MEDICIN

Medicine in the 20th century

Konstanty Tukałło

The 16th-century outstanding physician, naturalist and philosopher Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus, claimed that the loss of health was the greatest misfortune a man could experience. In the 20th century thousands of scientists worked to prolong human life and fight illnesses. The progress in biology, as well as electronics and computer technology enabled us to discover a great number of previously unknown truths concerning health - defined as a state of biological, physical and mental balance. The discovery of penicillin by Fleming in 1929 resulted in a large decrease in the number of infection-related diseases and deaths: hence suggestions to call the 20th century the century of penicillin and penicillin-related antibiotics. An average man does not realise how many people he meets owe their lives to the antibiotic therapy. Towards the end of the 20th century, however, we witnessed the increasingly smaller effectiveness of antibiotics. The resistance of bacterium strains to antibiotics is increasing, despite finding new medicines from this group. At present scientists predominantly tend to look for possibilities of strengthening the natural, inborn immunity.

The development of sciences related to grafting tissues, and even transplanting entire organs such as the heart, kidneys, the liver and lungs, was another significant step forward in the 20th-century medicine. At the same time a kidney machine and an artificial right cardiac ventricle were constructed. In the 20th century scientists started experimenting with employing animal transplants in humans. A man lived for 23 days with an implanted baboon’s heart and he died due to acute rejection of the animal transplant which could not be overcome by contemporary medicines.

In the 20th century doctors mastered ways of removing pain and the so called palliative (symptomatic) medicine enabled people to die with dignity and without pain. The lack of rudimentary knowledge about removing pain among members of the Dutch parliament has led to a situation when euthanasia in the Netherlands is no longer a crime. A sole request of patients, who are not always of sound mind, is enough for doctors, or rather executioners, to kill them off with impunity.

The use of plastic and metal implants to a large degree allowed millions of people to return to normal life after accidents as well as heart and artery diseases. Unfortunately the above mentioned and other considerable discoveries and inventions of the 20th-century medicine have only benefited citizens of rich countries. In 1980, the then mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, in his speech addressed to surgeons assembled in Paris at an international congress, asked them to consider the issue of reducing costs of medical treatment. A great number of citizens of not necessarily the poorest countries have been deprived of access to modern diagnostics and therapy for economic reasons. This problem has been increasingly worrying also in Poland.

Despite unquestioned successes of medicine in the 20th century, new threats arose, such as AIDS, often called the plague of the 20th century, BSE, etc. So far unknown or disregarded ecological threats such as the hole in the ozone layer, sudden increase in CO2 in atmosphere resulting in warming up the world climate by 1.5 degrees Celsius, etc., became subjects of numerous debates and scientific research. Unfavourable phenomena caused by cutting down forests, reversing courses of rivers and polluting the earth with radioactive wastes have been the revenge of nature for breaking its eternal laws. Only towards the end of the last century did doctors, biologists and politicians notice the danger of the so called civilisation diseases. Parliaments of numerous countries have been working on and passing laws to stop the destruction of the natural environment caused by the uncontrollable development of the pseudo-civilisation.

The progress in prolonging human life in good health does not depend entirely on the development of medical sciences. In countries of high education and culture people live longer and there are fewer disabled people. Health on the national level depends on the level of education and culture in a given country. Popular knowledge about contemporary hazards to life and health is closely related to the prevention of various diseases. The percentage of early detected life threatening diseases depends on the education of a patient, who is able to notice the disadvantageous changes in his organism.

Among the great achievements of the 20th-century medicine one also needs to add the widespread use of endoscopy, which allows monitoring and even operating on internal organs. Endoscopy and laparoscopy enable the ill to avoid a major operation injury as doctors have to reach the disease focus in order to cure it.

The above mentioned examples of progress in the 20th-century medicine, despite ever arising new problems, augur well for the future of human health. Prolonging life in good health to a hundred years of age seems to be more and more possible.