Here are 8 medical advances that were discovered completely by accident!
8 - ANESTHESIA Without the knockout gas known as anesthesia,
getting surgery would be quite an awful experience.
There’s debate on who truly discovered anesthesia since a few different people had the same
accidental discovery, and each played a role in its creation.
Anesthesia, as we know it today, derived from two different substances.
1.
Nitrous oxide, commonly known as laughing gas.
And 2.
Ether, a flammable liquid used as a solvent.
The discoverers of anesthesia though their own experiences, realized that when either
nitrous oxide or ether were inhaled, it caused people to be less sensitive to pain.
In the 1800s, ether and nitrous oxide were used as party drugs.
Well, I guess some things still haven’t changed!
Anyways, these inhalants were popular at events called “laughing parties” or “ether
frolics.”
It was through observing (and even participating in) these events that the pain relief properties
were discovered.
For example, Horace Wells, one of the people credited with the discovery of anesthesia,
attended one of these laughing parties.
At the party, one guy who probably had too many puffs, fell and hurt his leg pretty badly.
Even though he was bleeding, the man said that he didn’t feel any pain.
So, Horace Wells decided to use the laughing gas as an anesthetic while he removed one
of his own teeth……..seriously?
From that point, Wells, along with other collaborators, used the laughing gas for dental practices
and other public demonstrations.
After this caught on, ether was also used as an anesthetic for minor surgeries.
7 - ROGAINE Rogaine was discovered in 1971 by Guinter
Khan.
He was the head of the dermatology department at the University of Colorado.
One day a man named Paul Grant came to him and asked him to look into something strange
going on with a patient.
A woman was growing hair all over her face.
The woman suffered from hypertension and was using the experimental drug, minoxidil, to
lower her blood pressure.
The woman said that before she started taking the drug, she never had to shave her legs
and she only got a haircut every four months or so.
Afterwards, she had to shave her legs frequently and get her hair cut every three to four weeks!
Being blessed to be hair-free and suddenly you’re shaving your legs all the time and
dealing with hair all over your face...?
I would imagine that she had to be pretty upset.
Khan, however, probably had to hide his excitement.
He noticed that the hair on her face grew especially on the temples and he knew instantly
that this unfortunate side-effect could be used as a medicinal cure for baldness.
As fate would have it, Khan himself suffered from hair loss and had a more than receding
hairline.
Unfortunately for him, he could never use his own cure because…...get this, he was
allergic!
6 - THE PACEMAKER There is debate about who first conceptualized
the pacemaker, because many people have made contributions over time.
We’re going to give props though to Wilson Greatbatch, the electrical engineer who was
best known for his role in inventing the first implantable pacemaker.
Notice that we said implantable, because that definitely makes a difference.
Greatbatch was looking for a way to combat a condition known as heart block.
It’s a condition where a blockage in the electrical conduction system of the heart
throws off the rhythm of the heart muscle.
As of the early 1950’s, the only solutions were big, bulky devices and Greatbatch wanted
to create something smaller and more convenient to put those off- beat hearts back at a regular
pace.
In 1958, he was working at Cornell University to build an oscillator to record the heartbeat
of animals.
He wasn’t paying attention and installed the wrong transistor into the recording machine.
Since he’d already done the work he decided, hey, let’s just see what’ll happen.
When he turned it on, he could hear a pulsing sound, similar to a regular heartbeat.
The device took some tweaking and testing, but eventually it became what we know today
as the pacemaker.
It was installed successfully into a human for the first time on October 8, 1958 in Sweden.
5 - PENICILLIN Penicillin is one of the first antibiotics
in the world.
Back in September of 1928, Dr. Alexander Fleming, a bacteriologist at St. Mary’s hospital
in London, had returned from a vacation, only to find that his lab was left in chaotic condition.
As he sorted out the mess, he came across some colonies of Staphylococcus aureus, a
bacterium that commonly causes infection after an injury or a surgery.
His lab had been kept in such poor condition while he was away that a mold, Penicillium
notatu, could be seen growing on the petri dishes.
As he examined the mold further under the microscope, he realized Staphylococcus bacteria
weren’t growing as fast as they normally would.
The mold had somehow stunted the bacteria’s growth.
It took a few weeks to grow more of the mold, but he eventually confirmed that there was
definitely something in the Penicillium mold that could be used to treat infections.
At St. Mary’s, he didn’t have the resources he needed to do further research.
And… he kinda didn’t have the smarts either.
Don’t get me wrong, he really was a smart guy.
But he was a bacteriologist.
It would take someone with a deep background in chemistry to isolate and purify the active
ingredient from the mold.
1938, Dr. Howard Florey, a professor and director of pathology at Oxford University was catching
up on some reading when he came across Fleming’s essay in The British Journal of Experimental
Pathology.
Dr. Florey was a go-getter, known for his skill of obtaining research grants.
Because he had always had a curiosity about who would win in a fight… bacteria or mold?
He helped Fleming acquire the funds, technology, and team of experts needed to see this revolution
through.
In March of 1942, Anne Miller was the first patient to be successfully treated with penicillin.
4 - QUININE Quinine is a compound that was used to fight
malaria.
It’s still used to treat malaria, but these days it’s commonly seen in tonic water.
Turns out that Quinine had been used to treat malaria as early as the 1600s.
The legend goes like this: One day, a native Andean Indian was wondering around in the
jungle.
Lost and sick from malaria, he stumbled upon a pool of water at the base of a cinchona
tree and took a few sips.
Initially he thought he’d made a big mistake.
Because the water was bitter, he thought it was only going to make him sicker.
But he actually started to feel a lot better.
His fever went away and he was able to make it out of the jungle to share his tales of
the healing powers of the cinchona tree.
Other Southern American Indians started to use the substance treat malaria.
It was also used to treat the shivers due to the low temperatures of the Andes Mountains.
The bark was dried and the powder was mixed with water and sugar to get rid of the bitter
taste.
Because no other tree naturally produces this particular compound, it was vital that an
alternative eventually be created.
A synthetic version of quinine was finally created in 1944 by W.E.
Hoering and R.B.
Woodward.
3 - INSULIN Insulin was discovered in 1889 when two researchers
at the University of Strasboug, Oskar Minkowski and Josef von Mering, were looking into what
impact the pancreas had on digestion.
They removed a pancreas from a dog and realized a few days later that for some odd reason,
flies would swarm around the dog’s urine.
After removing the poor pup’s pancreas, they discovered that the dog urine had become…
sweet?
The abnormally large amount of sugar in the doggie pee made for a nice snack for the swarms
of flies.
To top it off, the dog also drank a lot more water which resulted in frequent urination
and frequent cleaning of the lab floor.
The lab attendant couldn't understand why he was getting in trouble when he really was
taking the dog out regularly.
When it was also observed that the dog was losing strength, the doctors realized that
removing the dog’s pancreas caused the dog to develop diabetes.
They never figured out how the pancreas helped to regulate blood sugar, but after 1922, other
researchers at the University of Toronto had better luck.
After more tests were done on dogs and on larger animals, like cattle, Dr. Frederick
Banting and Charles Best were finally able to isolate the pancreatic substance responsible
for sugar regulation, which today we know as insulin.They decided that they would be
the first humans to be tested with the injection rather than testing on other people.
Once the insulin was perfected, they chose Leonard Thompson to be the first person with
diabetes to get the treatment.
In January of 1922, 14-year-old Leonard was the first human to have his diabetes successfully
treated.
2 - VIAGRA Before Viagra was launched in 1998, men had
very few ways to combat erectile dysfunction.
They either had to get an injection or get a prosthetic implant, neither of which sounded
too pleasant.
Viagra was originally known as UK92480.
It began as a new way to treat angina, which is a heart condition that reduces blood flow
to the heart by restricting the vessels that supply the blood.
The drug company Pfizer was searching for a way to relax those blood vessels, but saw
little success.
They were about to call it quits until more and more volunteers informed them about the
drug’s ahem, “side effects.”
At the same time, scientists who were researching erectile dysfunction finally discovered its
cause.
When a man has narrow blood vessels in his penis, this keeps the blood from flowing fast
enough to form an erection.
Sound familiar?
It’s similar to angina, the heart condition Pfizer was researching.
Turns out, days after taking Pfizer’s heart drug, men would experience the effects of
a firm erection.
Ian Osterloh, who directed the research of this drug, initially wanted to keep the focus
on the drug’s effect on the heart.
He thought, “who would want to take something and have to wait days to feel its effects?”
However, after some time, it became clear that the drug was mediocre at treating angina.
Thanks to brave souls and their reports of mass erections, Pfizer eventually decided
to go down a different path for this, uh, “heart” drug.
Now men, and the lucky ladies of course, get to enjoy stronger and longer lasting erections,
and to this day Viagra is still one of the best selling drugs of all time.
SOOO many jokes in here, but I didn’t go there.
You’re welcome!
1 - THE X-RAY The discovery of X-rays back in 1895 are usually
credited to Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen although he wasn’t the first to observe the effects
of X-rays.
Roentgen’s scientific career began a little rough.
Just a case in point, back in December 1862, he attended Utrecht Technical School in Holland
and was quickly expelled when a student drew a caricature of the teacher and he was blamed
for it.
Röntgen, being such a stand up guy, refused to snitch on the student who really did it,
so bye-bye Utrecht Tech.
On November 08, 1895, Roentgen was late for dinner.
Before dinner he had been working in his laboratory at the University of Worzburg when a glimmer
of light in the corner of the room caught his eye.
As he investigated this mysterious light, he realized it came from a piece of paper.
The paper was coated with barium platinocyanide, a substance that glows when exposed to cathode
rays.
The glow on the paper didn’t make any sense because the cathode ray tube that he was working
on was covered with a thick piece of cardboard and it was located on another side of the
room.
Yet the paper was still somehow glowing.
Naturally, he decided to see what would happen if he turned the cathode ray tube off.
He turned the ray off, and surprise!
No more glowing paper.
He went into another room and took the paper with him.
He closed the blinds, shut the door, and discovered that the luminescence could pass through the
wall, allowing the paper to still glow.
He named this new ray the “x-ray” as a bit of a placeholder.
It meant “unknown ray.”
Röntgen threw himself into investigating these unknown rays systematically.
Röntgen discovered the x-ray’s medical use when he made a picture of his wife's hand
on a photographic plate.
The photograph of his wife's hand was the first photograph of a human body part using
X-rays.
When she saw the picture, she said quote, "I have seen my death."
No one ever really took the time to give it an official name.
I don’t think it needs one, just because you know what, x-ray turned out to be pretty
catchy.
Here’s what’s next!