Reels tagged #medicine
The brain cannot feel pain
Brain tissue has no pain receptors. That is why surgeons can operate on an awake patient, asking them to talk or play guitar to make sure nothing vital is cut.
Penicillin was found on a dish left by mistake
Alexander Fleming returned from holiday in 1928 to a contaminated culture plate. The mould killing the bacteria around it became the first true antibiotic and has saved an estimated 200 million lives.
X-rays were discovered by an accidental glow
In 1895 Rontgen noticed a screen glowing across his darkened lab while working with a covered tube. Weeks later he imaged his wife's hand, and medicine could see inside a living body for the first time.
The wearable pacemaker was invented after a blackout
When a power cut killed a hospitalised child on a plug-in pacemaker in 1957, Earl Bakken built a battery-powered wearable version in four weeks.
The MRI scanner grew out of a chemistry tool
Nuclear magnetic resonance was used to analyse molecules until researchers realised it could map water in human tissue, giving detailed images with no radiation at all.
Surgery before anaesthesia was timed in seconds
Surgeons competed to amputate a leg in under a minute because patients were awake. Ether anaesthesia, demonstrated publicly in 1846, changed surgery forever.