Can you even?

File: 1496947941020.jpg (144KB, 768x768px) Image search: [Google]

144KB, 768x768px

Diagnostic technologies
Microscope: While the Delft draper Antonie van Leeuwenhoek didn’t invent the compound microscope, he improved it, beginning in the 1660s, increasing the curvature of the lenses, and so became the first person to see and describe blood corpuscles, bacteria, protozoa, and sperm.
Electron microscope: Physicist Ernst Ruska and electrical engineer Max Kroll constructed the prototype in Berlin in 1933, using a lens by Hans Busch. Eventually, electron microscopes would be designed with two-million power magnification. Leeuwenhoek’s had about two hundred.
Stethoscope: Thank the French physician René Laennec, who introduced what he called a microphone in 1816. British nephrologist Golding Bird substituted a flexible tube for Laennec’s wooden cylinder in 1840, and the Irish physician Arthur Leared added a second earpiece in 1851. Notable improvements were made by Americans Howard Sprague, a cardiologist, and electrical engineer Maurice Rappaport in the 1960s (a double-sided head), and Harvard cardiologist David Littmann in the same decade (enhancing the acoustics). The device undoubtedly transformed medicine, and with good reason became the symbol of the health care professional.

File: 1496951682011.jpg (296KB, 640x933px) Image search: [Google]

296KB, 640x933px

Pain
If you ever had surgery, did you opt for anesthesia?
If so, thank a few more white males, beginning with William Clarke in New York and Crawford Long in Georgia who both used chloroform in minor surgeries in 1842. A paper published four years later by William Morton, after his own work in Boston, spread the word. Ether replaced chloroform during the next decade. There are now scores of general and regional anesthetics and sedatives and muscle relaxants, administered in tandem. The first local anesthetic has also been superseded. It was cocaine, pioneered by a Viennese ophthalmologist, Carl Koller, in 1884.
Ever take an analgesic?
Next time you pop an aspirin, remember Felix Hoffmann of Bayer. In 1897, he converted salicylic acid to acetylsalicylic acid, much easier on the stomach. Aspirin remains the most popular and arguably the most effective drug on the market. In 1948 two New York biochemists, Bernard Brodie and Julius Axelrod, documented the effect that acetaminophen (Tylenol), synthesized by Harmon Morse in 1878, had on pain and fever. Gastroenterologist James Roth persuaded McNeil Labs to market the analgesic in 1953.

File: dfgs.jpg (93KB, 600x600px) Image search: [Google]

93KB, 600x600px

Sphygmograph: The first machine to measure blood pressure was created by a German physiologist, Karl von Vierordt in 1854.
X-rays: Discovered by Karl Wilhelm Röntgen, at Wurzberg in 1895, this was probably the single most important diagnostic breakthrough in medical history. Before Röntgen noticed that cathode rays, electrons emitted from a cathode tube, traveled through objects and created images on a fluorescent screen, physicians could only listen, palpitate, examine stools, and drink urine.
PET scans: James Robertson designed the first machine in 1961, based on the work of number of American men at Penn, Wash U., and Mass General, designed the first machine. The scanner provides an image from the positron emissions coming from a radioactive isotope injected into the patient, and is particularly useful for mapping activity in the brain.
CAT scans: The first model was developed by electrical engineer Godfrey Hounsfield, in London, 1972, drawing on the work of South African physicist Alan Cormack in the mid-1960s. It generates three-dimensional and cross-sectional images using computers and gamma rays.
MRI: Raymond Damadian, a SUNY professor of medicine with a degree in math, performed the first full-body scan 1977. His design was anticipated by theoretical work by Felix Bloch and Edward Purcell in the 1930s, and, later, Paul Lauterbur. MRIs map the radio waves given off by hydrogen atoms exposed to energy from magnets, and are particularly useful in imaging tissue -- and without exposing the patient to ionizing radiation.

File: 1497289791124.jpg (132KB, 800x1200px) Image search: [Google]

132KB, 800x1200px

Ultrasound: Ian Donald, a Glasgow obstetrician, in the mid-1950s adopted a device already used in industry that generated inaudible, high frequency sound waves. The machine quickly and cheaply displays images of soft tissue, and now provides most American parents with the first photo of their baby.
Endoscopes: Georg Wolf produced the first flexible gastroscope in Berlin in 1911, and this was improved by Karl Storz in the late ‘40s. The first fiber optic endoscope was introduced in 1957 by Basil Hirschowitz, a South African gastroenterologist, drawing on the work of British physicist Harold Hopkins. The scope is indispensible in diagnosing GI abnormalities.
Angiogram: Werner Forssmann performed the first cardiac catherisation -- on himself -- in Eberswald in 1929. He inserted a catheter into his lower left arm, walked downstairs to a fluoroscope, threaded the catheter to his right atrium and injected a radioptic dye. The technique was further developed by Dickson Richards and André Courmand at Columbia in the ‘40s, and then extended to coronary arteries, initially accidentally, by Frank Sones at the Cleveland Clinic in 1958.
X-rays and scopes were quickly used in treatment as well diagnosis. Roentgen himself used his machines to burn off warts. Similarly, in 1964, Charles Dotter and Marvin Judkins used a catheter to open a blocked artery, improving the technique in 1967. Andreas Gruentzig then introduced balloon angioplasty in 1975, an inflated balloon opening the narrowed or blocked artery. In 1986, Jacques Puel implanted the first coronary stent at U. of Toulouse, and soon afterwards a Swiss cardiologist, Ulrich Sigwart, developed the first drug-eluding stent.

File: 1497996321276.jpg (148KB, 1080x1152px) Image search: [Google]

148KB, 1080x1152px

Cancer Drugs
In the forty-three years since Richard Nixon’s “war on cancer” was launched, the disease has received the lion’s share of government, foundation, and pharmaceutical industry funding, though heart disease kills more people -- 596,577 Americans last year to 576,691 for cancer, according to the most recent data. This makes it particularly difficult, and invidious, to single out individual researchers.
There is still, of course, nothing close to a magic bullet, though cancer deaths have dropped about 20% since their peak in 1991. Around 27% of cancer deaths this year will be from lung cancer, so the rate will continue to fall as more people stop smoking.
The originators of a few therapies with good five-year survival rates ought to be singled out and thanked.
Seattle oncologist Donnall Thomas performed the first successful bone marrow transplant in 1956. The donor was an identical twin of the leukemia patient. With the development of drugs to suppress the immune system’s response to foreign marrow, Thomas was able to perform a successful transplant from a non-twin relative in 1969. About 18,000 are now performed each year.
One of the more notable successes of chemotherapy has been in the treatment of the childhood cancer acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). Sidney Farber in the late ‘40s carried out clinical trials with the antifolate aminopterin, synthesized at Lederle by the Indian biochemist Yellapragada Subbarow. This proved the first effective compound in treating the disease. It was superseded by methotrexate, and now, as in all chemo treatments, a combination of agents is used. The five-year survival rate for ALL has jumped from near zero to 85%.

File: 67-American_Flag_Bikini.jpg (35KB, 500x667px) Image search: [Google]

35KB, 500x667px

number are effective owing to other mechanisms, and are currently used.
Psychiatric medicine
Drugs have revolutionized the practice of psychiatry since the 1950s, and brought relief to millions suffering from depression, anxiety, and psychoses. For obvious reasons, these are some of the most highly addictive and widely abused drugs.
A few men to thank:
Adolph von Baeyer, Emil Fischer, Joseph von Mering: barbiturates, synthesized in 1865, but not marketed until 1903. The most commonly prescribed today are phenobarbital sodium (Nembutal) and mephobarbital (Membaral).
Bernard Ludwig and Frank Berger: meprobamate, the tranquilizer Miltown. By the end of the ‘50s, a third of all prescriptions in America were for this drug
Leo Steinberg: the anxiolytic (anti-anxiety) benzodiazepines, first synthesized in 1955. The most successful initially was diazepam, Valium, marketed in 1963. The most widely prescribed benzodiazepine today is alprazolam, Xanax. It’s also the most widely prescribed psychiatric drug, with nearly 50 million prescriptions. It increases concentrations of dopamine and suppresses stress-inducing activity of the hypothalamus.
Leandro Panizzon: methylphenidate (Ritalin). The Swiss chemist developed it in 1944 as a stimulant, and named it after his wife, whose tennis game it helped improve. Until the early ‘60s amphetamines were used, counter-intuitively, to treat hyperactive children. Thirty years after its patent expired, the controversial dopamine reuptake inhibitor is still the most widely prescribed medication for the 11% of children who’ve been diagnosed with ADHD.

File: 1139083872_2053570816.jpg (93KB, 640x804px) Image search: [Google]

93KB, 640x804px

Even Islam needs to thank western civilization.

Muslims boast that their faith has over 2 billion followers throughout the world. If this number is accurate, it has far less to do with the appeal of Islam or with Arab or Turkish conquests than with the work of some Northern Europeans and Jews, along with the “imperialists” who built roads, canals, and ports and the vehicles that use them, as well as schools and hospitals – like the traveling eye clinics in Egypt funded by the Jewish banker Ernest Cassel, which nearly eliminated blinding trachoma, then endemic.

File: s-l1000.jpg (66KB, 750x1000px) Image search: [Google]

66KB, 750x1000px

Not a single contribution to humans or civilization by non whites.
Typical.