Contents - IADR/AADR

development totaled $1.6 billion in 1968 in the United States; in 1903 the Public Health Service expended a
total of $300 for a research grant in Chicago.
THE LABORATORY IN GROWTH OF MEDICAL SCIENCE
The recent growth of medical science emerged from the increasing interest in chemistry, physics,
microbiology, and pharmacology, as well as in the physiology of health and disease in animals and man. The
problems of the bedside were taken to the laboratory and the discoveries of the laboratory brought to the
bedside. Precision necessary for the new knowledge came through the invention of specific tools and technics:
electrocardiography, electromyography, and angiography; radio scanning for studies of the brain, lung, heart
chambers, liver, pancreas, and spleen; the evaluation of electrolytes in the body fluids and of phosphorus,
calcium, uric acid, creatinine, bicarbonate, and glucose; the determination of blood gases; pulmonary function
tests; improved visualization of the retina by photography; esophagoscopy, gastroscopy, peritoneoscopy,
proctoscopy, thoracoscopy, mediastinoscopy, bronchoscopy, and cystoscopy; the use of isotopes of iron,
sodium, iodine, and phosphorus for both treatment and diagnosis; and the employment of sophisticated
laboratory technics such as column chromatography, absorption spectroscopy, ultracentrifugation, electron
microscopy, X-ray diffraction, electrophoresis on gel media, and immunochemical assays.
Wilhelm Roentgen's wildest dreams could never have imagined the broad range of developments that
flowed from his discovery of a simple X-ray light beam at his laboratory in Würzburg in 1895. Diagnostic
radiology came to include cholecystography, intravenous pyelography, myelography, and angiography and
brought out details such as those seen through tomography, air contrast, and cinematography; it helped to track
down deformities, infection, ulcers, and tumors wherever they occurred. Thanks to the discovery of artificial
radiotherapy by the Joliots in 1934, therapeutic radiology with its gamma rays and its cobalt 60 has been useful
in the treatment of tumors and leukemia. Robert Koch would be surprised at the rise of a new field in
microbiology, the viruses—such as the adenovirus, the virus of Eaton agent pneumonia, and the virus of
hepatitis.
Stupendous developments were a diagnostic skin test of trichinosis; successful vaccination against
tuberculosis, measles, German measles, cholera, and poliomyelitis; and the Dick test for susceptibility to scarlet
fever. 1
Pathology contributed the Pap test, in which smears taken from the cervix, lungs, mammae, and stomach
are studied for early diagnosis of cancer. 2 Percutaneous biopsy of liver and lungs became commonplace.
SUCCESSES IN SURGERY
Surgery entered the vascular system and altered our previously hopeless outlook in that area. In 1945
Alfred Blalock and Helen B. Taussig 3 at the Johns Hopkins Hospital operated on three children with cyanosis
INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR DENTAL RESEARCH (IADR) – THE FIRST FIFTY YEAR HISTORY PAGE 10