Advances In Medical Understanding Have Been Happening For Considerably Longer Than You May Think. Centuries Of Research Have Created The Treatments We Benefit From Today.
Over thousands of years, illnesses and medical problems have attracted the interest of many people folk looking for a cure or treatment for every kind of bodily complaint. We should think of ourselves as fortunate that we live in an era when the majority of health concerns are properly understood and are generally treatable or curable.
The art of medicine has been developing for many centuries. The ancient civilisations of China, Greece, Rome, Egypt and India all cultivated a certain level of understanding of some groups of ailments and diseases by endeavouring firstly to find the cause of the problem and secondly to discover a way of at least reducing the symptoms, if not developing a permanent cure.
We should undoubtedly be grateful that various ancient civilisations were as enlightened as they were that long ago, when just five hundred years ago, so-called ‘Western civilisation’ was still treating with mistrust some of those who had some idea of how to cure illnesses. We accused them of being witches and chose to burn them to death.
Because medicine is a massive topic to describe, let’s concentrate on one area in particular to review how the treatments we utilise today have developed since ancient times. Let’s examine Ophthalmology – the care and treatment of the eyes.
Problems such as cataracts and glaucoma were known eye complaints in ancient times and surgery could be undertaken on them. It is known that an Indian called Sushurata, (who is known as the ‘Father Of Surgery’ due to his amazing work in the field) was the first person to perform documented surgery on a cataract a very long time ago in 800BCE. The Greeks were also using a similar surgical procedure (called ‘couching’) by the 5th Century BCE, which was done using metal instruments.
By the time of the 1st Century CE, the Greeks were also relying on herbs from India to help treat eye infections such as conjunctivitis, and we must assume that such plants had been used successfully in Asia for many centuries prior to that for their reputation as a cure to have spread extensively enough to prompt them be imported into a distant continent.
We have evidence that both the Chinese and Romans were aware of the attributes of shaped glass for improving the clarity of an object, although it took until the 13th Century before proper spectacles as we know them were created in Italy.
Throughout the following hundreds of years, the ancient ‘couching’ treatment of cataracts was still the only cure. This basically was achieved by pushing the affected area of the lens to one side of the eye. But, in the early 1700’s a few learned men realised that it might be possible to take away the affected lens in its entirety and in 1747 a Frenchman named Jacques Daviel carried out the first cataract extraction. As with all medical advances, it took years before the new process was adopted and considered as the first option for such an ailment.
Although we normally associate the Industrial Revolution with big machinery and massive factories, it must be remembered that the advances in manufacturing methods also enabled far more accurate and delicate instruments than ever before to be made, and having better tools for the job naturally led to more rapid and inspired advances in surgery than ever before. And apart from the metal tools and equipment, in the latter half of the 20th century, new developments in science introduced comfortable and safe plastic contact lenses as an alternative to potentially dangerous glass ones.
But in the last fifty years or so, even precision metal instruments have become the second option for many eye complaints, as Laser eye surgery has been approved for simple corrective procedures. Laser eye treatments are already available for long and short-sightedness and astigmatism and are being trialled for use on cataracts.
In this day and age, technology and science are advancing faster than they ever have before and it must logically only be a matter of time before other Laser eye treatments are invented for more complicated or less understood conditions. In the end, we may even reach the point when all ophthalmic conditions can be treated with Laser eye surgery. Or indeed, be treated by whatever scientific innovations may replace it in the years to come.
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