History Of Medicine

The practice of medicine has been shaped through the years by advances in the area of diagnostic procedures. Many of these advances were made possible by scientific breakthroughs made before the 20th century. Modern medicine arguably emerged. Both normal and abnormal functions (physiology and pathology) were increasingly understood within smaller units, first the tissues and then the cells. Microscopy also played a key role in the development of bacteriology. Physicians started to use stethoscope as an aid in diagnosing certain diseases and conditions. New ways of diagnosing disease were developed, and surgery emerged as an important branch of medicine. Above all, a combination of science and technology underpinned medical knowledge and practice in a pattern of successful discoveries involving medical instruments such as microscope, staining, stethoscope and X-rays.

Of the five senses, the most important is sight. It aids in the process of gathering information about the environment that we are part of. However, this visual gathering is adequate only to a certain point. Beyond this point, the unaided human eye fails to help us; the amount of detail that it can provide is severely limited. In order to overcome this limitation, humans started to develop instruments like microscope. The development of the simple microscope to the electron microscope allowed for all the different discoveries of cells and eventually to the development of the Cell Theory. This statement has definitely been proven in history. As the microscopes advance in their abilities, biologists and scientists are able to study the cells in more detail. More details lead to more discoveries of things previously unknown to man. When sections of living things were magnified under the microscope, tiny structures could be seen for the first-time and in structures that the human eye was never able to see. For example, in 1664, a scientist named Robert Hook looked at pieces of cork under his microscope. He saw that the cork was made of very tiny boxes which he called cells. Other scientists believed that if cork were made of tiny cells, other living things might be made of cells as well (Porter, pg 329). By using their microscopes, they found that every living plant and animal they examined was made of cells. As microscopes

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