Medicine Revolution
Highlights
- Five medicines changed the whole world
- The rate of living of people increased
- There are also some disadvantages associated with
Medicine Revolution: It’s difficult to measure the impact of a single drug on world history, but there are five drugs we can safely say have made a huge difference in our lives, often in ways we didn’t expect. Was. There is no doubt that these medicines have some incredible benefits. But they usually come with a legacy of complications that we need to look at critically. Well, it should always be remembered that the miracle medicine of today can be the medicine of tomorrow’s problem.
1) Anesthesia
In the late 1700s, English chemist Joseph Priestley created a gas he called ‘phlogisticated nitrous air’ (nitrous oxide). The English chemist Humphry Davy thought it could be used as a pain reliever in surgery. We reached another milestone in 1834, when the French chemist Jean-Baptiste Dumas gave a new gas called chloroform. Scottish doctor James Young Simpson used it in 1847 to aid in obstetrics.
Anesthesia soon became more widely used during surgery, leading to better recovery rates. Before anesthesia, surgical patients often died of shock from the pain. But any drug that can make people unconscious can also cause harm. Modern anesthetics are still dangerous because of the risks of deactivating the nervous system.
2) penicillin
What happened to Scottish physician Alexander Fleming in 1928 is one of the classic tales of accidental drug discovery. Fleming went on vacation, leaving some cultures of the bacterium Streptococcus in his laboratory. When he returned, he noticed that some airborne penicillium (a fungal contaminant) had stopped Streptococcus from growing.
Australian pathologist Howard Florey and his team immobilized penicillin and conducted the first human experiment. With US funding, penicillin was mass-produced, which changed the scenario of World War II. It was used to treat thousands of service personnel.
Penicillin and its subsequent drugs are highly successful frontline drugs for conditions that once claimed millions of lives. However, their widespread use has led to drug-resistant strains of bacteria.
3) Nitroglycerin
Nitroglycerin was invented in 1847. It was also the first modern medicine to treat angina, chest pain associated with heart disease. The factory workers who came in contact with it started experiencing headache and redness on the face. This was because nitroglycerin is a vasodilator—it dilates blood vessels.
London physician William Murrell used nitroglycerin on himself and tried it on his angina patients. He was relieved almost immediately.
Nitroglycerin made it possible for millions of people with angina to lead relatively normal lives.
It also paved the way for drugs such as blood pressure lowering drugs, beta-blockers and statins. These drugs have extended life and extended the average lifespan in Western countries.
But since people’s lives have become longer, the death rate from cancer and other non-communicable diseases is now higher. So nitroglycerin became a world-changing drug in unexpected ways.
4) contraceptive pill
In 1951, American birth control advocate Margaret Sanger asked researcher Gregory Pincus to develop an effective hormonal contraceptive funded by heiress Katherine McCormick.
Pincus found that progesterone helped prevent ovulation, and used this to develop a test pill. Clinical trials were conducted on women, particularly in Puerto Rico, where there were concerns about testing and side effects.
The new drug was released by G. D. Sarley and Company in 1960 with the approval of the US Food and Drug Administration. It took ten years to prove a link between oral contraceptive use and serious side effects. After a 1970 US government investigation, the pill’s hormone levels were dramatically reduced. Another result was the patient information message that you now see inside all prescription medicine packets.
The pill caused major global demographic changes with smaller families and increased income as women re-entered the workforce. However, the question still stands as to how the medical profession applied it to women’s bodies.
5) diazepam
The first benzodiazepine, a type of nervous system depressant, was created in 1955 and marketed as Librium by the pharmaceutical company Hoffmann-La Roche.
Polish-American chemist Leo Sternbach and his research group chemically altered Librium in 1959, producing a more potent drug. It was diazepam, marketed as Valium since 1963.
Such cheap, readily available drugs had a huge impact. From 1969 to 1982, Valium was the best-selling drug in America. These drugs created a culture of managing stress and anxiety with medication.
Valium paved the way for modern antidepressants. These new drugs were more difficult (but not impossible) to take in higher doses, and they had fewer side effects. The first SSRI, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, was fluoxetine, which was marketed as Prozac from 1987.
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