The iron lung arrives just as there’s a spike in poliomyelitis cases, a disease that could affect its victim’s ability to breathe normally. Talk about good timing.
Archive for the ‘Health and Medicine’ Category
1956: Dr. Albert Sabin announces that his live-virus oral polio vaccine is ready for mass testing. It will soon supplant the Salk vaccine.
Cutting into someone’s chest to perform heart surgery is not yet an accepted medical practice. But without it the victim is doomed, so the surgeon goes in.
Under the supervision of pioneering transplant surgeon Michael DeBakey, doctors perform the first simultaneous, multi-organ transplant procedure.
The CT scan goes into use in the United States. Lives will be saved. Originally known as a CAT scan — for computed (or computerized) axial tomography, or computer-aided (or assisted) tomography — the process uses a series of X-rays to create sequential images of virtual slices of body tissue.