CRISTIAN DAVID GONZALEZ MALAVER

MEDICINE

From its origins, the human being has tried to explain the reality and the

transcendental events that take place in it, like life, death or illness.

Two historical facts marked the way to practice medicine, and even to become ill,

from the Renaissance.

On one hand, the great plagues that plagued and carried out the end of the Middle

Ages. During the fourteenth century, the Black Death appeared in Europe, the cause

of the death alone of about 20-25 million Europeans.59 On the other hand, the

fifteenth (il Quattrocento) and sixteenth (Cinquecento) centuries had in Italy the

origin of philosophies of science and society based on the Roman tradition of

humanism. The flourishing of Universities in Italy under the new mercantile classes

was the intellectual engine from which the scientific progress that characterized this

period was derived. This "new age" came with a special emphasis on the natural

sciences and medicine, under the general principle of "critical revisionism". The

universe was beginning to look at itself from a mechanistic point of view.

The Renaissance is also the time of takeoff of psychology, with Juan Luis Vives, of

biochemistry with Jan Baptist van Helmont, or pathological anatomy: Antonio

Benivieni compiled in his work the abditis morborum causis (Of the hidden causes

of diseases , 1507) the results of autopsies of many of his patients, comparing them

with the symptoms prior to death, in the manner of modern scientific empiricism. The
great figure of the pathological anatomy, however, belongs to the following century:

Giovanni Battista Morgagni.

Isaac Newton, Leibniz, and Galileo will give way in this century to the scientific

method. While diseases such as diabetes are still classified as a function of the more

or less sweet taste of urine, or while smallpox becomes the new pest in Europe,

technical and scientific advances are about to usher in a more effective and resolute

time. Edward Jenner, a British physician, observes that herdsmen who have suffered

a mild disease from their cows, in the form of small, liquid-filled blisters, do not

contract dreaded smallpox, and decide to carry out an experiment to test their

hypothesis: With a lancet inoculates part of the fluid from a blister of a young girl

infected with smallpox (variolae vaccine) to a child named James Phipps, a volunteer

for the experiment. After a few days, it presents the usual symptoms: feverishness

and some blisters. At six weeks the child is inoculated with a sample from a human

pox patient and waits. James Phipps will not contract the disease and since then,

this type of immunization has been known as the "vaccine".

The medicine of the twentieth century, driven by scientific and technical

development, was consolidated as a more resolute discipline, while still being the

synergistic fruit of the medical practices experienced up to that point: scientific

medicine, based on evidence, supported a fundamentally biological paradigm, but

admits and proposes a health-disease model determined by biological,

psychological and sociocultural factors.

When talking about advances, everything in one way or another has to do with

technology, in the field of medicine that is no exception, the development of robotics

in the science of medicine, has allowed great changes that have enabled the well-

being of thousands and thousands of people.

HIV / AIDS was the first disease that made health a real global issue of our time.

Poor understanding of the epidemiology of a common disease in both rich and poor

countries; the perception that WHO was not able to lead the response to a growing

threat; and the success of political activism of HIV positive people in government

organizations such as ACT UP created an environment that in the 1990s called for

new interventions from the international community. The response was massive. In

1996, UNAIDS was created; in 2000, the Security Council held a session devoted to

the disease; the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of 2001 called for halting

the spread of HIV and other communicable diseases; and in 2001, the General

Assembly held its first special session devoted to a single disease. In 2002, the

Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria was established. In rich

countries, thanks to the development of new drugs, HIV has become a chronic

disease that can be controlled, but for a large part of the seropositive population in

Africa and other poor regions, it cannot access the necessary medicines, remains a

deadly disease.

The story by critically analyzing how difficult it is to build and consolidate a scientific

knowledge of relative validity and by giving full awareness of fallibility of science will

help to form a critical scientific spirit, devoid of intolerance and dogmatism.

The practice of medicine is a lifelong learning process, nice experience. Actually,

there is no way to separate medicine of today, of the experiences of all the doctors
who have preceded us. Track down the evolution of what one does every day and

appreciate that work from a Historical perspective is a gift to the spirit.