Century

Year

Medical Discoveries*

Sanitary Engineering Discoveries

16^th Century

1543

Andreas Vesalius presents "De Humani Corporis Fabrica," or "The Structure of the Human Body," which detailed the anatomy of the human body. He was the first to point out that without bones, human beings would be mushy blobs. "It presented medicine with the precious gift of the scientific method with which to approach an infinite number of future medical problems."

17^th Century

1628

William Harvey published "De Motu Cordis" or "On the Motion of the Heart," in which he described the functions of the heart and the circulation of blood. Introducing his discovery of circulation, Harvey wrote that his findings were "of so novel and unheard-of character, that I not only fear injury to myself from the envy of a few, but I tremble lest I have mankind at large for my enemies."

1675

Anton Leeuwenhoek, a haberdasher and part-time janitor, looking at a drop of rainwater under a microscope, discovered "little animals" - or bacteria, a cause of myriad diseases.

18^th Century

1796

By using cowpox, which causes a mild disease in human beings, to protect a person from the deadlier smallpox, Edward Jenner discovered vaccination. His method of injecting dead bacteria or their toxins helped eradicate smallpox, and protects against bubonic plague, chickenpox, cholera, diphtheria, influenza, measles, mumps, rabies, typhoid fever, tetanus and other diseases.

19^th Century

1842

Crawford Long, using ether to prevent his patients from feeling pain, developed surgical anesthesia.

1895

Wilhelm Roentgen discovered the X-ray beam, and developed one of the most important diagnostic tools.

20^th Century

1907

Ross Harrison figured out how to grow living cells outside the body. " It made possible the study of living organisms at the cellular and even the molecular level and the development of modern vaccines…and abetted the search for the causes of cancer (and AIDS). Indeed, because of tissue culture, more has been learned about the basic mechanisms of disease in the past 50 years than in the previous 5,000."

1912

Nikolai Anichkov discovered that cholesterol was responsible for coronary artery disease, currently the world's most deadly disease.

1928

Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, which led the way for the development of other antibiotics to treat infections.

1950-53

Maurice Wilkins did the pioneering work of isolating a single fiber of DNA and examining it, which James Watson and Francis Crick then used to develop their own double helix model of DNA, the heredity-bearing molecule. Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize with them for the discovery, which opened the door to genetics research in 1962.