The Greatest Medical Discoveries of the Millennium

By Meyer Friedman and Gerald W. Friedland
During the last 1,000 years, a series of monumental discoveries revolutionized the practice of medicine. These discoveries have saved millions of lives and brought about remarkable improvements in the health of entire populations.
One thousand years ago the average person in Europe could expect to live about 30 years. Of 100 children born alive, 40 would die before their first birthday. Disease and infections, largely the result of squalid living conditions, claimed untold numbers of lives. The average life span throughout the industrialized West has now more than doubled the average in 1000—to about 76.5 years for babies born in 1997 in the United States. Infant mortality rates are now a mere fraction of what they were 1,000 years ago.
Medical breakthroughs during the next millennium will probably bring even longer, healthier lives. Advances in genetics, for example, offer hope of new treatments to cure serious diseases such as cancer, eliminate genetic defects from families, and possibly even slow the aging process. And recent developments in transplantation technology suggest that soon it may be possible to grow replacement organs in the laboratory. But none of these anticipated breakthroughs would be possible—even thinkable—without the pioneering medical discoveries of the last 1,000 years.
Sorting through literally thousands of medical discoveries made during the past millennium to determine the ten most important is a challenge. How is the significance of a discovery measured? One factor is paramount: The most fundamental breakthroughs led to multiple other discoveries that eventually reshaped medicine and affected millions, even billions, of people. To be sure, changes in medical practices often lagged far behind the initial discovery; effective therapies sometimes emerged only after many years. These discoveries have attained the status of millennial importance not because they quickly helped physicians save lives, but because they fundamentally shifted the way scientists and physicians thought about human health. In so doing, the discoveries opened vast new fields of research that would revolutionize medicine and save the lives of incalculable numbers of people.
These seminal breakthroughs are, in the order of their discovery, human anatomy, circulation of blood, bacteria, vaccination, surgical anesthesia, X rays, blood typing, tissue culture, antibiotics, and the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).
source: encarta encyclopedia