Medicine

VIII

20th-Century Medicine

Medicine's most revolutionary advances have occurred since 1900. By the end of the 20th century, medical advances helped to increase the average person's life expectancy by almost 30 years. As people lived longer, new medical challenges emerged. Heart disease, cancer, stroke, and other conditions often associated with aging replaced infectious diseases as the leading causes of death. Physicians began to devote greater attention to preventing disease and keeping patients healthy into advanced age. Biomedical research also shifted focus to the most basic causes of diseases, including defects in individual genes.

A

Infectious Diseases

Infectious diseases that historically have killed millions of people each year were conquered early in the 20th century by improved sanitation, antibiotics, and vaccines.

German physician Paul Ehrlich showed around 1910 that a chemical compound, arsphenamine, could treat syphilis. He opened the era of chemotherapy, in which physicians use chemical compounds that act selectively to target specific diseases.

In the early 1930s, German and French scientists showed that sulfonamide was effective in treating streptococcal bacteria infections. This discovery led to the first family of so-called wonder drugs, the sulfonamide antibiotics. In 1938 British biochemists Howard Florey and Ernst Chain purified penicillin, the bacteria-destroying compound that Alexander Fleming observed in mold ten years earlier. Streptomycin, the first antibiotic for tuberculosis, was discovered in 1944 by American microbiologist Selman Waksman. Dozens of other antibiotics were subsequently discovered, each stronger and more effective against a broader range of bacteria.

---

---

Scientists learned more about how the body's immune system protects itself from infections, resulting in new tests for diagnosing infectious diseases and new vaccines to prevent them. The Wasserman blood test for syphilis was developed in 1906 and the tuberculin skin test for tuberculosis appeared in 1908. By the 1930s new techniques for growing viruses in the laboratory led to vaccines against viral diseases. These included a yellow fever vaccine in the late 1930s and the first effective influenza vaccine in the 1940s. The American physician Jonas E. Salk developed a polio vaccine in 1954. Later virologist Albert B. Sabin developed a safer oral polio vaccine, which was in wide use by the 1960s. Later came vaccines for other childhood diseases, including measles, German measles, mumps, and chicken pox.

Infectious diseases, once thought conquered by antibiotics, became a major concern again in the 1990s. New forms of tuberculosis and other diseases resistant to antibiotics spread. Concerns also arose over new or newly recognized microbes, such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the cause of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), which became epidemic in 1981. As human populations grow and expand into wilderness areas, humans and animals come in closer contact. A number of diseases transmitted from animals have become problematic in recent years, including the hemorrhagic fevers caused by the Ebola and Marburg viruses, hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, and Lyme disease. In other areas, physicians recognized that an easily curable bacterial infection caused most peptic ulcers, a disease once blamed on stress and diet.

B

Nutrition

Polish-born American biochemist Casimir Funk introduced the term vitamine in 1912. Researchers later identified vitamins needed by the body to prevent deficiency diseases such as beriberi, rickets, scurvy, and pellagra. As better nutrition was developed and the quality of life improved, these diseases almost disappeared from industrialized countries (see Human Nutrition). But by the end of the 20th century, other nutritional disorders emerged. Studies conducted in the United States in the 1990s showed that more than 97 million Americans were overweight and risked health problems, such as heart disease and diabetes mellitus, commonly associated with obesity.

C

Surgery

Operations that people once regarded as impossible became routine in the 20th century. Many of these surgical advances resulted from improved drugs or medical technology. Better drugs to prevent rejection of transplanted organs made transplantation of hearts, kidneys, livers, lungs, and other organs removed from donors possible. Patients were kept alive with artificial kidneys and temporary artificial hearts while awaiting a transplant (see Medical Transplantation). The heart-lung machine made it possible to stop and restart the heart during coronary bypass surgery. Small fiber-optic instruments called endoscopes led to the new field of minimally invasive surgery. These new tools made it possible to remove a diseased gallbladder or appendix, for example, through small slits rather than large incisions, greatly reducing the amount of anesthesia required during the surgery and lessening recovery time. Transfusions of blood, plasma, and other saline solutions, which went into use in the 1930s, helped prevent deaths from shock in surgery patients. In the 1990s, physicians even began performing surgery to repair defects in unborn infants.

D

Radiology

New methods for viewing diseased structures inside the body improved diagnosis of disease beginning in the 1970s (see Radiology). A gamma camera detects radioactive medication that attaches to certain forms of cancer cells. Computed tomography (CT) scanners use X rays to produce lifelike three-dimensional images of body structures. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners produce highly detailed images without X rays. Positron emission tomography (PET) detects very early warning signs of disease. Sonograms, or ultrasound, taken with high-frequency sound waves diagnose disease and monitor the progress of pregnancies. X rays and high-energy particles emitted by linear accelerators also are used to treat cancer. Lithotripsy uses high-frequency sound waves to destroy some kidney stones and gallstones, conditions that once required surgery.