Hospitals Today and 100 Years Ago
Medicine has a history spanning many thousands of years and specialized establishments for treating the sick have also existed for a long period of time. Despite the fact that hospitals’ functions have not changed much during the last century, technological and scientific progress has made possible treatment approaches that could not have been implemented a hundred years ago and made a large contribution to health care. The main differences between hospitals today and a century ago are improved surgical techniques, safer use of anesthesia, and safer childbirth procedures.
Today, many people take anesthesia for granted and cannot imagine surgery without local or complete analgesia. Anesthetics are widely-used, and oftentimes, even minor surgery is done with the mandatory application of these drugs. They have become significantly less dangerous, and the control over their usage is applied effectively. This can be attributed to the invention of the re-breathing circuit by Ralph Waters, which facilitated the application of artificial ventilation during surgery (Stephen 24).
The second significant achievement of modern hospitals is quality supervision over pregnancy. Today, a woman giving birth can reasonably presume that both she and her child will undergo a healthy process from pregnancy to birth. This has become possible due to the new and progressive ways of monitoring the status of a mother and her fetus. For instance, most modern hospitals, with the help of electronic means, can survey a baby’s heartbeats using an internal device positioned directly on the fetus’s head which measures the electrical current produced by the heart (Stephen 26). The cesarean section rate today is approximately 30% in the United States and some birth procedures that were used in the past century have been revealed as ineffective and have ceased (Berkowitz 210). The adoption of new childbirth technology not only mitigates any risk that might have...