History of Medicine - Importance of Individuals

Importance of Vesalius:

• Moved people on from studying Galen.
• Brought about change in medical thinking.
• Helped establish surgery as a separate profession.
• Taught at Padua.
• Made dissection of humans more acceptable.
• Improved anatomical drawings and reference books.

Opposition/Limitations:

• Was not able to prove himself that the heart was a pump.

Importance:

• He marked the end of Galen's influence on anatomy.
• Worked on the idea that blood circulated around the body.
• Reduced the power of Church through dissection.
• Made little difference at the time - blood letting remained popular.
• Encouraged others to investigate circulation.
• Essential to the understanding of the body.

Opposition/Limitations:

• Considered eccentric.
• Only until better quality microscopes were discovered that people accepted (after his death).

Importance:

• First person ever to immunise disease.
• Affected Pasteur and Koch 100yrs later.
• Saved lives from smallpox (biggest killer 15%)

Opposition/Limitations:

• People thought it was going against religion.
• He was not able to explain why or apply it to other diseases.
• Many doctors were against his ideas.
• Did not eradicate disease.

Importance:

• He scientifically proved how disease was caused.
• He was finally able to explain how Jenner's vaccines worked.
• Led to improved public health.
• He proved religion wrong.
• Led to vaccinations being found.
• Magic Bullets led on from Germ Theory.

Opposition/Limitations:

• As he was a scientist rather than a doctor he was not able to turn his results into treatment until Koch developed it further.

Importance:

• He proved germs were the cause of disease (built on Pasteur's work).
• Found the specific bacterium that caused disease.
• Discovered vaccine for Anthrax and Cholera.
• He finally laid rest to miasma theory.
• Koch developed the right methods to discover.
• "As soon as the right methods were found, discoveries came as easily as ripe apples from a tree".

Opposition/Limitations:

• Believed in miasma for the majority of his work.

Importance:

• First woman doctor to become a qualified physician.
• Paved the way for other women.
• Started St. Mary's Dispensary School for Women.
• First and only woman member of British Medical Council.

Opposition/Limitations:

• Still some gender prejudice.
• Did not actually move medicine forward.
• Saved no lives.

Importance:

• Revolutionised the profession of nursing.
• She trained and educated women.
• Improved the conditions in hospitals during the Crimean War.
• Reduced deaths by infection.

Opposition/Limitations:

• Before Pasteur so could not explain.

Importance:

• Discovered double helix structure of DNA
• Scientists could prove how DNA replicates itself so consistently.
• Led to advances in genetic understanding (Human Genome mapped in 2000)
• Technology and nanoscience improved.

Opposition/Limitations:

• Lots of ethical issues surrounding.
• Has not affected many cures (only understanding).

Importance:

• Relevant cure - WW1
• Worked effectively.

Opposition/Limitations:

• Technology wasn't advanced enough at the time to separate penicillin from the mould.
• Florey and Chain completed his work ten years later.