A Brief History of Surgery

For this History of Science class, our final exam can take the form of a research project/experiment. For mine, I am planning on delving into a research project with one of the pediatric urology surgeons I work with at U of M's hospital.

I have always been fascinated by the history of surgery, and how it has evolved over the years, so I thought I would share some of the more interesting parts with the readers of this blog.

Surgeons and doctors were considered very different in the Middle Ages: doctors went to university and got a degree to practice medicine, while surgeons were apprentices, and learned their trade through practice. Surgeons were called Mr. _______ instead of Dr. _________. One of the surgeons I work with practiced in England, and still has his nameplate that says Mr. _________.

Surgeons' primary responsibilities were pulling teeth and setting broken/dislocated bones.

Aseptic techniques for surgery were developed by Joseph Lister in 1867 with his book Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery.


Surgery is often advanced during war, when desperate times call for desperate measures. For example, amputations were experimented with during wartime, especially in the Civil War.

There are many others to check out if you are left curious by this post. Surgery is a fascinating field, and advancements are constantly being made to make surgeries safer and more comfortable for patients.

Stumbling upon science...

Can you believe that one of the greatest drugs discovered in history was found by accident?  In 1928 Alexander Fleming noticed in his lab that there was mold on one of his plates of bacteria, and around the mold there was an absence of bacteria (http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/alexander_fleming_and_penicillin.htm).  I have been taught throughout my life that Fleming had discovered penicillin, the wonder drug, but I did not know that he discovered it by accident.  It is truly amazing to me is that Fleming was not actively testing mold as an agent to kill bacteria.  He merely discovered it due to his lab being messy.  Based on this one observation, the bacteria free ring around the mold, he was able to make one of the most important scientific discoveries in history.  Many lives would be saved because of Fleming's accidental discovery.  It just goes to show that sometimes the best science can come from making observations of mistakes or accidents.

The future of Science and Medicine

The chapter titled Science and Medicine out of Peter Bowler's Making Modern Science shares many insights on the process of integrating science and medicine throughout the 18th through the 21st centuries. After reading about this interesting process, I began to wonder what the future of science in medicine might bring. Researching the future of medicine brought to my attention many possible future technologies, procedures, and miracle cures that could be coming out in the near future. Some of the proposed futures include nanobots that circulate in your blood, drugs tailored to the patient's DNA profile, and DNA based microchips. Here I will describe how some of these cures/preventative methods work and how they will revolutionize science in medicine.

Circulating Nanobots

These little tiny robots swim through your bloodstream, measuring many different elements in your blood. They then send the information to your doctor (eliminating the need for blood to be drawn at check ups.) The sophisticated robots will also have the ability to read your DNA and decode your entire genome to make predictions about susceptibility to certain diseases. If made affordable and readily available, these little guys will likely be swimming through your body within the next twenty to thirty years. This would greatly improve the predictive and preventative ability of medicine since each doctor would be able to sequence each of their patients' genomes to make predictions about their future health.

DNA chips

The structures of DNA chips are refreshingly simple; they are little wafers of silicon or plastic with strands of DNA embedded in the surface. DNA naturally tends to bind to "complementary partners" in the process of hybridization. These chips can be embedded with the DNA of hundreds of different diseases or genetic disorders then sent into the bloodstream of patient. If one of these chips comes in contact with a matching strand of DNA, the complementary strand will bind to the chip within hours. These chips can then be input directly into an analyzer which confirms the presence of whichever diseases or genetic disorders effecting the patient. The application of DNA chips will greatly increase the accuracy of diagnosis and biopsy analysis.

The future of medicine is all about predicting diseases and preventing them. This will require much more personalization of medicine as doctors will know the genetic sequences of each of their individual patients. While much of this is possible today, the costs of genetic sequencing is a large preventative factor of its widespread application. Many doctors agree that in the next few decades, though, we will see personalization, prediction, and prevention improved dramatically.

Sources

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-future-of-medical-technology

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/06/26/a-doctor-s-vision-of-the-future-of-medicine.html

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/06/future-of-health-may-depend-on-recognizing-its-not-all-about-medicinethe-future-of-medicine-were-decades-away-from-the-huge-advances.ars

Joey Gurrentz