During our visit to Musée d’Histoire de la Medécine, we had the opportunity to walk through the evolution of medicine and understand how it shifted from a theoretical approach to a scientific practice backed by tangible evidence and experience. Before medicine became a scientific practice, it was very much so based on folklore and word-of-mouth. With the technological advancements and understanding of the human body that we have today, it is hard to imagine that people used to be so willing to try treatments with no actual evidence that it won’t harm them or that it even works. However, this isn’t really a different approach to medical treatments now, as most people simply want something to cure their maladies without understanding the mechanisms behind it. It’s the same ‘if it works, it works’ approach that people had before doctors could outline the positive and negative consequences of any treatment. As with any new development or discovery, we should expect that same learning curve, but now we can account for larger implications of those discoveries.
What I believe to be one of the most significant contributions to medicine is anesthesia. Let us not forget that even though anesthesia wasn’t developed until the mid-1800s, major medical procedures still occurred before then. Operations like amputation, dental work, and internal procedures all happened while patients were entirely conscious and could feeling everything the doctors were doing. Not only were the patients stressed, but the doctors were as well because they had to stay focused while patients screamed in agony. Needless to say, anesthesia was a very useful advancement for all parties involved, and continues to prove its usefulness in newer procedures today. As brain research has become more complex, doctors have developed a way to sedate patients and keep them conscious during the operation. This seems counter intuitive to the original purpose of anesthesia but it has proven to be helpful in cases where monitoring the patient’s mental ability is necessary. Altieri et al. (2018) conducted a study examining the effects of dexmedetomidine, an anesthetic used for awake surgery, on stress levels during and post-surgery as compared to full-sleep patients, and found that post-surgery stress levels were the same regardless of if the patient was awake. Anesthesia has come quite a long way since the first time it was used, because previously, patients would go under for surgery and would not wake up. But with the help of weight-dependent dosage, anesthesia has propelled medical treatment beyond where we could have imagined.
Figure 1. Me astutely listening to the history behind tools used for amputation.
Figure 2. Ombredanne’s anesthesia mask (1871-1950), which I credit for sparking my curiosity in anesthesia.
Works Cited
Altieri R, Zenga F, Melcarne A, Junemann C, Faccoli E, et al. (2018) Conscious Sedation with Dexmedetomidine in Awake Surgery. J Anesth Clin Res 9: 812. doi:10.4172/2155-6148.1000812