How The Evolution Of Medicine Has Negatively Affected Our Culture

William James Mayo once said, “The aim of medicine is to prevent disease and prolong life, the ideal of medicine is to eliminate the need of a physician”.( Mayo/ Google Images) If you truly think about this quote, it's amazing how medicine can one day replace health care professionals. If you think about the beginning of mankind, no one was practicing medicine,so if you were to tell those same people about the medicine we now have they wouldn't be able to imagine it. The evolution of medicine has greatly affected our culture, by allowing us to live better, longer, and healthier lives.The first medical practices were quite fascinating, but what they have evolved into is truly spectacular, that wouldn't have been possible without the evolution
Anesthetics cause anesthesia, which is the reversible loss of sensation. Without anesthetics any type of surgery would cause unbearable pains, this explains why many surgeries did not work out, previous to the development of anesthetics. Another reason begin, it took a while to perfect the formula of anesthetics to types we are currently using. Doctors began experimenting with different gases such as nitric oxide,which turned out to be a failure, but it did not stop trying to perfect the formula. This led to the first anesthetics being produced for sale in 1858. They were made with ether, chloroform and ironically cocaine, which is now an illegal drug because of how dangerously addictive it is. Heroin, which is now also illegal because of how dangerously addictive it, was once used as an anesthetic in 1898. After many attempts anesthetics were successfully made, so successful that we are able to control what parts of the body they affect, and whether the patient is put to sleep or remain
He was an American engineer “attempting to build a device that recorded heart rhythms, but after he mis-assembled the contraption, he noticed that it was giving off a heartbeat-like pulse.” (Chainey) He discovered that his mistake was actually a blessing in disguise because it could be used as a smaller pacemaker. It took him two years of refinement, but he was finally able to perfect it, drafting a patent for it in 1960 and later sending it into production. It has now evolved into a device called the implantable cardioverter-defibrillator, which has and still is helping save the lives of those in