Medical Breakthroughs – Time Continues And The Inventions Increase

Medical Patents Broker Inc.
By Kenneth Pearce, President

Part 1 of 3 – From Hand to Hand to Model Ts

The American Revolution: The First Mandate

In 1777, we were rebellious people, and our Constitution still stirs us up.

For General George Washington, smallpox was much more deadly than the British. In a desperate maneuver known as "variolation," the general ordered the risky procedure of rubbing infected scabs carrying smallpox into healthy skin. Of course, Washington did not have the procedure himself. Not because he was the boss; because as a teenager he survived smallpox. He had the pockmarks on face to prove it.

The "variolation" was the first time a government mandated mass immunization. It saved soldiers, and we know what the rebellious bunch did in Philadelphia.

The Civil War: The Birth of Triage

The Civil War was our deadliest war. It’s impossible to imagine such death at your doorstep. You must live through it to know.

With only horses/mules/donkeys, wagons and bumpy wooden wheels, Dr. Johathan Letterman moved the injured from the battlefield to rearward hospitals, such as church buildings, for treatment. The wounded were moved to the doctors and not vice versa. Today, we are spoiled by excellent EMS in most every city.

James Edward Hanger was an Civil War amputee that hated his peg leg. He made himself a different prosthetic that launched Hanger Inc. that is still in business.

World War I: The Blood Bank

Because of World War I’s infamous “No Man’s Land” between the Allies and the Germans, odors of death, dirty humans, excrement, disease and deadly gases were obvious miles from the front. Survivors of this agony only rarely could erase the Stench War from their memories.

Before 1914, blood transfusions were "person-to-person" affairs. If you did not have your blood type close by, you were a dead man. Out of this cesspool, Dr. Oswald Robertson discovered that a mixture of citrate and glucose with blood could be stored on ice for weeks and taken to the front when needed. Today, we have local blood banks where people regularly donate their blood.

The Roaring Twenties: Molecular Mastery

The 1920’s newsreels show us that booze, flapper dresses and the Charleston were popular. Whether beer, wine or whiskey, the alcohol molecule touched the lives of many. Of course, the wine molecule has been well established for millennia. We learned the hard way; no Congressional mandate will alter the use of ethyl alcohol.

Until the Twenties, Type-1 diabetes was a death sentence. In 1922, Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolated insulin from the pancreas. This discovery provided doctors with a disease intervention tool that benefited an unknown number of diabetics. Today, we’ve finally retired porcine and bovine insulin. Who would have ever conceived it? The same dreaded E. coli bacteria that we spend our lives trying to avoid is now used to manufacture our insulin. Using human protein to create insulin was unthinkable just a few years ago.