Malignant disease

While progress was the hallmark of medicine after the beginning of the 20th century, malignant disease, or cancer, continued to pose major challenges. Cancer became the second most common cause of death in most Western countries in the second half of the 20th century, exceeded only by deaths from heart disease. Nonetheless, some progress was achieved. The causes of many types of malignancies were unknown, but methods became available for attacking the problem. Surgery remained the principal therapeutic standby, but radiation therapy and chemotherapy were increasingly used.

Soon after the discovery of radium was announced in 1898, its potentialities in treating cancer were realized. In due course it assumed an important role in therapy. Simultaneously, deep X-ray therapy was developed, and with the atomic age came the use of radioactive isotopes. (A radioactive isotope is an unstable variant of a substance that has a stable form. During the process of breaking down, the unstable form emits radiation.) High-voltage X-ray therapy and radioactive isotopes have largely replaced radium. Whereas irradiation long depended upon X-rays generated at 250 kilovolts, machines that are capable of producing X-rays generated at 8,000 kilovolts and betatrons of up to 22,000,000 electron volts (MeV) came into clinical use.

The most effective of the isotopes was radioactive cobalt. Telecobalt machines (those that hold the cobalt at a distance from the body) were available containing 2,000 curies or more of the isotope, an amount equivalent to 3,000 grams of radium and sending out a beam equivalent to that from a 3,000-kilovolt X-ray machine.

Of even more significance were developments in the chemotherapy of cancer. In certain forms of malignant disease, such as leukemia, which cannot be treated by surgery, palliative effects were achieved that prolonged life and allowed the patient in many instances to lead a comparatively normal existence.

Fundamentally, however, perhaps the most important advance of all in this field was the increasing appreciation of the importance of prevention. The discovery of the relationship between cigarette smoking and lung cancer remains a classic example. Less publicized, but of equal import, was the continuing supervision of new techniques in industry and food manufacture in an attempt to ensure that they do not involve the use of cancer-causing substances.

Tropical medicine

The first half of the 20th century witnessed the virtual conquest of three of the major diseases of the tropics: malaria, yellow fever, and leprosy. At the turn of the century, as for the preceding two centuries, quinine was the only known drug to have any appreciable effect on malaria. With the increasing development of tropical countries and rising standards of public health, it became obvious that quinine was not completely satisfactory. Intensive research between World Wars I and II indicated that several synthetic compounds were more effective. The first of these to become available, in 1934, was quinacrine (known as mepacrine, Atabrine, or Atebrin). In World War II it amply fulfilled the highest expectations and helped to reduce disease among Allied troops in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Far East. A number of other effective antimalarial drugs subsequently became available.

An even brighter prospect—the virtual eradication of malaria—was opened up by the introduction, during World War II, of the insecticide DDT (1,1,1-trichloro-2,2,-bis[p-chlorophenyl]ethane, or dichlorodiphenyltrichloro-ethane). It had long been realized that the only effective way of controlling malaria was to eradicate the anopheline mosquitoes that transmit the disease. Older methods of mosquito control, however, were cumbersome and expensive. The lethal effect of DDT on the mosquito, its relative cheapness, and its ease of use on a widespread scale provided the answer. An intensive worldwide campaign, sponsored by the World Health Organization, was planned and went far toward bringing malaria under control.

The major problem encountered with respect to effectiveness was that the mosquitoes were able to develop resistance to DDT, but the introduction of other insecticides, such as dieldrin and lindane (BHC), helped to overcome that difficulty. The use of these and other insecticides was strongly criticized by ecologists, however.

Yellow fever is another mosquito-transmitted disease, and the prophylactic value of modern insecticides in its control was almost as great as in the case of malaria. The forest reservoirs of the virus present a more difficult problem, but the combined use of immunization and insecticides did much to bring this disease under control.

Until the 1940s the only drugs available for treating leprosy were the chaulmoogra oils and their derivatives. These, though helpful, were far from satisfactory. In the 1940s the group of drugs known as the sulfones appeared, and it soon became apparent that they were infinitely better than any other group of drugs in the treatment of leprosy. Several other drugs later proved promising. Although there was no known cure—in the strict sense of the term—for leprosy, the outlook had changed: the age-old scourge could be brought under control and the victims of the disease saved from the mutilations that had given leprosy such a fearsome reputation throughout the ages.

William Archibald Robson Thomson Philip Rhodes

Surgery in the 20th century

The opening phase

Three seemingly insuperable obstacles beset the surgeon in the years before the mid-19th century: pain, infection, and shock. Once these were overcome, the surgeon believed that he could burst the bonds of centuries and become the master of his craft. There is more, however, to anesthesia than putting the patient to sleep. Infection, despite first antisepsis (destruction of microorganisms present) and later asepsis (avoidance of contamination), was an ever-present menace. And shock continued to perplex physicians. But in the 20th century surgery progressed farther, faster, and more dramatically than in all preceding ages.

The situation encountered

The shape of surgery that entered the 20th century was clearly recognizable as the forerunner of modern surgery. The operating theatre still retained an aura of the past, when the surgeon played to his audience and the patient was little more than a stage prop. In most hospitals it was a high room lit by a skylight, with tiers of benches rising above the narrow wooden operating table. The instruments, kept in glazed or wooden cupboards around the walls, were of forged steel, unplated, and with handles of wood or ivory.

The means to combat infection hovered between antisepsis and asepsis. Instruments and dressings were mostly sterilized by soaking them in dilute carbolic acid (or other antiseptic), and the surgeon often endured a gown freshly wrung out in the same solution. Asepsis gained ground fast, however. It had been born in the Berlin clinic of Ernst von Bergmann, where in 1886 steam sterilization had been introduced. Gradually, this led to the complete aseptic ritual, which has as its basis the bacterial cleanliness of everything that comes in contact with the wound. Hermann Kümmell of Hamburg devised the routine of “scrubbing up.” In 1890 William Stewart Halsted of Johns Hopkins University had rubber gloves specially made for operating, and in 1896 Polish surgeon Johannes von Mikulicz-Radecki, working at Breslau, Germany, invented the gauze mask.

Many surgeons, brought up in a confused misunderstanding of the antiseptic principle—believing that carbolic acid would cover a multitude of surgical mistakes, many of which they were ignorant of committing—failed to grasp the concept of asepsis. Thomas Annandale, for example, blew through his catheters to make sure that they were clear, and many an instrument, dropped accidentally, was simply given a quick wipe and returned to use. Tradition died hard, and asepsis had an uphill struggle before it was fully accepted. “I believe firmly that more patients have died from the use of gloves than have ever been saved from infection by their use,” wrote American surgeon W.P. Carr in 1911. Over the years, however, a sound technique was evolved as the foundation for the growth of modern surgery.

Anesthesia, at the beginning of the 20th century, progressed slowly. Few physicians made a career of the subject, and frequently the patient was rendered unconscious by a student, a nurse, or a porter wielding a rag and a bottle. Chloroform was overwhelmingly more popular than ether, on account of its ease of administration, despite the fact that it was liable to kill by stopping the heart.

Although, by the end of the first decade, nitrous oxide (laughing gas) combined with ether had displaced—but by no means entirely—the use of chloroform, the surgical problems were far from ended. For years to come, the abdominal surgeon besought the anesthetist to deepen the level of anesthesia and thus relax the abdominal muscles; the anesthetist responded to the best of his or her ability, acutely aware that the more anesthetic administered, the closer the patient was to death. When other anesthetic agents were discovered, anesthesiology came into its own as a field, and many advances in spheres such as brain and heart surgery would have been impossible without the skill of the trained anesthesiologist.

The third obstacle, shock, was perhaps the most complex and the most difficult to define satisfactorily. The only major cause properly appreciated at the start of the 20th century was loss of blood, and, once that had occurred, nothing, in those days, could be done. And so, the study of shock—its causes, its effects on human physiology, and its prevention and treatment—became all-important to the progress of surgery.

In the latter part of the 19th century, then, surgeons had been liberated from the age-old issues of pain, pus, and hospital gangrene. Hitherto, operations had been restricted to amputations, cutting for stone in the bladder, tying off arterial aneurysms (bulging and thinning of artery walls), repairing hernias, and a variety of procedures that could be done without going too deeply beneath the skin. But the anatomical knowledge, a crude skill derived from practice on cadavers, and the enthusiasm for surgical practice were there waiting. Largely ignoring the mass of problems they uncovered, surgeons launched forth into an exploration of the human body.

They acquired a reputation for showmanship, but much of their surgery, though speedy and spectacular, was rough and ready. There were a few who developed supreme skill and dexterity and could have undertaken a modern operation with but little practice. Indeed, some devised the very operations still in use today. One such was Theodor Billroth, head of the surgical clinic at Vienna, who collected a formidable list of successful “first” operations. He represented the best of his generation—a surgical genius, an accomplished musician, and a kind, gentle man who brought the breath of humanity to his work. Moreover, the men he trained, including von Mikulicz, Vincenz Czerny, and Anton von Eiselsberg, consolidated the brilliant start that he had given to abdominal surgery in Europe.

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