Medical Advances Timeline: 1800-1849

1800
- The Royal College of Surgeons is founded in London.
- Eli Whitney invents muskets with interchangeable parts.

1802
- German naturalist Gottfried Treviranus coins the term “biology”.

1803
- German pharmacist F.W.A. Serturner isolates morphine, an opium alkaloid. It was named for Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams.
- Ohio becomes a state of the U.S.
- American Robert Fulton propels a boat by steam power.
- English inventor Henry Shrapnel invents the shell.

1805
- Rockets, which were originally created by William Congreve, are reintroduced as weapons in the British Army.

1807
- The medicinal pill-making machine is invented
- Charles Bell publishes his System of Comparative Surgery.

1810
- Homeopathy is introduced by Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann in Germany in his Organon of Therapeutics.

1815
- After the battle of Waterloo, in present-day Belgium, it takes ten days to gather and treat the wounded. It is Napoleon’s last battle.

1816
- Physician Rene Theophile Hyacinthe Laennec of France invents the stethoscope to examine the sounds made by the heart and lungs.
- Indiana becomes a state of the U.S.

1817
- In New Orleans, Louisiana, the Creole Societe Medicale de la Nouvelle-New Orleans is founded. All transactions were in French.

1820
- John Hall is manufacturing breech-loading rifles at Harpers Ferry, VA
- In New Orleans, Louisiana, an English-speaking medical society, the Physio-Medical Society, is established

1823
- A building with an apothecary is erected in New Orleans by Louis Joseph Dufilho, Jr., America’s first licensed pharmacist. It houses today’s Historical Pharmacy Museum.
- “The Lancet”, the British medical journal, is founded.

1824
- The Medical College of South Carolina is founded in Charleston.
- A Treatise on the Diseases of the Eye is published by Dr. George Frick, the leading oculist in Baltimore, Maryland. This was the first American book on ophthalmology.
- The forerunner of the ophthalmoscope was created by Dr. E.G. Loring of Baltimore. It had sixteen lenses mounted on a rotating dist. Concave and plane mirrors were attached.

1826-1837
- First North American cholera epidemic.

1828
- The mineral Thorium is discovered and subsequently used for dental fillings. -In 1898 it was found to be radioactive.
- A Medical Department is established at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

1829
- The breechloading needle gun is invented by J.N, von Drayse.
- British chemist James Smithson bequeaths L100,000 to found the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
- William Burke is hanged in Scotland for murder. He was found to have provided very fresh corpses for anatomy schools in Edinburgh.

1831
- Chloroform is introduced into medical practice. It was invented simultaneously by American Samuel Guthrie and German Justus von Liebig. It was administered by inhalation in a solution with spirits of wine called Chloric Ether.

1832
- The Anatomy Act is passed in the United Kingdom. This allowed hospitals and workhouses to hand over for dissection bodies that were unclaimed for two days.

1835
- Samuel Colt takes out an English patent for his single-barreled pistol and rifle.

1836
- The first medical periodical in the South, The Southern Medical and Surgical Journal, begins publication.
- The Patent Arms Manufacturing Company of Paterson, New York is established to manufacture and market revolvers and rifles.

1839
- Charles Goodyear devises a process to heat India rubber with sulfur, creating vulcanite. The material was used to make denture bases, replacing gold.
- The first medical journal in Louisiana, Journal de la Societe Medicale de la Nouvelle-New Orleans is published in French.

1840
- Baltimore College of Dentistry in Maryland opens with five students.

1842
- Crawford W. Long, an American physician, produces surgical anesthesia using ether.

1843
- A machine for making pills containing more than one ingredient, or “compound tablets” is invented.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes publishes The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever.
- American social reformer Dorothea Dix reports to the Massachusetts Legislature on the shockingly bad conditions in prisons and asylums.

1844
- U.S. dental surgeon Horace Wells, a pioneer in the use of anesthetics, has nitrous oxide administered to himself for a tooth extraction.

1845
- The hypodermic syringe is introduced.

1846
- October 16: Successful demonstration of diethyl ether as an anesthetic at Massachusetts General Hospital by dentist William Thomas Green Morton. The substance had been known since about 1200 A.D.
- The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. is founded.

1847
- Elizabeth Blackwell is the first woman to enter medical school at Geneva (New York) Medical College.
- The American Medical Association is formed by a group of medical school professors who wanted to reform medical education.
- January 19: Scottish physician James Simpson, head of obstetrics at Edinburgh, introduces the use of chloroform as an anesthetic.
- Ignac Semmelweis develops his theory of puerperal sepsis in Vienna. His observations were not taken seriously by a large audience. It would be another 10 years before Louis Pasteur published his discoveries and even longer before surgeons realized that their ungloved, unwashed hands carried blood, soil, pus, excrement and germs into open wounds.
- A report on surgery to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia focused on the uses, power and safety of ether as an anesthetic.

1849
- Elizabeth Blackwell receives her medical degree in New York, prompting international media coverage. She then went to Paris to study midwifery at La Maternite.

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