British Inventions - Medicine

Medicine

• First correct description of circulation of the blood - William Harvey
• Smallpox vaccine - Edward Jenner with his discovery is said to have "saved more lives (...) than were lost in all the wars of mankind since the beginning of recorded history."
• Surgical forceps - Stephen Hales
• Antisepsis in surgery - Joseph Lister
• Artificial intraocular lens transplant surgery for cataract patients - Harold Ridley
• Clinical thermometer - Thomas Clifford Allbutt.
• isolation of fibrinogen ("coagulable lymph"), investigation of the structure of the lymphatic system and description of red blood cells by the surgeon William Hewson (surgeon)
• Colour blindness first described by John Dalton in Extraordinary facts relating to the vision of colours
• Credited with discovering how to culture embryonic stem cells in 1981 - Martin Evans
• Carried out ground breaking research on the use of penicillin in the treatment of venereal disease with the Scottish scientist Sir Alexander Fleming in London - Jack Suchet
• First blood pressure measurement and first cardiac catheterisation-Stephen Hales
• Pioneer of anaesthesia and father of epidemiology for locating the source of cholera - John Snow (physician)
• pioneered the use of sodium cromoglycate as a remedy for asthma - Roger Altounyan
• The first scientist to demonstrate that a cancer may be caused by an environmental carcinogen and one of the founders of orthopedy - Percivall Pott
• Performed the first successful blood transfusion - James Blundell
• Discovered the active ingredient of Aspirin - Edward Stone
• Discovery of Protein crystallography - Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
• The world’s first successful stem cell transplant and the first British Bone Marrow Transplant using bone marrow from a matching sibling - John Raymond Hobbs
• First typhoid vaccine - Almroth Wright
• Pioneer of the treatment of epilepsy - Edward Henry Sieveking
• discovery of Nitrous oxide (entonox/"laughing gas") and its anaesthetic properties - Humphry Davy
• Ophthalmoscope - conceived by Charles Babbage in 1847
• Computed Tomography (CT scanner) - Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield
• Gray's Anatomy widely regarded as the first complete human anatomy textbook - Henry Gray
• Discovered Parkinson's disease - James Parkinson
• General anaesthetic - Pionered by Scotsman James Young Simpson and Englishman John Snow
• Contributed to the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) - Sir Peter Mansfield
• The development of in vitro fertilization - Patrick Christopher Steptoe and Robert Geoffrey Edwards
• First baby genetically selected to be free of a breast cancer - University College London
• Viagra - Peter Dunn, Albert Wood, Dr Nicholas Terrett
• Pioneer of modern nursing - Florence Nightingale
• Acetylcholine - Henry Hallett Dale
• EKG (underlying principles) - various
• Vitamins and Tryptophan - Frederick Gowland Hopkins
• diagnostic ultrasound - John J. Wild (although his research was conducted in US)
• Identifying the mosquito as the carrier of malaria: Sir Ronald Ross (1857–1932) (born India, educated in England; mother English and father Scottish)
• Earliest pharmacopoeia in English
• The hip replacement operation, in which a stainless steel stem and 22mm head fit into a polymer socket and both parts are fixed into position by PMMA cement - pioneered by John Charnley
• Description of Hay Fever - John Bostock (physician) in 1819