Sanitation a Top Medical Milestone

Jan. 18, 2007 — -- If it were up to you to decide what has been the greatest medical advance of the past 150 years, what would you choose?

That's exactly the challenge the prestigious British Medical Journal posed to a small group of experts and the many thousands of their readers, mostly doctors. Well, almost exactly.

They actually were looking for the greatest medical advance of the past 167 years, back to 1840, the year the journal was founded.

What comes to mind? In 1840, we didn't yet know about viruses and bacteria. Louis Pasteur established the germ theory in the 1860s, but it didn't really catch on until almost 1880. Germ theory is pretty important, and a good contender.

Florence Nightingale is credited with establishing standardized training for nurses, but she did not open her school until 1860.

Anyone who has ever had a bone heal after wearing a cast may owe a debt to an X-ray. William Roentgen invented those in 1895.

According to legend, we owe antibiotics to some moldy bread and the insight of Dr. Alexander Fleming. Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928 and it was first used to treat human infection in 1941. Antibiotics are of monumental importance, and might get your vote.

We learned about the structure of DNA -- the double helix at the foundation of life -- from Watson and Crick in 1953.

The World Health Organization announced the eradication of smallpox in 1980. The product of an immunization program, this was the first and only time human beings have completely eliminated an infectious disease.

We didn't have anesthetics until 1846 (I am about to have an operation on my knee, so personally, I'm pretty thankful to Dr. William Morton for this advance!). The electrocardiogram (ECG) was first developed in 1903 by Willem Einthoven. Dr. Gregor Pincus gave us oral contraceptives in 1955. The cardiac pacemaker was developed in 1957; the CT scan in 1973; and diagnostic ultrasound in 1979.

Dr. Christiaan Barnard performed the first heart transplant in 1967; Dr. Robert Jarvik invented the artificial heart in 1982. Hemodialysis for kidney failure first became practical in the 1960s. Recent decades have given us MRI scans, robotic surgery, laparoscopy, endoscopy, angioplasty, coronary bypass surgery and a decoded genome.