The History of Health Care

Primitive Times

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• Prevention of injury from predators
• Illness/disease caused by supernatural spirits
• Tribal witch doctors treated illness
• Trephining used to treat insanity, epilepsey and headache
• Average life span 20 years

Herbs and plants used at medicine

• Digitalis from foxglove plants (slow heart)
• Quinine from cinchona tree (fever, muscle spasms, malaria)
• Belladonna from nightshade plant (muscle spasms, GI)
• Morphine from opium poppy (severe pain)

Egyptians

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• Earliest to keep accurate health records
• Superstitious
• Called upon gods
• Identified certain diseases
• Pharaohs kepts many specialists

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• Imhotep may have been first physician
• Priests were doctors
• Temples were places of worship, medical schools, & hospitals
• Only priests could read medical knowledge from the gods

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• magicians were also healers
• believed demons caused disease
• prescriptions were written on papyrus
• bloodletting or leeches used to "open" "clogged" channels

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• embalming done by priests. Must have advanced knowledge of anatomy. Strong antiseptics used to prevent decay, gauze similar to today's surgical gauze

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• research on mummies revealed the existence of diseases. Arthritis, kidney stones, arteriosclerosis.

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• some medical practices still used today: enemas, circucision (4000 BC) preceded marriage, closing wounds, setting fractures

Jewish Medicine

• Avoided medical practice
• concentrated on health rules concerning food, cleanliness, and quarantine
• Moses: banned quackery (God only physician), enforced day of rest

Greek

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• First to study causes of diseases
• Believed illness was a result of natural causes
• Research helped eliminate superstitions
• Sanitary practices were associated with the spread of disease (diet & cleanliness)
• Average life span 25-35 years

Father of Medicine

• Hippocrates:
• no dissection, observation
• notes of S&S
• disease was not caused by supernatural forces
• wrote standards of ethics which is the basis for medical ethics today

caduceus

• staff and serpent
• symbol for medicine
• temples built in Aesculapius' honor for his first clinics

Roman

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• Average life span 25-35 years
• learned from the Greeks and developed a sanitation system:aqueducts and sewers
• Beginning of public health

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• first to organize medical care
• Army medicine
• Room in doctors' house became first hospital
• later hospitals were in monasteries
• Public hygiene: flood control, solid construction of homes

Claudius Galen

• Physician
• Body was 4 humors: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile
• An imbalance of the humors resulted in sickness

Dark Ages

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• Emphasis placed on saving the soul, study of medicine prohibited
• Prayer and divine intervention used for Tx
• Medicine practiced only in convents and monasteries (monks & priests)
• custodial care
• life and death in God's hands
• Average life span 20-30 years

Middle Ages

Terrible Epidemics

• Bubonic plague (Black Death: killed 3/4 pop in Europe & Asia
• Small Pox
• Diphtheria
• Syphilis
• Measels
• Thyphoid Fever
• Tuberculosis

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• Renewed interest in medical practice of Greeks & Romans
• Physicians began to gain knowledge from medical universities
• Arab physicians used their knowledge of chemistry to advance pharmacology
• Average life span 20-35 years

Renaissance Medicine

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• Rebirth of science of medicine
• Universities and medical schools for research
• dissection
• book publishing

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• first anatomy book was published by Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564)
• Artist Michelangelo & Leonardo de Vinci used dissection to draw the human body more realistically
• Average life span 30-40 years

16th & 17th Century

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• causes of disease were still not known
• Ambrose Pare: Father of modern surgery
• Gabriel Fallopius: identified fallopian tubes
• William harvey: described circulation of blood
• Anton van Leeuwenhoek: invented microscope

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• Bartholomeo Eustachio: identified eustachian tube
• Apothecaries (early pharmacist) made, prescribed and sold medications
• Some quackery
• Average life span 35-45 years

18th century

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• Gabriel Fahrenheit: first mercury thermometer
• Joseph Priestley: discovered oxygen
• John Hunter: English surgeon, feeding tube
• Benjamin Franklin: invented bifocals

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• James lind: lime juice to prevent scurvy
• Edward Jenner: small pox vaccination
• Average life span 40-50 years

19th century

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• French barbers acted as surgeons extracting teeth, using leeches for Tx and giving enemas
• First successful blood transfusion 1818
• Rene Laennac invented stethoscope
• Florence Nightingale received formal training
• Anesthesia discovered: nitrous oxide, ether, choloroform

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• Ignaz Semmelweiss; identified the cause of puerperal fever which led to the importance of hand washing
• Louis Pasteus (1860-1895): discovered that microorganisms cause disease (germ theory
• Jpseph Lister: first doctor to use antiseptic during surgery
• Ernest von Bergman: developed asepsis

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• Wilhelm Roentgen: discovered x-rays
• Paul Ehrlick: discoved effect of medicine on disease causing microorganisms
• Robert Koch: Father of Microbiology, identified germ causing TB
• Clara Barton: founded Red Cross in 1881
• Average life span 40-60 years

20th Century

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• Health insurance plans and social reforms developed in the 1920s
• Kidney dialysis machine
• Birth control pills approved by FDA 1960
• First liver, lung, heart transplants
• Sheep was cloned in 1997
• Average life span 60-70 years

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• Sir Alexander Fleming: discovered penicillin
• Jonas Salk: developed the polio vaccine

1900-1945

• Acute infectious diseases ( diphtheria, TB, rheumatic fever)
• No antibiotics, DDT for mosquitoes, rest for TB, water sanitation to help stop spread of typhoid fever, diphtheria vaccination
• Hospitals were places to die
• Most doctors were general practitioners

1945-1975

• Immunization common
• antibiotic cures
• safer surgery
• transplants
• incresed lifespan
• chronic degenerative diseases

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• new health standards: obesity, neurosis, lung cancer, hypertension
• disintegrating families
• greatly increasing medical costs

1975 to Present

• Artificial parts
• Bioengineering
• cloning
• Bioethical Issues
• AIDS
• Drug Resistant Organisms
• Laser Surgeries
• Manage Health Care

21st Century

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• Cures for AIDS, cancer and heart disease
• Genetic Manipulation to prevent inherited diseases is common practice
• Development of methods to slow the aging process
• Nerves in the brain are regenerated to eliminate paralysis
• Transplants of every organ in the body
• Antibiotics that do not form resistance
• Average life span 90-100 years