Felix Guyon applied Lister's system to surgical treatment of the genitourinary ailments, and became a leader in this class of surgery. Bernard Naunyn, a well-known German writer on surgery, became a leading authority on diabetes and diseases of the liver and pancreas. Jean Martin Charcot made the Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris, the greatest of the world's neurological clinics. He was also a great authority on diseases of the biliary passages and kidneys. Sir James Paget, Sir Jonathan Hutchinson, Sir William Gull, Jenner, Wilks, Spencer Wells, and Clifford Allbutt, besides doing much by their writings to advance the practice of medicine, all closely allied themselves with large hospitals, giving as much attention to the hospitals as to the treatment of disease. Modern hospitals are largely due to their pioneering work.
Louis Pasteur's studies in fermentation led to the discovery of lactic-acid bacteria and this was the starting point for a number of revolutionary discoveries in bacterial diseases. Infectious diseases were placed in new categories by his work.
The etiology of traumatic infectious diseases was advanced by the researches of Robert Koch (1843-1910). His work in discovering the cholera vibrio, the microorganisms of Oriental ophthalmia and his researches on the nature and treatment of tuberculosis, made his name known everywhere. His isolation of the tuberculosis germ in 1882, and that of Asiatic cholera in 1884, were leading steps toward the discovery of a great number of disease germs.
Fevers, like typhus, typhoid, yellow fever, and malaria, a few generations ago, took a great annual toll of lives. The work of the men mentioned above, Lister, Pasteur, Koch, and the French physiologist, Claude Bernard, gave medical men the means of curbing the ravages of these diseases so that to-day they are incidental annoyances rather than human scourges.
The germ of typhoid fever was discovered in 1880 by Eberth. The cocci of pneumonia were isolated by Frankel in 1886.
Modern surgery has been greatly facilitated by the employment of numerous anesthetics, chemicals which possess the power of inducing local or general insensibility. Soporific drugs have been used in surgical operations since the remotest antiquity, but modern practices in the employment of anesthetics followed the discoveries of Faraday in 1818. He described the properties of nitrous oxide, or ether and other gases in that year and suggested their use in medicine.
John Godman (1822), James Jackson (1833), and Drs. Wood and Bache (1834) were among American medical men who made use of Faraday's suggestions. Dr. Horace Wells, a dentist at Hartford, Connecticut, used ether in 1844. Two years later W. T. Morton, a dentist in Boston, employed it successfully. Chloroform was described as a useful anesthetic by Dr. Flourens, of Paris, in 1847, the year in which Sir James Simpson introduced ether as an anesthetic in obstetric practice.
Mesmer introduced hypnosis into medical practice about 1777, and in 1784 Benjamin Franklin reported favorably on the medical value of what he called magnetic sleep. Alexandre Bertrand, about 1831, described the nature of hypnosis and in 1841 James Braid employed it in his English medical practice. The employment of hypnosis has not become general, although it is recognized that in certain nervous troubles there is a field for it.
Among other American medical men who advanced their science in the past were James Marion Sims (1813-1883) and Thomas Emmet, who acquired wide fame for successful methods of operating in obstetric diseases. William Beaumont (1785-1853) investigated the offices of the gastric juice and devised treatment for digestive troubles. John Shaw Billings served his profession by compiling, with the assistance of Robert Fletcher, an Index Catalogue of the Surgeon General's library, Washington.
Pharmacology is as old as medicine. The medicinal qualities of herbs, roots, and gums were known to primitive man. There have been herbalists and druggists in all important communities at all times. Scientific pharmacology, however, is just as new as modern medicine. Cordus published a pharmacopœia, which listed drugs in use in 1535. Since that time many such works have appeared. The second of the Monros of Edinburgh University Medical School, Magendie, and Claude Bernard placed pharmacy upon a scientific basis. They followed scientific methods used by Fontana in Florence in 1765 in studying the effects of snake poisons. Pareira's "Elements of Materia Medica" was the leading textbook in 1842. This work gave very brief accounts of the physiological effects of drugs. The physiological values were not properly appreciated until about twenty years later.