Early Health and Medicine
Today our personal health is often something we take for granted, because over the years we have developed more advanced vitimens, medicines, and cures for numerous sicknesses. In the early days, getting sick was much more terrifying than it is today. The cures for diseases were not much healthier than the diseases themselves. Any illness in the early 19th century could be very serious , no matter how big or small. For example, today cancer is considered a very serious disease because we have yet to discover an absolute cause or cure. Altough, centuries ago people were not aware of what caused a a common cold or simply yet one did’nt even know what a germ even was.
Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) was the famous French scientest who first discovered germs, and that they were the main cause of most diseases. After Pasteur’s significant discovery people began to be much more conscious of their personal hygiene. Such as, brushing their teeht and bathing more persistently. Pastuer opened the doors to a series of new remedies and discoveries. Some of these would include pasteurized milk(you can see where it received it’s name), bacteria, fermentation, yeast, and rabies:to name a few. Within a year of Pasteur’s remedy for rabies, he treated and cured maore than 2,000 patients.
A German pathologist named Robert Kock (1843-1910) studied a disease called diptheria. Koch learned htat diptheria bacteria or bacilli could only be found in samples from a patients throat. Although Koch could not understand how diptheria was somehow affecting the victim’s heart. Finally, Koch concluded that the bacilli produced a toxin that circulated the bodyand damaged heart cells. Soon Koch developed an antitoxin that both cured and prevented the disease.
Lastly, a scottish docter nmed Joseph Lister(1786-1869) was worried about surgical infection. Lister researhed Pasteur’s germ discovery and expanded on it. Lister wondered if the same bacteria that made things formentmight also be responsible for surgical infection. Pasteur discovered that heat(sterilization) or specail antiseptics could kill germs. Lister was interested in improving hospital surgery and invented a machinethat killed the germs in the room, by producinga fine spray of carbolic acd. After this invention , few patients died of infection in hospitals.
Therefore, between 1837 and 1901 many medical advances were made. Some of these advances include the discovery of germs, sterilization, importance of hygiene, pasteurization, and the cure for the common childhood disease, diptheria. Thanks to these most helpful medical discoveries, we are more comfartably able to pursue findings in medicine today.