As science and technology evolve, injuries and diseases generally remain the same. As such, modern ways of treating these ailments may or may not evolve over time. This article published by Wired, talks about which surgeries remain the same and which have dramatically changed over time. Here’s an excerpt:
“That’s one of the good things about medical devices in general,” Gifford said. “Technology rolls on but people keep getting sick from the same diseases over the ages.”
And that technology has been developing at an increasing rate since medicine started to incorporate all that anatomical and physiological knowledge with the widespread use of anesthesia in the mid-19th century and antibiotics during the 20th.
“Before anesthesia, the only thing to recommend any technique was how fast it was, because you had to be able to keep the person held down and from dying of shock,” said Sara Piasecki, the head of historical collections and archives at Oregon Health Sciences University’s History of Medicine Library.
Without antibiotics, though, even good procedures could end up being ruined by infection, so efficacy was hard to assess. Still, human bodies have remained fundamentally the same. So much so that in time-pressured situations, like battlefield medicine, surgery hasn’t changed much at all.
“We still saw off legs with a saw the way that they did back in colonial days — the way they did way back before colonial days,” said Dave Lounsbury, M.D., a retired U.S. Army colonel and co-editor of War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq. “At the risk of being brutish, though there is fancier equipment, the procedure is fundamentally the same. Blood transfusion today in Afghanistan is identical to the way it was in World War I.”
Working in surgery I’ve seen this myself, sometimes it looks like doctors have a set of tools ready to build a house, rather than amputate a leg. [Wired]
