Medicine
23 inventions
Penicillin
Fleming discovered it by accident when mold contaminated a petri dish. He did not develop it into a ...
Vaccine
Jenner observed that milkmaids who had cowpox never got smallpox. He tested this by infecting a boy ...
X-Ray
Rontgen discovered them accidentally while experimenting with cathode rays. He called them X-rays be...
Antibiotics
Fleming discovered penicillin but Florey and Chain made it usable. Selman Waksman discovered strepto...
Anesthesia
Morton demonstrated ether anesthesia publicly at Massachusetts General Hospital. Before anesthesia, ...
Contraceptive Pill
The pill gave women control over reproduction for the first time. Pincus was funded by Margaret Sang...
CRISPR
A gene-editing tool that lets scientists modify DNA precisely. Won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry...
MRI Scanner
Damadian demonstrated that cancer cells and normal cells respond differently to magnetic fields. Pau...
Pacemaker
Greatbatch accidentally installed the wrong resistor, creating a rhythmic pulse. The first implant w...
Stethoscope
Laennec rolled up a tube of paper to avoid pressing his ear against a womans chest. Before this, doc...
Smallpox Vaccine
Jenners vaccine was the worlds first vaccine. Smallpox killed an estimated 300 million people in the...
Insulin
Before insulin, type 1 diabetes was a death sentence. Banting sold the patent for 1 dollar, saying i...
Anesthesia (Ether)
The Ether Dome at Massachusetts General Hospital is where surgery changed forever. Morton demonstrat...
Aspirin
Hippocrates knew willow bark relieved pain 2,400 years earlier. Hoffmann synthesized acetylsalicylic...
Polio Vaccine
Salk refused to patent it, saying the patent belongs to the people. When asked who owned it, he repl...
Artificial Heart
The Jarvik-7 was the first permanent artificial heart. Barney Clark received it and lived 112 days. ...
CT Scanner
Hounsfield built the first CT scanner at EMI, the same company that owned the Beatles. The first sca...
Defibrillator
Kouwenhoven developed the first external defibrillator at Johns Hopkins. The portable version was in...
Blood Transfusion
Landsteiner discovered blood groups A, B, AB, and O. Before this, transfusions were Russian roulette...
Quinine
The Quechua people used cinchona bark to treat malaria. Jesuit missionaries brought it to Europe in ...
Aspirin detail
See Aspirin main entry....
Hypodermic Syringe
Edinburgh physician Alexander Wood developed a syringe with a hollow needle in 1853 to inject morphi...
Eyeglasses
The first spectacles appeared in northern Italy around 1286. In a sermon of 1306, the Dominican fria...