History of Medical Instruments

As long as humans have been getting ill or injured, physicians of some type have been there with instruments at the ready to alleviate the patient's suffering or to save their lives. While many people today are familiar with simple medical instruments such as the stethoscope, most medical instruments' history goes unknown to the average patient. Understanding where these instruments came from, what their forerunners did, and how they've evolved over time may help you appreciate how far medicine has come since Hippocrates.

Ancient Medicine

• Carved into the temples of Ancient Egypt are instructions on washing hands, administering narcotics to dull pain, and how to perform surgeries, complete with diagrams of doctors and patients. Using bronze instruments, Ancient Egyptians practiced "trepanation," that is drilling or cutting holes in the head of a patient to relieve the pressure and swelling of a head injury. Trepanation was also practiced in ancient Mesopotamia, China, and even MesoAmerica.
  In addition to cutting instruments, ancient medical instruments were also designed to extract abscessed teeth. Archeologists believe that physicians of the city-state of Mohenjo-Daro on the Indus river used pliers-like devices with ridges for tooth extraction more than 4000 years ago.

Classic Medicine

• Modern doctors take the "Hippocratic Oath" as an homage to the ancient physician, Hippocrates. In 300 BCE, Hippocrates not only set forth the rules by which physicians act today, but also described scalpels, retractors, and even gynecological instruments used by Greek physicians.
  Galen, the famous Greco-Roman physician also described the medical instruments of the Greeks and Romans in the 2nd century CE. Instruments made of copper, iron, and bronze were used to remove bladder stones and to catheterize men and women who had trouble urinating.
  It is said that Julius Caesar would have died in childbirth had not the attending physicians operated on his mother and cut him free of her womb. Today, such an operation is called a Cesarian Section or "C Section."

Medieval Instruments

• In addition to classic trepanation tools, Medieval European doctors included blood-letting and blood-catching devices, needles and thread to sew up wounds, and even stout saws to perform amputations. These doctors added to their arsenal "natural instruments" such as leeches to relieve "excess blood" and restore circulation to damaged limbs and maggots to eat away necrotized (dead and rotting) flesh around a wound.
  It is interesting to note that, despite the bad rap many Medieval physicians get, modern medicine is re-discovering the usefulness of leeches in restoring mobility to re-attached limbs and the value of maggots to eat gangrenous flesh away from a wound, which speeds healing.

Early Modern Medicine

• During the Civil War, triage and field surgeons gained such a fearsome reputation that many soldiers attempted to hide their wounds or resisted treatment for fear of the pain. Unfortunately, without adequate anesthetic, field surgeries were extremely painful as bullets were removed or limbs amputated in order to save the lives of the patients. During those years, doctors quickly adopted the use of the anesthetics like Chloroform, making the attendant specialty of anesthesiology and anesthetic instruments like inhalation masks.
  In the 19th and early 20th centuries, physicians acted as general practitioners, surgeons, dentists, and anesthesiologists. Because of their changing roles, many physicians carried with them bags containing whatever instruments they thought might be handy; syringes, bone saws, scalpels, stethoscopes, and drills to name a few.

Modern Medicine

• With the advent of regulated medical schools and licensing of physicians in the mid-twentieth century, medical instruments became both more specialized and more recognizable to the general public. Visits to a hospital or doctors office became routine as health care became more available, resulting in the prevalence of basic diagnostic instruments such as sphygmomanometers (blood pressure cuffs), otoscopes (ear scopes), and ophthamaloscopes (eye examining scopes).
  Some surgical instruments have become mechanized, such as bone saws and drills, but some remain manual tools, such as forceps and scalpels. In addition to these tools, new computerized instruments have emerged, including laser eye surgical machines, Magnetic Resonance Imagers (MRIs), and laser scalpels used in treating cancer.

The Future

• Medical practitioners are emphasizing "less intrusive" methods of treatment (that is, less of your skin is cut) for a variety of ailments, such as endometriosis and polyp removal The result is a demand for radical redesigns of medical instruments. It is entirely possible that within a few years, instruments which are familiar to us now will look as alien and barbaric as leech jars and hand-drilled surgical instruments do now.