compulsory by the British government in 1853
Pasteur - impact
- proved that spontaneous generation was wrong and that germs, not chemicals caused disease
Pasteur - short-term significance
- most doctors at the time did not believed that microscopic germs could harm something as large and advanced as a human
- Pasteur’s research related to specific germs that might make food go off or give diseases to animals. It did not relate to those that might make people ill
- Charlton Bastian, an influential doctor in London, had written many articles that supported spontaneous generation and many people didn’t want to challenge his views
Why did people begin to believe Pasteur
- during the cattle plague of 1866, Lionel Beale used the latest microscopes to identify the specific microbe responsible and it the plague was shown to be clearly spread by contact
- John Tyndall was a famous physicist who argued in favour or Pasteur and against Bastian
- the specific germ that causes typhoid was identified
Pasteur - long term significance
- by the 1880s, British doctors had accepted Germ Theory but deep inside the body they could not use intense heat of powerful antiseptics
- by 1890s surgeons in Europe and North america developed aseptic surgery
- led to face ask, rubber gloves and surgical gowns being used and huge public operating theatres were replaced with smaller room all reducing infections dramatically
Lister - impact
- used carbolic acid in surgery to kill bacteria
- sprayed it on surgeons hands and operating area as well as soaking instruments and bandages in it
Lister - short-term significance
- used Germ Theory to explain his work which wasn’t accepted in Britain yet
- Lister’s ideas were criticised
- British surgeons offered alternative explanations
- spontaneous generation was supported by influential doctors like Bastian
- carbolic acid dried skin and irritated lungs and it took nurses a long time to prepare his carbolic methods
- Lister changed his techniques and surgeons said this was due to ineffectiveness
Simpson - impact
- found chloroform: a safe and effective anaesthetic
Simpson - short- term significance
Many objected to anesthetics because:
- surgeons were used to operating quickly on a conscious patient
- some army surgeons thought that soldiers should dutifully bear the pain
- in the early days of chloroform, some patients died because it was not understood that patients of different sizes needed different amounts of chloroform - Hannah greener died from an overdose in an operation to remove her toenail
- there were religious objections to anaesthetics as pain in childbirth was though to be God’s will
What happened when chloroform was tried on Hannah Greener?
- she died from an overdose
- she was having an operation to remove her toenail
Simpson - long-term significance
- Queen Victoria used anaesthetics in 1853 for childbirth which made it acceptable and fashionable
- anaesthetics did not revolutionise surgery as there was still a high death rate from infections produced by operations
Robert Koch - impact
- the founder of bacteriology - the study of bacteria
- identified the microbe responsible for anthrax
- identified the cholera germs and the tuberculosis germs
- used scientific methods like industrial dyes and microscope to help him view and identify bacteria and used a camera to photograph his findings and share them
Koch - short-term significance
-helped to train many young scientists to use his methods
Fleming - impact
- discovered the germ-killing capabilities of penicillin
Fleming - short-term significance
- published his findings but didn’t test it and garnered little interest
Penicillin (Florey and Chain) - long term-significance
- Us government fund it
- mass production of antibiotics today
could be limited due to antibiotic resistance
Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree - impact
-both wrote reports saying that a large proportion of the population did not have enough money to eat properly
- Booth demonstrated that there was a link between poverty and a high death rate
Beveridge - impact
- wrote The Beveridge Report
- it said that people had the right to be free of the ‘five giants’ that could ruin their lives:
1. disease
2. want (need0
3. ignorance
4. idleness
5. squalor
Bevan - impact
- introduced the NHS
