OUR JOURNAL COVER NOSSA CAPA
In the 18th century, with the apogee of Enlightenment medicine, the tendency to specialization was born. Cardiology, for example, originated from Antonio Giuseppe Testas work (1764-1814). Cardiac diseases deserved special attention from two French clinicians: Jean de Senac recognized asthma, orthopedics, legs edema and hemoptysis as cardiac disease symptoms; Jean Nicholas Corvisart (dês Marets) created the term carditis and was the first to call himself a heart specialist.
A pioneer clinician and obstetrics professor was William Smelle, which in despite of jealous midwife attacks, demonstrated his art with a leather manikin. The highest taxes of infantile mortality, and the teachings of philosopher Rousseau and pedagogue Pestalozzi awakened the conscience of the epoch to medical necessities of children. One of the first pediatrics works, called Nursing Assay and Children Care, belonged to William Cadogan. Asylums and infantile hospitals were opened in London during that century.
Advances in anatomy and physiology of eyes, stimulated by Leonardo da Vincis visual attitude towards anatomy and optical science, were made by several physicians of the century. Combined to physical studies on light and color, those advances transformed ophthalmology in a scientific specialty. Jacques Daviel taught the first surgical proceeding to cataract extraction. In Vienna, Maria Thereza founded in 1773 the first ophthalmology school of the continent and named Joseph Barth its first lecturer.
The last years of the century presented a dramatic change of medical posture in relation to mental illness, whose victims were until then treated with extreme cruelty in sordid lazarettos. The French Philippe Pinel (1745-1826), physician of Bicêtre Hospital, in Paris, obtained in 1799 permission to unchain approximately 50 insane patients. He affirmed that mental illnesses were caused by pathologic modifications in the brain, and such assertion transformed the expectation and the knowledge of then about what in the future would be called psychiatry.
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
13 Apr 2007 -
Date of issue
Feb 2007
