The Making of Modern Medicine
Narrative history series exploring over 2,000 years of western medicine, with medical historian Andrew Cunningham
The Making of Modern Medicine - A Long and Ghastly Kitchen
Napoleonic France witnessed the second big event that made medicine scientific - Dr Magendie's experiments on live animals.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - A Yankee Dodge
Andrew looks back to the origins of pain relief and how chloroform, with its rapid action and few side-effects, would come to be favoured among surgeons.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - Anatomy and the Invisible Hand
How did this period come to be known as 'the perfection of anatomy' and secure one of the few medical disciplines that would survive the upheaval that was about to engulf Europe?
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - Changing disease identity
A side effect of progress in medical thinking is that diseases often had their identities changed over time. Andrew looks at the disease that became known as tuberculosis.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - Culturing the germ theory
In 1875, Louis Pasteur's great European rival Robert Koch, a country doctor from Prussia, succeeded in tracing the entire life cycle of an anthrax bacteria cell.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - Dark side of obstetrics
Andrew discusses the work of Ignaz Semmelweis in Vienna, who made proposals for better cleanliness in maternity hospitals to cut down on the spread of diseases.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - Fever
In the 17th Century, fevers were the main concern of physicians, who believed that nature had a natural way of responding to any disease by eliminating offensive matter in the body.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - Flinging the tropics open to civilisation
In the 1870s, the so-called 'scramble for Africa' saw many countries competing for a slice of the continent. What role did European medicine play in spreading European culture?
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - Free at the Point of Need
It was called it the biggest experiment in social service that the world has ever seen. The National Health Service was set up in 1948 to provide free healthcare for everyone.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - God's House, the hospital
Aside from the universities to educate physicians, the hospital is one of the main innovations made in Christian Medieval times that persist into modern medicine.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - Hot, Cold, Wet and Dry
Hippocrates and Galen's writings and pithy pieces of advice for the aspiring physician in ancient Greece remained the basis for medical practice well into the 18th century.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - It Looks Like a Miracle
By the 1940s the arrival of the first antibiotic, penicillin, appeared to be a miracle medicine. Its discoverer Alexander Fleming was regarded as a great hero.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - Learning from the illiterate
By the early 18th Century, smallpox was taking between 10-15 per cent of all lives in Europe and physicians were constantly arguing about how best to cure it.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - Little Reading, Much Seeing and Much Doing
The French Revolution ushered in new ambition and a new scientific clinical approach that is still taught to all medical students.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - Making Signs
Systematic post mortems revolutionised the study of disease. It enabled physicians armed with new instruments such as the stethoscope to detect the signs of disease.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - Near Pavilions
The influence of Florence Nightingale and the sanitarians in creating isolated pavilion-style buildings designed on the basis of a current theory of disease.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - Paracelsus and the people's medicine
The 16th century witnessed the birth of a new kind of natural philosophy and medicine under its chief advocate, Swiss medical reformer Paracelsus.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - Science Has No Sex
A series exploring over 2,000 years of western medicine, written and presented by medical historian Andrew Cunningham.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - Sisters of charity
How the nursing profession was transformed from the role of virtually a domestic servant thanks to an enterprising Florence Nightingale.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - Stopping the Rot
During the late 1800s, the surgeon Joseph Lister had introduced anti-sepsis into surgery. Andrew examines the less than enthusiastic welcome it received.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - The anatomical renaissance
Thanks to a renaissance in anatomy in the 16th century, the art of surgery had been perfected in Bologna to the extent artificial but living noses, ears and lips could be supplied.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - The Coming of the GP
A dramatic siege took place in 1767 outside the Royal College of Physicians in London between old guard physicians and a new breed of general practitioners from Scotland.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - The Crippler
Andrew traces the impact of the great polio epidemics and the ethical dilemmas they posed after World War II before a safe and effective vaccine was introduced in 1955.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - The Disease is its Own Preventative
The story of Louis Pasteur's development of the anti-rabies vaccine in 1885. The readers are David Rintoul and Annette Badland.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - The early transfusion experiments
For almost 2,000 years in the West, medical men had been taking blood out of their patients to cure them. It wasn't until 1660 that anyone thought of putting blood in!
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - The first sexual epidemic
A mysterious new disease broke out among the French army in 1492, terrifying everyone and sparing no one.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - The ministry of healing
The idea that doctors needed to consult laboratory workers before they could make a final diagnosis was seen by many physicians as a threat to their authority.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - Transforming Plague
When bubonic plague broke out in Hong Kong in 1894, European rivalry between France and Germany continued to be played out between two students of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - Transplant
In 1967, Christiaan Barnard performed the first heart transplant operation. Competition between pioneering teams of transplant surgeons pushed the limits in scientific medicine.
Details
The Making of Modern Medicine - You Are What You Eat
It was the disease of beri-beri that would inspire medics that the absence of a vitamin rather than the presence of a microbe could be the cause of a disease.
Details