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950 BCE
Prosthetics
The earliest- known prosthetic toe was made from wood and leather. It was discovered in the 1800s attached to an Egyptian mummy. During the Middle Ages peg legs and hand hooks were common. Today prosthetic design are advanced and highly specialized. -
Bifocals
Invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1784. Franklin had trouble seeing both up close and far away so he cut two pairs of spectacles in half and put half of each lens in a single frame. The top half for far vision and the bottom half for near vision. -
Smallpox Vaccine
Edward Jenner developed the first successful vaccine in 1796.He observed that milkmaids who previously had cowpox did not catch smallpox. So he took fluid form a cowpox blister and scratched it in to the skin a young boy. Then a couple of months later Jenner inoculated the boy again but with smallpox matter, and no disease developed. -
Stethoscope
French physician Rene Laennec had a patient with too much body fat for him to hear the heartbeat he created a trumpet-shaped wooden tube to amplified the sound. -
Anesthesia Used During Surgery
William T.G. Morton was the first person in the world to publicly and successfully demonstrate the use of ether anesthesia for surgery. He performed on a 17 year old boy who had a tumor in the neck. -
Lister's Antiseptic Sprayer
English physician Joseph Lister reduced the mortality rate of his patients by using a carbolic solution spray as he operated. HE would also use the spray on the wound, on the articles the wound and body builds cameo in contact with, and on the hands of the operating team. -
X- radiation aka X-ray
Professor Wilhelm Roentgen discovering the X-ray in 1895. He was in his laboratory working with a cathode-ray when he observe a fluorescent glow of crystal on a table near his tube. He covered the tube with a heavy black paper and discovered a green colored fluorescent light generated. Roentgen found that the new ray could pass through most substances, including human tissue but not bone or medal. -
Antibiotics
The age of antibiotics began in 1907 when Alfred Bertheim and Paul Ehrlich created Slavarsan. This was the first drug to effectively counter Syphilis disease. Today Salvarsan is known as Arsphenamine. -
Computed Axial Tomography aka CAT scan
Invented by British engineer Godfrey Hounsfield and physicist Allan Cormack in1972. In the1947 first clinical CT scanner was for head imaging only but in 1976 whole body CT scanner became available. -
Magnetic resonance imaging aka MRI
Raymon Damadian invited a safe and accurate technique using unclear magnetic resonance to differentiate between cancerous and normal cells. MRI can be used to detect a number of things.
