100 Years

The Journal of the American Medical Association contains a short section entitled "JAMA 100 Years Ago," and glancing over it is always enlightening. It amazes me that modern medicine as we know it is young. A hundred years ago, medical practice was shockingly different. A century ago, blood types had just been discovered. X-rays and EKGs were coming into use. It wasn't until after the First World War that the first antibiotics were developed. Epidemiology had its heyday with the 1918 influenza pandemic and the focus on public health measures. Only fifty years ago did vaccines begin to control infectious diseases we rarely see today. Smoking and tobacco were widespread for much of the last century. Hormonal contraceptives were introduced within the last fifty years. When I think about this and realize that many of my patients lived through an era with ether anesthetics, racial inequality, travesties of medical ethics, few antibiotics, polio, and other "historical diseases," I begin to appreciate how modern "modern medicine" really is. What will happen in the next one hundred years, I wonder?