Timeline of Medicine
Medicine worldwide from Egyptian medical papyri of about 1600 BCE through Greek, Indian, Chinese and Islamic traditions, anatomy, germ theory and clinical trials to evidence-based medicine and the first approved gene-editing therapy in 2023.
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- 35 events ~1600 BCE – 2023
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~1600 BCE: Edwin Smith Papyrus sets out 48 injury cases
An Egyptian scribe copied what is now the oldest known surgical treatise on trauma, possibly from an Old Kingdom original. Its 48 cases of wounds, fractures and dislocations, ordered from the head down, each give examination, diagnosis, treatment and a verdict: "an ailment which I will treat", "with which I will contend" or "not to be treated". It relies little on magic and has the earliest known descriptions of the meninges and cerebrospinal fluid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Smith_Papyrus~1550 BCE: Ebers Papyrus records remedies and incantations
The Ebers Papyrus, a 110-column scroll and the most extensive surviving record of ancient Egyptian medicine, mixes hundreds of prescriptions with spells against disease-causing demons. It covers burns, the eyes and skin, intestinal parasites, contraception and pregnancy, and includes a treatise on the heart as the center of vessels running to every limb. A calendar on its back names the ninth year of the pharaoh Amenhotep I; it is kept at Leipzig University Library.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebers_Papyrus~1050 BCE: Esagil-kin-apli edits the Babylonian Diagnostic Handbook
Esagil-kin-apli, chief scholar to the Babylonian king Adad-apla-iddina (reigned 1067 – 1046 BCE), arranged older omens into the 40-tablet Sakikku, or Diagnostic Handbook. Its more than 3,000 entries run from head to foot, linking symptoms to a prognosis and often to the god or spirit thought to have sent the illness. It remained the standard reference for Mesopotamian healers through the first millennium BCE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esagil-kin-apli~400 BCE: Hippocratic writers explain disease by natural causes
Greek physicians, many linked to the school of Hippocrates of Kos (about 460 – 370 BCE), wrote treatises, later gathered as the Hippocratic Corpus of about 60 works, that explained illness by diet, climate and an imbalance of four humors rather than the will of the gods; "On the Sacred Disease" gave epilepsy a natural cause. None can be firmly attributed to Hippocrates himself, and the Oath, perhaps later, does not contain the phrase "first, do no harm".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Corpusearly 3rd century BCE: Herophilus dissects human bodies in Alexandria
Herophilus of Chalcedon, working in Ptolemaic Alexandria, was among the earliest physicians known to dissect human corpses systematically. He distinguished nerves from blood vessels and sensory from motor nerves, told the cerebrum from the cerebellum, named the duodenum and timed the pulse with a water clock. His books are lost and known mainly through Galen; later claims that he vivisected prisoners are disputed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herophilos~200 BCE – 500 CE: Sushruta Samhita describes surgical training and operations
The "Sushruta Samhita", a Sanskrit compendium of Ayurvedic medicine, described surgical training with incisions practiced on gourds and leather bags, removal of bladder stones and repair of a severed nose with a cheek-skin flap. Its dating remains debated: medical historian G. Jan Meulenbeld placed its development in layers from the last centuries BCE to about 500 CE, while older scholarship proposed origins around 600 BCE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sushruta_Samhita~1st century BCE: Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor compiled
Framed as dialogues between the legendary Yellow Emperor and his ministers, the "Huangdi Neijing" gathered diverse, sometimes conflicting writings explaining health and illness through qi, yin and yang and the five phases; its Lingshu part deals mainly with acupuncture. Its theory is more systematic than that of medical texts sealed in a tomb at Mawangdui in 168 BCE, so Nathan Sivin and others date it to about the 1st century BCE; some prefer the 2nd. It remains the core text of Chinese medicine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huangdi_Neijing~50 – 70: Dioscorides compiles "De materia medica"
Pedanius Dioscorides, a Greek physician serving with the Roman army, described about 600 plants, along with animal and mineral substances and around 1,000 medicines made from them, explaining how to recognize each, prepare it and spot counterfeits. Copied in Greek, Latin and Arabic, as in the illustrated Vienna Dioscurides made in Constantinople around 512, it remained the principal reference on drugs in Europe and the Middle East for some 1,500 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_materia_medica162: Galen demonstrates anatomy and physiology in Rome
Galen of Pergamon arrived in Rome, where his public anatomical demonstrations made his name and he later served as physician to emperors including Marcus Aurelius. Barred from dissecting humans, he worked on Barbary macaques and pigs, showing by tying the recurrent laryngeal nerve of a living pig that the brain controls the voice. His humoral and anatomical teaching dominated medicine in Europe and the Islamic world for more than 1,300 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galen~900: Al-Razi describes smallpox and measles as separate diseases
Abu Bakr al-Razi (Rhazes), a Persian physician who headed hospitals in Baghdad and his native Rayy, wrote "On Smallpox and Measles", which, with a book of the same name by Thabit ibn Qurra, is among the earliest surviving works to treat them as distinct diseases. His clinical notebooks, compiled after his death as "al-Hawi" ("The Comprehensive Book") and translated into Latin in 1279, recorded hospital cases that contradicted Galen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Bakr_al-Razi1025: Ibn Sina completes the "Canon of Medicine"
Ibn Sina (Avicenna) finished in Hamadan, in western Iran, a five-book encyclopedia that fitted the medicine of Galen into the natural philosophy of Aristotle, listed about 800 simple drugs and set out rules for testing new ones. Translated into Latin during the Middle Ages, it became a standard textbook in European universities into the early modern period and remains a core text of Unani medicine in South Asia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Canon_of_Medicine~1242: Ibn al-Nafis describes the pulmonary circulation
In a commentary on the anatomy in Ibn Sina's "Canon", the Damascus-born physician Ibn al-Nafis, later chief physician in Cairo, rejected Galen's claim that blood seeps through invisible pores between the heart's ventricles and argued that it passes from the right side through the lungs to the left. The work was little known until a manuscript surfaced in Berlin in 1924; whether Michael Servetus (1553) and Realdo Colombo (1559), who described the same circuit, knew of it is debated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Nafis1543: Vesalius publishes the "Fabrica"
Andreas Vesalius, who taught anatomy at Padua by dissecting corpses himself rather than leaving it to a barber surgeon, published "De humani corporis fabrica" in Basel, seven books with detailed woodcut illustrations. Arguing that Galen had described animals rather than humans, it corrected him on points such as the human lower jaw, which is a single bone, though Vesalius still accepted Galen's account of how blood moved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Humani_Corporis_Fabrica_Libri_Septem1628: Harvey shows that blood circulates
In "De Motu Cordis", published in Frankfurt, the English royal physician William Harvey combined ligature experiments, the one-way valves of the heart and veins, and a calculation that the heart pumps far more blood in an hour than the body could make from food, to argue that the same blood travels a closed circuit out through the arteries and back through the veins. He could not see how arteries joined veins; Marcello Malpighi observed capillaries in a frog's lung in 1661.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercitatio_Anatomica_de_Motu_Cordis_et_Sanguinis_in_Animalibus1747: Lind tests scurvy remedies in a controlled trial
Aboard the Royal Navy ship HMS Salisbury, the Scottish surgeon James Lind gave 12 sailors with scurvy the same diet and split them into six pairs, each taking a different remedy, among them cider, dilute sulfuric acid, vinegar, seawater and two oranges and a lemon a day; the citrus pair recovered fastest. Published in 1753, it is one of the earliest reported controlled clinical trials, but Lind still blamed scurvy on faulty digestion; the navy issued lemon juice fleetwide only in 1795.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lind1796: Jenner vaccinates a boy with cowpox
Edward Jenner, a country doctor in Berkeley, England, inoculated eight-year-old James Phipps with matter from a milkmaid's cowpox sores in May and weeks later showed that smallpox matter did not infect him. Variolation, deliberate infection with mild smallpox, was long known in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and the farmer Benjamin Jesty had used cowpox in 1774; Jenner's tests and his 1798 "Inquiry" spread the method, and his Latin name for cowpox, variolae vaccinae, gave vaccination its name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Jenner1816: Laennec invents the stethoscope
At the Necker hospital in Paris, René Laennec, reluctant to put his ear to a young woman's chest, rolled paper into a tube to listen to her heart, then made a wooden cylinder for the purpose. His 1819 treatise "On Mediate Auscultation" matched the sounds he heard with what he later found at autopsy, establishing listening to the chest as a way to diagnose diseases of the heart and lungs, including tuberculosis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stethoscope1846: Ether anesthesia demonstrated in Boston
On October 16, in the operating theater of Massachusetts General Hospital now called the Ether Dome, the dentist William T. G. Morton gave ether to Edward Gilbert Abbott while the surgeon John Collins Warren removed a tumor from his neck, and news of painless surgery spread around the world. Crawford Long had used ether in Georgia in 1842 without publishing, and Hanaoka Seishū in Japan had operated under a herbal general anesthetic in 1804.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ether_Dome1847: Semmelweis has doctors wash hands in chlorinated lime
At Vienna General Hospital, where the maternity clinic run by doctors and medical students had more than twice the death rate from childbed fever of the one run by student midwives, Ignaz Semmelweis concluded that doctors carried "cadaverous particles" from autopsies to women in labor. Washing hands in chlorinated lime cut deaths in his clinic by about 90 percent, but he published his own account only from 1858, and leading doctors, including Rudolf Virchow, rejected it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis1854: Snow traces cholera to a Soho water pump
During a cholera outbreak in Soho, London, the physician John Snow found that deaths clustered around a public pump on Broad Street and persuaded parish authorities to remove its handle, though the outbreak was already waning. His maps and his comparison of households supplied by two water companies, one drawing sewage-polluted water from the Thames, supported his view that cholera spread through contaminated water rather than "miasma" in the air.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak1858: Virchow publishes "Cellular Pathology"
Rudolf Virchow's Berlin lectures, published as "Cellular Pathology", argued that disease arises from changes in the body's cells and that every cell comes from another cell, rejecting the ancient doctrine of imbalanced humors. Giovanni Battista Morgagni had in 1761 traced diseases to particular organs from hundreds of autopsies; the slogan "omnis cellula e cellula" was coined by François-Vincent Raspail, and the evidence that cells divide came largely from Robert Remak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Virchow1867: Lister publishes his antiseptic method
Applying Louis Pasteur's evidence that microorganisms cause fermentation and putrefaction, the Glasgow surgeon Joseph Lister treated open fractures with carbolic acid (phenol), with a first success in 11-year-old James Greenlees in 1865, and reported his cases in "The Lancet". He went on to disinfect instruments, wounds and surgeons' hands, reducing infections after surgery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lister1882: Koch identifies the tuberculosis bacterium
On March 24, Robert Koch told the Physiological Society in Berlin that he had identified the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, a disease many then thought was inherited. The pure-culture methods behind the discovery, stated as Koch's postulates by his assistant Friedrich Loeffler, became a standard test of whether a microbe causes a disease. The World Health Organization marks the date as World Tuberculosis Day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Koch1895: Röntgen discovers X-rays
Wilhelm Röntgen, a physicist at the University of Würzburg, noticed that a covered cathode-ray tube made a fluorescent screen glow and found that the unknown rays passed through flesh far more easily than bone; he published on December 28 after making a radiograph of his wife Anna Bertha's hand. Within weeks a doctor in Birmingham, England, used X-rays to locate a needle in a hand, and reports of radiation burns followed within months.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_R%C3%B6ntgen1922: Toronto team treats diabetes with insulin
In January at Toronto General Hospital, Leonard Thompson, a boy with type 1 diabetes, received pancreatic extract developed by Frederick Banting and Charles Best in John Macleod's laboratory. A second course, purified by James Collip, greatly improved his condition. Banting, Best and Collip assigned their patent rights to the university for one dollar each; Banting and Macleod shared the 1923 Nobel Prize and divided their prize money with Best and Collip.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin#Extraction_and_purification1928: Fleming discovers penicillin
At St Mary's Hospital in London, Alexander Fleming noticed that a Penicillium mold contaminating a culture plate of staphylococci had stopped the bacteria growing around it; he named the active substance penicillin in a 1929 paper but could not purify it. From 1939 an Oxford team led by Howard Florey, with Ernst Chain and Norman Heatley, purified and tested it, production was scaled up in the United States during World War II, and Fleming, Florey and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_penicillin1947: Doctors' Trial verdict sets out the Nuremberg Code
Judging 20 physicians and three officials for Nazi human experiments and the killing of disabled people, a US military court at Nuremberg convicted 16 and sentenced seven to death. Its verdict listed ten principles for research on people, beginning "The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential". The World Medical Association adopted its own code for medical research, the Declaration of Helsinki, in 1964.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Code1948: British streptomycin trial allocates patients at random
The Medical Research Council's trial of streptomycin for pulmonary tuberculosis, published in the British Medical Journal, assigned patients to the drug plus bed rest or to bed rest alone using random numbers. Statistician Austin Bradford Hill's design concealed forthcoming assignments from clinicians, helping establish a model for modern randomized controlled trials. The trial showed a benefit but also the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_Bradford_Hill1950: Doll and Hill link smoking to lung cancer
Comparing lung cancer patients in 20 London hospitals with matched controls, Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill reported in the British Medical Journal that risk rose with the amount smoked; Ernst Wynder and Evarts Graham published similar results in the United States, and German studies had suggested a link as early as the 1920s. Doll and Hill's British Doctors Study, following 40,701 physicians from 1951, confirmed the finding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Doll1962: US law requires proof that drugs work
After the sedative thalidomide, sold in dozens of countries, caused severe birth defects in thousands of children, President John F. Kennedy signed the Kefauver–Harris Amendment, which for the first time required drug makers to prove to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that their products were effective as well as safe. The FDA reviewer Frances Kelsey had kept thalidomide off the American market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kefauver%E2%80%93Harris_Amendment1980: World Health Assembly declares smallpox eradicated
On May 8 the World Health Assembly, the governing body of the World Health Organization (WHO), declared smallpox eradicated, the first and so far only human disease to be wiped out, after it had killed hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century alone. The intensified WHO campaign begun in 1967 relied on surveillance and vaccinating the contacts of each case; the last natural infection was in Ali Maow Maalin, a hospital cook in Merca, Somalia, in October 1977.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_infectious_diseases#Smallpox1981: CDC reports the first cases later named AIDS
On June 5 the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) described a rare pneumonia in five previously healthy young gay men in Los Angeles, the first official report of the disease named acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) in 1982. Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and colleagues at the Pasteur Institute reported in 1983 the retrovirus later named human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and combination antiretroviral therapy, shown effective in 1996, made it a manageable chronic infection where available.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_HIV/AIDS1991: Guyatt names evidence-based medicine
Gordon Guyatt of McMaster University in Canada introduced the term "evidence-based medicine" in the "ACP Journal Club" of the American College of Physicians; a 1992 paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association presented it as teaching clinical practice through critical appraisal of research. It drew on Archie Cochrane's 1972 critique of untested treatments, and the Cochrane Collaboration, founded in Oxford in 1993, set out to review trials systematically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence-based_medicine2020: RECOVERY trial finds dexamethasone cuts COVID-19 deaths
Set up in March as COVID-19 reached Britain, the Randomised Evaluation of COVID-19 Therapy (RECOVERY) trial enrolled thousands of patients in National Health Service hospitals and on June 16 reported that dexamethasone, a cheap steroid, cut deaths by about a third in ventilated patients and a fifth in those on oxygen. The World Health Organization called it the first treatment shown to reduce mortality in such patients; hydroxychloroquine showed no benefit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RECOVERY_Trial2023: Regulators approve the first CRISPR gene-editing therapy
Britain's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency approved Casgevy for sickle cell disease and transfusion-dependent beta thalassemia in November. The US Food and Drug Administration approved it for sickle cell disease in December and beta thalassemia in January 2024. The first licensed medicine using CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) gene editing, it modifies a patient's blood stem cells to increase fetal hemoglobin production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exagamglogene_autotemcel