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Horace Wells (d. New York City, 1848) is the first person to use nitrous oxide as an anesthetic in dentistry. | |||
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An air lock, called a hospital lock, is introduced to eliminate caisson disease -- known as the bends -- as part of an abortive attempt to build a tunnel under the Hudson River at New York City, by providing a place for slow decompression for workers from the pressurized underwater caissons, the hospital lock completely eliminates the disease, which previously had affected as many as one worker in four. | |||
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New York University Professor of Physics Daniel Webster Hering is credited with taking the first human X-Ray in the United States on February 5, 1898 at Bellevue Hospital. This is barely one month after Wilhelm Roentgen's announcement of the discovery of X-Rays.
Pictured here is a later X-Ray of Hering's left hand. Daniel Webster Hering Papers, ca. 1898 |
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Millar Hutchinson, based in New York, invents the first electrical hearing aid. | |||
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The New York Cancer Hospital -- now Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center -- is the first hospital in the country to use radiation therapy, only six years after the discovery of radium. | |||
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Alexis Carrel, working at the Rockefeller Institute, develops techniques for rejoining several blood vessels, paving the way for organ transplantation. Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center becomes perhaps the leading organ transplant center in the Northeast. | |||
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During World War I, as in World War II, Dean Virginia Gildersleeve of Barnard College stressed the importance of "trained brains" in servicing the country's best interests.
Botany
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Dr. Arthur Master develops the "Master 2-Step," a test designed to measure the heart's performance under stress. Master developed the test while working at the Mount Sinai Medical Center, where he was Cardiographer to the Mount Sinai Hospital. Master's test survives today as the commonly known treadmill test.
Dr. Arthur Master, ca. 1965 |
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Workers at the Sloan-Kettering Institute isolate DNA, the basic material of heredity, from a virus known to cause malignant tumors in mice. They are startled to find that the DNA on its own can cause cancer just as the virus does. | |||
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Sophisticated - and expensive - technology played an increasingly large role in medical care in the 20th century. As the nation's leading center for academic medicine, New York's hospitals played an important part in introducing such equipment into medical practice. A
patient undergoes radiation treatment at |
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Solomon Berson, MD and Rosalyn Yalow, Ph.D., working at the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital, develop a technique to measure the reaction between an antigen and antibody, specifically insulin. Their technique, radioimmunassay, is now used widely to study other hormones in the body. Solomon Berson died in 1972. In 1977, Rosalyn Yalow was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work. | |||
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The rise of scientific medicine helped introduce a new kind of hospital, the academic medical center, whose primary mission was biomedical research and education. At Columbia-Presbyterian, for example, research funding from outside sources went from $200,000 in 1934/35 to over $7 million in 1958/59. Many technicians employed in this growing field were women, though at the time the number of women physicians and research scientists was generally low. A technician in a laboratory at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, ca. 1964. |
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J.D. Hardy's team, which has been working on animal heart transplants, performs the first human heart transplant. The patient, already in shock from terminal heart disease, receives the heart of a chimpanzee but dies an hour later. The operation proves that a heart transplanted into a human body can resume an effective beat. | |||
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To prevent stroke or sudden heart attack, Dr. Sol Sobel, a New York heart surgeon, refines the technique of endarterectomy by injecting carbon dioxide gas into clogged arteries to loosen and remove fatty deposits. A powerful jet of gas is directed through the blood vessel by hypodermic syringe and the congealed deposits can then be removed with forceps. This life-saving procedure cleans even small branch arteries. | |||
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Scientists at the New York Blood Center develop a successful experimental vaccine against hepatitis B. | |||
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While the first heart transplant was performed in 1967 by South Africa's Christiaan Barnard, a successful heart transplant in a child was only accomplished in 1984 by a team of Columbia-Presbyterian surgeons. An
infant heart transplant at the Columbia- |
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