The History of Medicine

Living in a city was associated with reduced life expectancy, a phenomenon known as the ‘urban penalty’, as death rates from tuberculosis, cholera, dysentery and smallpox remained high.

The birth, on 25 July 1978, of Louise Brown, the world’s first test-tube baby, was a fitting climax to three decades of remarkable biomedical creativity.

In 1967, a brave new medical world was born. On the night of 2 December that year, Christiaan Barnard (1922–2001), a cardiac surgeon at the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, performed the first human heart transplant. Although the recipient, Louis Washkansky, lived for only eighteen more days, Barnard’s second patient survived over eighteen months, demonstrating the feasibility of transplanting the most important organ in the body

According to certain historians, 1865 was a pivotal year in the emergence of modern medical science. This was the moment when the English surgeon Joseph Lister (1827–1912) introduced antiseptic techniques into surgical practice.

In Tokyo, students were increasingly educated in scientific medicine imported from Germany. In Kyoto, by contrast, physicians such as Akashi Hiroakira (1839–1910) taught and administered Western medical treatments alongside traditional Japanese remedies.

Western models of modernization in medicine and science also became popular amongst some Chinese officials during the 1860s. Chinese students increasingly travelled abroad to study medicine or were able to receive formal training in the theories and practices of Western medicine at state institutions such as the Tianjin Medical School, which opened in 1881.

Perhaps the oldest and most well-known hospital catering specifically for the insane was Bethlem (commonly referred to as Bedlam) in London. Founded as a religious institution for the sick in 1247, Bethlem admitted lunatics by the fourteenth century. Across Europe, similar places of refuge, known as ‘asylums’, were opened in Gheel, in Belgium, and in Valencia, Barcelona and other urban centres in Spain.

Known as the ‘King’s Evil’, it was thought scrofula could be cured or alleviated by the medieval practice of the sufferer being touched by the king or by the patient touching a coin (known as an angel) that had been handled by a monarch. Similarly, superstition often shaped attempts to ward off disease, restore health and vitality, and enhance or reduce fertility. While some couples employed herbal preparations, prayers and incantations to induce conception, others regularly used folk remedies to avoid or terminate unwanted pregnancies.

In 1671, Jane Sharp published The Midwives Book, a manual of midwifery that combined information on anatomy with advice about sexuality, conception, pregnancy, labour and the care of infants.

In the most prominent Renaissance or early modern work on melancholy, The Anatomy of Melancholy, published in 1621, the Oxford scholar Robert Burton (1577–1640) suggested that insufficient exercise, idleness, isolation, fear, shame, hatred, envy, anger, the love of gambling and excessive pleasure, pride, self-obsession, over-work, too much studying, frights, infatuations, rejections, imprisonment and poverty could all lead to mental illness. According to Burton, the cure for melancholy was to address these aspects of the patient’s life. Moderate exercise of the body and mind, outdoor recreation, music and laughter, friendly company and the alleviation of poverty were all capable of reviving ailing spirits and restoring sanit