Antibiotics Discovery

The discovery of penicillin was the most significant discovery of the 20^th century, because it led to the availability of antibiotics to cure infectious diseases. The development of water treatment and sanitary sewers were equally important in preventing infectious diseases.

Life expectancy is an “average” death age of a population invented by the statistician who drowned in a lake with a mean depth of 3 feet. Life expectancy in the US is 76 for men and 81 for women. Because it includes all deaths, it is not a “maximum” age and many healthy seniors in the US are living into their 90s. There are just as many seniors who have died in their 60s, plus newborns and everybody in between. If you list everybody who died last year in the US and average their age, you would have calculated “life expectancy” for that year in the US.

A major causes of death in the 18^th and 19^th centuries were infectious diseases like small pox, cholera, typhus, yellow fever, diphtheria, dysentery, malaria, hepatitis, tuberculosis and influenza. Bubonic plague killed 200 million people in the 1300s.

Antibiotics treat a long list of bacterial infections that used to result in death. The improvement in the human lifespan is largely due to the introduction of antibiotics in 1945.

Antibiotics was discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming who discovered the first antibiotic, penicillin, but it took over a decade before penicillin was introduced as a treatment for bacterial infections.

The Microscope was invented in the 1590s by two Dutch spectacle makers, Zacharias Jansen and his father Hans started experimenting with these lenses. They put several lenses in a tube and made a very important discovery.

In 1653, Petrus Borellus [1] wrote the first publication on the use of microscope in medicine. He described 100 observations and applications, including how to remove ingrowing eyelashes that are invisible to the naked eye. In 1646, Athanasius Kircher [2] (or “Kirchner, as it is often spelled), a Jesuit priest, wrote that “a number of things might be discovered in the blood of fever patients.” In 1658, in his Scrutinium Pestis, Kirchner [3] described microscopic “worms” in plague victims which he suspected caused the disease that killed millions of people in Europe during the 17th century. Most likely, he was viewing pus cells, or perhaps red blood cells, since he could not possibly see the Bacillus pestis with his 32-power microscope. Another early microscopist was Joseph Campini of Bologna. His microscope was the first that was depicted in clinical use in medicine.

Clinical microscopy had a slow beginning; more than two centuries passed before the value of microscopes began to be appreciated by clinical and laboratory scientists. In 1800, Bichat (1771–1802), a young pathologist, published a book in which, for the first time, morbid anatomic and histopathologic changes of various organs of the body were discussed and illustrated. Soon thereafter the microscope became an indispensable laboratory tool at medical schools all around the world.

http://www.annclinlabsci.org/content/32/3/309.full

Microscopes with higher magnification were developed in the 1700s from 50x to 270x and later in the 1800s to 500x. Now good magnification is 1000x and 1500x.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader