If it were up to you to decide what has been the greatest medical advance of the past 150 years, what would you choose? That’s exactly the challenge the prestigious British Medical Journal posed to a small group of experts and the many thousands of their readers, mostly doctors. Well, almost exactly. They actually were looking for the greatest medical advance of the past 167 years, back to 1840, the year the journal was founded. What comes to mind? In 1840, we didn’t yet know about viruses and bacteria. Louis Pasteur established the germ theory in the 1860s, but it didn’t really catch on until almost 1880. Germ theory is pretty important, and a good contender. Florence Nightingale is credited with establishing standardized training for nurses, but she did not open her school until 1860. Anyone who has ever had a bone heal after wearing a cast may owe a debt to an X-ray. William Roentgen invented those in 1895. According to legend, we owe antibiotics to some moldy bread and the insight of Dr. Alexander Fleming. Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928 and it was first used to treat human infection in 1941. Antibiotics […]