Via a couple of posts from Anders Sandberg, my attention was drawn today to an illustration of the scale of medical progress. The latest BMJ contains a list of short essays on important medical milestones since 1840 - glances at small fractions of the enormous progress in medicine that has occurred in the past 167 years.

167 years is not such a long time when you stop to think about it; some people living today have seen two thirds of that span with their own eyes. So much has come to pass; many of the tools of medicine today would have been hard to imagine in the 1950s, let alone the 1840s. Human life expectancy has increased dramatically over this time as the result of improvements in our knowledge and willingness to use it to improve our lot:

Since the Stone Age we have evaluated, interpreted, calculated, and computed. As we observed the effects of our primitive interventions we tried, tried again, and modified our technology. Our legs could take us only so far, until we extended their reach through increasingly sophisticated means of transportation - technology that took us across land and sea and through the air. We overcame the limits of our visual acuity with lenses, opening new vistas of the heavens and the microcosm. Our clinical gaze was augmented by new understandings of anatomy, physiology, and pathology. New tools, such as the stethoscope, radiography, and anaesthesia, let us listen to and see into the human body and tinker with it.

Inevitably, we moved beyond augmenting our limbs and our sense organs. Our powerful brain began to realise its own limitations. With its insatiable urge for self improvement and its unparalleled parallel processing capacity it began building tools to enhance itself. We created external devices that exponentially increased our ability to calculate, analyse, and learn. It took us two millennia to jump from the Babylonian abacus to the mechanical eight digit calculator that Pascal built in the Enlightenment. After only two centuries Charles Babbage envisaged a massive, steam powered mechanical calculator designed to print astronomical tables. Less than a century later Alan Turing created Colossus, an electronic computer that helped end a war plagued by our self destructive drive and power. Over only decades in the second half of the 20th century we developed powerful resources to communicate and exchange unlimited amounts of knowledge, almost anywhere and at any time. We created a global network of computers able to decode the genome; machines capable of seeing our body and its functions in three dimensions; tools to track and control diseases remotely. Computers started to change the way we learn, live, communicate, and heal.

The pace of science, computation and medical engineering is blistering today - why is there any doubt that the medicine of the 2050s will be far more advanced, to the point of extending the present limits of our healthy lives? When we look at what was lacking in 1840 that is known and available in 2007, it seems that those alive then must have lived in the uttermost darkness and suffering. The young of 2050 will see much the same in 2007 - how could people have carried on without reliable cures for cancer, without instant diagnosis of all conditions, without superior, artificial immune systems, without nanomedicine to repair the cellular damage caused by aging?

A look back at history allows us to see the full sweep, power and momentum of medical science, a vision often missed in the day-to-day view of incremental advances. This momentum of progress will carry us into a future of far greater knowledge, capability and longevity - the only questions for we aging individuals are those of pace and timing.

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Posted by Reason at January 24, 2007 9:32 PM | TrackBack (0)