User:JamesS&T3530/History of hospitals

(Article Draft)

Lead

These sections of the article aim to show the significance of anesthetics and antisepsis and how they have played a role in shaping modern hospitals in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

20th and 21st centuries

Resuscitation room bed after a trauma intervention, showing the highly technical equipment of modern hospitals

See also: Category:Hospitals established in the 20th century and Category:Hospitals established in the 21st century

Improvements in medicine, medical technology, major worldwide pandemics in 1918 and 2020, and management and consolidation of hospitals were the primary influences on hospitals during the 20th and 21st century.

My additions to the article

The American hospital, primarily a charity based organization, became a medical institution based on scientific and business principles in the 1900's.

Peer Review Response and

CorpusculateAggregation's Peer Review Response

I would agree that the article still requires further expansion. My additions to the article probably feel like the framework due to the fact that I am attempting to add a brand new section to the article. I do plan on making this flow better than it currently does. My article also does have citations after every sentence, which is a result of me being cautious about plagiarism. However, I do not agree that this is too much, and I have also acquired more sources since starting this section and plan to add more diverse citations to add more credibility to my information.

Kelton T Back's Peer Review Response

Thank you for bringing to my attention that my article is lacking specific examples. I will add in early uses of anesthetics and antisepsis. I also planned on elaborating on the controversy of germ theory and reasons why it is so important now. I recently added in the 19th century section to possibly include the early use of antiseptics and antisepsis, but I had not gotten around to adding these examples yet. I think the confusion about the headers comes from what the article currently looks like and what I plan to add. The sections I added are in chronological order, and I will add a 21st century section when I find relevant information on it. I was trying to follow the format of the whole article, which is going chronologically century by century. I also plan on adding images to enhance the article.

19th Century

Integration of New Technology and Advancements

Anesthetics

A major change to procedures in the medical field was the introduction of anesthetics used to put patients to sleep. While the use of anesthetics was first introduced in the 19th century, it became a favorable and widely used practice due to its ability to incapacitate a patient and make operations easier and less painful. This, in turn, made operations such as amputations less fatal, because patients would stay still as well as not be in shock and lose less blood while being operated on.

On November 7, 1846, the first amputation using a form of anesthesia called ether anesthesia was preformed. This anesthetic was called letheon and was created by a dentist, Dr. William Morton. This new, ether based anesthetic was administered to Alice Mohan in an amputation procedure to, first, subdue her during the amputation and second, to test the effects of the new letheon. After being given to Alice Mohan, the anesthetic reportedly only took three minutes to take full effect. The amputation was carried out with little reaction from Alice Mohan, and she seem completely unaffected by pain and outside stimuli until a static nerve was cut, when a small cry was noticed. There was also only a small amount of blood lost during the operation.

Antisepsis

Antisepsis plays an extremely important role in medical safety and relies on the ideas of germ theory. Germ theory is the idea that disease is caused by microscopic living organisms being introduced to the body. Joseph Lister was able to apply germ theory to medical practice and tried to show that germ theory should be taken seriously. This idea was not widely accepted when it was presented due to the fact that Lister was determining that airborne germs were infecting open wounds, and it was not believed that this could be a single cause of infection. Through experimentation, Louis Pasteur was able to determine that living organisms are the cause of fermentation, and demonstrated that the spread and growth of septicemia was dependent on a living microorganism. Lister applied this idea to surgeries and used a carbolic acid solution to attempt to sterilize anything that would be on our around a wound. This method proved to be successful when Lister pointed out that, despite his patients, in most cases, being in a tighter space than standard wards, there was still a very low infection rate among them since he began using his methods.