360Medicine's great breakthroughs
From the first vaccine to the human genome. 9 moments, oldest first.
- 179614 May 1796
Edward Jenner tests the first vaccine
On 14 May 1796, the English doctor Edward Jenner infected a boy with mild cowpox and later showed he was protected from smallpox. It was the first vaccine. Vaccination spread worldwide, and in 1980 smallpox, which had killed hundreds of millions of people, became the first human disease ever eradicated.
- 18161816
Laennec invents the stethoscope
In 1816, the French doctor René Laennec rolled a sheet of paper into a tube to listen to a patient's heart, and heard it far more clearly. He built a wooden version and called it the stethoscope. His study of chest sounds helped doctors diagnose heart and lung diseases, and the stethoscope became the symbol of medicine.
- 184616 October 1846
Ether anaesthesia is shown in public for the first time
On 16 October 1846, at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, the dentist William Morton gave a patient ether before the surgeon John Collins Warren removed a tumour from his neck. The patient felt no pain. The public demonstration spread anaesthesia around the world within months and made modern surgery possible.
- 18856 July 1885
Pasteur's rabies vaccine saves a boy's life
On 6 July 1885, the French scientist Louis Pasteur began treating nine-year-old Joseph Meister, who had been badly bitten by a rabid dog, with an experimental vaccine. The boy survived, though rabies was almost always fatal. The success made Pasteur world-famous and led to the founding of the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1887.
- 18958 November 1895
Wilhelm Röntgen discovers X-rays
On 8 November 1895, the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen discovered a new kind of invisible ray that could pass through the human body and show the bones inside. He called them X-rays. Within months, doctors were using them, and in 1901 Röntgen received the first Nobel Prize in Physics.
- 1928September 1928
Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin
In September 1928, the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming noticed that mould growing on a laboratory dish had killed the bacteria around it. He named the substance penicillin. In the 1940s, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain turned it into a medicine, the first widely used antibiotic, saving millions of lives.
- 195512 April 1955
The Salk polio vaccine is declared safe and effective
On 12 April 1955, scientists announced that Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was safe and effective, after a trial involving about 1.8 million children in the United States. Polio had paralysed tens of thousands of children every year. Vaccination began at once. With Albert Sabin's oral vaccine and a global campaign, wild polio now survives in only two countries.
- 19673 December 1967
Christiaan Barnard performs the first human heart transplant
On 3 December 1967, at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, the surgeon Christiaan Barnard and his team transplanted a human heart for the first time. The patient, 53-year-old Louis Washkansky, lived for 18 days before dying of pneumonia. Today, thousands of heart transplants are performed every year.
- 19808 May 1980
The world declares smallpox eradicated
On 8 May 1980, the World Health Assembly declared that smallpox had been wiped out worldwide. The disease had killed hundreds of millions of people over the centuries. A global vaccination campaign led by the World Health Organization tracked down the last cases. Smallpox remains the only human disease ever eradicated.