Medical Advancements In The 1800's

Medical Advancements of the late 1700’s to the early 1800’s
In early medicine, the sounds of the heart, lungs, and organs were few of the only sources to determine if an individual was ill. The act of listening to these sounds, known as auscultation, was dramatically refined by the invention of the stethoscope. The word stethoscope originated from two Greek words for “I see” and “the chest”’. In the early 1800’s, medicine had been immensely improved. Scientists and doctors made advancements that would alter medicine for hundreds of years to come. A french doctor named Rene Theophile Hyacinthe Laennec invented the stethoscope in the year of 1816. This advancement changed how doctors examined their patients. The invention of the stethoscope allowed
His mother’s understudied condition, tuberculosis, was ultimately his motivation to discover a mechanism to hear early signs of “crackles”. In the 1800’s alone, tuberculosis caused more than 30% of all deaths in Europe. It was known to be “The most fatal disease known to man”. Rene played an important role in advancing medical technology to detect such sounds. Rene Theophile Hyacinthe Laennec allowed for an earlier diagnosis to exist throughout Europe in the early 1800’s.
~~Edward Jenner was an English physician and scientist that made a monumental endowment for medicine; the smallpox vaccine. Jenner, the “Father of Immunology,” was born May 1749 in Berkeley, Gloucestershire. He received most of his schooling from Wotton-under-Edge and Cirencester. During this time, he became infected with smallpox, which had a lifelong effect on his health. Jenner was apprenticed at the age of 14 for 7 years from which he obtained most of the experience he required to become a surgeon. Smallpox is provoked by the virus variola and enters through the lungs. It then spreads to the skin, causing a rash. This “treatment” for the virus had already been founded by a man named John Fewster in 1768 who discovered the cowpox disease. He observed that milkmaids were generally immune to smallpox and thought it was due to the pus from
He tried this experiment to treat postpartum hemorrhage. This first transfusion was done by a husband donating blood to his wife. Between the years of 1825 and 1830 he performed 10 transfusions, 5 of these transfusions proved to be beneficial to his patients. James also created two instruments after he performed the first blood transfusion, these instruments were the impellor and the gravitator. The impellor was a complex invention, it consisted of a cup, tube and syringe. With the gravitator blood was injected into the patient with a vessel that was held above the patient during the procedure.
During this time, James didn’t know of the blood groups. He had no idea there were different blood types. It wasn’t until 1901 when the first blood types were discovered by Karl Landsteiner. Once the blood types were discovered, this made blood transfusions way safer and more successful. Today, blood transfusions are very common and very useful. There are a great number of people who donate blood.
James Blundell has left a huge impact on the medical field. Along with his invention of blood transfusion, he has also left a huge impression on the field or surgery. Even in his later years, James was dealing with medical places. James had done a lot of great things during his lifetime that has an impact on the life we have