# Medical Breakthroughs — The Big Steps That Saved Lives Canonical URL: https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-health-breakthroughs Raw viewer URL: https://content.shipslides.com/d/catalog-health-breakthroughs/raw Category: Health Slides: 13 Updated: 2026-05-17T20:55:57.456Z Tags: catalog, health, breakthroughs ## Summary The big steps that saved lives — from cowpox lymph in a country doctor's hand to messenger RNA folded by an algorithm. Two centuries of pushing back against death. Key sections include: MEDICAL BREAK- THROUGHS; Jenner inoculates a boy with cowpox.; Morton ends the screaming centuries.; Two men kill the invisible killers.; Röntgen finds the "X" rays.; Fleming returns from holiday to a mouldy miracle.; A double helix on a scrap of paper.; Salk's vaccine ends the summer terror.; Barnard transplants a beating heart.; Louise Brown — the world's first IVF baby.. ## Slide Outline 1. MEDICAL BREAK- THROUGHS 2. Jenner inoculates a boy with cowpox. 3. Morton ends the screaming centuries. 4. Two men kill the invisible killers. 5. Röntgen finds the "X" rays. 6. Fleming returns from holiday to a mouldy miracle. 7. A double helix on a scrap of paper. 8. Salk's vaccine ends the summer terror. 9. Barnard transplants a beating heart. 10. Louise Brown — the world's first IVF baby. 11. Antiretrovirals turn HIV treatable. 12. mRNA vaccines, designed in a weekend. 13. Two centuries, one direction. ## Slide Transcript ### Slide 1: MEDICAL BREAK- THROUGHS - A History in 13 Steps - The big steps that saved lives — from cowpox lymph in a country doctor's hand to messenger RNA folded by an algorithm. Two centuries of pushing back against death. - 13 Slides1796 → 2021 - Era Spanned225 years - Lives SavedHundreds of millions ### Slide 2: Jenner inoculates a boy with cowpox. - 02 / 13 — The First Vaccine - A country physician notices milkmaids don't catch smallpox. He tests a hunch on 8-year-old James Phipps — and invents immunology. - 17·96 - Edward Jenner — Berkeley, England - Smallpox vaccination — the first deliberate immunisation - Jenner inoculated a boy with material from a cowpox lesion, then exposed him to smallpox. The boy didn't get sick. The Latin word for cow, vacca, gave the procedure its name. Smallpox would go on to be the only human disease ever eradicated (1980). - 300M+ - Smallpox deaths in the - 20th century alone - Cases since 1977 - (the disease is gone) - A drop, an arm, an ideaImmunology begins ### Slide 3: Morton ends the screaming centuries. - 03 / 13 — Painless Surgery - Until October 1846, surgery meant being held down, awake, while a surgeon worked as fast as humanly possible. - 18·46 - William T. G. Morton — Massachusetts General Hospital - Ether anesthesia: the first public demonstration in the "Ether Dome" - Morton inhaled diethyl ether through a glass apparatus to a 20-year-old patient named Edward Abbott. Surgeon John Collins Warren removed a neck tumor in silence. Warren turned to the audience and said, "Gentlemen, this is no humbug." Within a year ether crossed the Atlantic. - 21 Oct - 1846 — "Ether Day" - at MGH, Boston - 100% - Of modern surgery - built on this moment - From horror to silenceEther Day ### Slide 4: Two men kill the invisible killers. - 04 / 13 — Why Patients Died After Surgery - Surgery was now painless — but post-operative infection killed roughly half of all surgical patients. Then a chemist in Paris and a surgeon in Glasgow connected the dots. - 1861 - Louis Pasteur — Paris - Germ Theory of Disease - Pasteur's swan-neck flask experiments showed microorganisms cause spoilage and disease — not "spontaneous generation" or bad air. He invented pasteurisation along the way and later developed vaccines for rabies and anthrax. - 1867 - Joseph Lister — Glasgow Royal - Antiseptic Surgery - Reading Pasteur, Lister sprayed carbolic acid in operating theatres and washed instruments. Surgical mortality at his hospital plunged. The mouthwash bearing his name (Listerine) is the small commercial echo. - 50% → 15% - Surgical mortality drop after carbolic acid spray - 1864 - Year pasteurisation patented - Implications: hand-washing, hygiene, modern microbiology ### Slide 5: Röntgen finds the "X" rays. - 05 / 13 — Seeing Through Skin - Working in a darkened lab, the German physicist saw a barium-coated screen glow even with his cathode-ray tube covered. He had stumbled into the first medical imaging. - 18·95 - Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen — Würzburg, Germany - X-ray imaging — first non-invasive look inside the living body - On 8 November 1895 Röntgen photographed his wife Anna's hand: bones and wedding ring sharply visible through flesh. She reportedly gasped, "I have seen my death." Within weeks the technique was being used in clinics. The first Nobel Prize in Physics (1901) went to him. - 15 min - Exposure for that - first hand image - 3.6B - X-ray exams now - performed yearly - Bones through skinThe first medical scan ### Slide 6: Fleming returns from holiday to a mouldy miracle. - 06 / 13 — A Forgotten Petri Dish - A blue-green mould had killed the bacteria around it. Fleming named the substance penicillin. It would take Florey, Chain and a wartime crisis to mass-produce it. - 19·28 - Alexander Fleming → Florey & Chain (Oxford, 1940) - Penicillin — the antibiotic age begins - Fleming's accident sat in a journal for a decade. Then Howard Florey and Ernst Chain at Oxford figured out purification; American pharma scaled production for D-Day. Soldiers who would have died from infected wounds in WWI now survived. The trio shared the 1945 Nobel. - 200M+ - Lives saved by - penicillin alone - 2.3M doses - Produced for Allied - troops by D-Day, 1944 - A clear ring of dead bacteriaThe first antibiotic ### Slide 7: A double helix on a scrap of paper. - 07 / 13 — The Secret of Life - In Cambridge, Watson and Crick built models. In London, Rosalind Franklin's X-ray diffraction "Photo 51" handed them the answer. - 19·53 - Watson, Crick, Franklin & Wilkins — Cambridge / King's College London - Structure of DNA: two anti-parallel strands, base pairs A-T and G-C - A one-page paper in Nature proposed a self-copying molecule. It birthed molecular biology, recombinant DNA, the Human Genome Project, CRISPR — and eventually the mRNA vaccines on slide 12. Franklin's contribution was for decades under-credited. - 3.2B - Base pairs in the - human genome - 2003 - Year the genome was - fully sequenced - Two strands, four lettersThe code of life ### Slide 8: Salk's vaccine ends the summer terror. - 08 / 13 — Iron Lungs Empty Out - Mid-century parents feared polio more than any other disease. Pools closed. Children appeared in newsreels in iron lungs. Then a Pittsburgh lab made a vaccine. - 19·54 - Jonas Salk → Albert Sabin (oral version, 1961) - Inactivated polio vaccine — first mass childhood immunisation campaign in the US - Salk's 1954 trial was the largest medical experiment in history: 1.8 million "Polio Pioneers." Asked who owned the patent, Salk replied: "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" Wild polio is now confined to two countries. - 99.9% - Reduction in wild - polio cases since 1988 - Salk's earnings - from the patent - From 350,000 cases (1988)To a few dozen today ### Slide 9: Barnard transplants a beating heart. - 09 / 13 — A Heart Borrowed - A 9-hour operation in Cape Town moved the heart of a young woman killed in a car crash into the chest of a 53-year-old grocer. - 19·67 - Christiaan Barnard — Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town - First successful human-to-human heart transplant - Patient Louis Washkansky lived 18 days; he died of pneumonia, not rejection. The world's press camped outside the hospital. Within years, surgeons everywhere were transplanting hearts, kidneys, livers and lungs. Cyclosporine (1983) made long-term survival routine. - 3 Dec 1967 - Date of the first - heart transplant - ~150,000 - Solid-organ transplants - now done globally each year - A new beatThe transplant era ### Slide 10: Louise Brown — the world's first IVF baby. - 10 / 13 — Conception, Re-engineered - Born 25 July 1978 in Oldham, England, weighing 5 lb 12 oz. The egg had been fertilised in a glass dish in a Cambridge lab. - 19·78 - Robert Edwards & Patrick Steptoe — UK - In-vitro fertilisation: the start of assisted reproduction - Edwards spent two decades being denied research funding. The Catholic Church condemned the experiment. The headlines screamed "test-tube baby." Today IVF is mundane medicine. Edwards received the Nobel Prize in 2010 — Steptoe had died, ineligible posthumously. - 12M+ - People born via IVF - since Louise Brown - 1 in 60 - Babies in developed - countries (and rising) - A glass dish, a new familyReproductive medicine ### Slide 11: Antiretrovirals turn HIV treatable. - 11 / 13 — Death Sentence to Chronic Condition - In the early '80s, a positive HIV test meant a death within years. By the mid-'90s a triple-drug cocktail rewrote the obituary pages. - 1987→1996 - AZT (1987) → HAART triple therapy (1996) - Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy: HIV becomes a chronic disease - David Ho's combination therapy reduced HIV in the blood to undetectable levels. Within a couple of years US AIDS deaths halved. Today a person with HIV on treatment has near-normal life expectancy and cannot transmit the virus (U=U). - 21M+ - Lives saved by - antiretroviral therapy - U = U - Undetectable equals - untransmittable - Three drugs, one daily pillHIV becomes chronic ### Slide 12: mRNA vaccines, designed in a weekend. - 12 / 13 — From Sequence to Shoulder in 11 Months - SARS-CoV-2's genome was published 11 January 2020. Moderna's vaccine sequence was finalised 48 hours later. The first US arms were jabbed on 14 December 2020. - 20·20-21 - Karikó & Weissman (decades of mRNA work) → Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna - First widely-deployed mRNA vaccines — and a new platform for medicine - Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman spent the 1990s and 2000s figuring out how to get synthetic mRNA past the immune system. Their 2005 paper was the seed. In a pandemic year that work paid off — and won them the 2023 Nobel Prize. The platform is now being aimed at flu, RSV, cancer. - ~14M - Lives saved by COVID - vaccines in year one - 11 mo - From genome publication - to first authorised shot - A line of code, a vaccineThe platform era ### Slide 13: Two centuries, one direction. - 13 / 13 — Where to Go Next - Each breakthrough multiplied lifespan and shrank suffering. Global life expectancy in 1800: about 30. In 2024: about 73. The line keeps climbing. - Medicine is the only profession that labours incessantly to destroy the reason for its own existence. - — JAMES BRYCE - Further Reading - Siddhartha Mukherjee — The Emperor of All Maladies (2010); The Gene (2016) - Roy Porter — The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History (1997) - Lindsey Fitzharris — The Butchering Art (Lister, 2017) - David Quammen — The Tangled Tree (molecular biology, 2018) - WHO & CDC reports on smallpox & polio eradication - Walter Isaacson — The Code Breaker (Doudna & CRISPR, 2021) - Watch on YouTube - Medical Breakthroughs in History - youtube.com — search results - Penicillin Discovery — Fleming - youtube.com — search results ## Related Decks - [Aging — The Mechanics of Getting Older](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-health-aging) - [Anatomia humana — a guided tour](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-health-anatomy) - [Major Diseases — the big four of chronic illness](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-health-diseases) - [EXERCISE / The most underused medicine](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-health-exercise)