While emergency medicine as a specialty is relatively new, trauma care is as old as medicine itself. Extraordinary people and discoveries have shaped emergency medicine throughout the millennia. In fact, many of the procedures we use today were developed generations ago.
Emergency Medicine Throughout the Years
Edwin Smith papyrus started it all
The Edwin Smith papyrus dates from the 17th Century BCE, making it the oldest-known emergency medicine manuscript and the first known description of the signs and symptoms of spinal injuries. Likely a manual of military surgery, it describes 48 cases of trauma, 6 of which involve the spinal cord and column. The six spinal injuries are:
• Cervical fracture as a result of a penetrating injury
• Cervical sprain with disc injury
• Cervical dislocation
• Cervical compression fracture
• Cervical burst fracture
• Lumbar sprain with disc injury
Hua Tuo debrides an arrow wound
In a 3rd Century BCE battle, Chinese General Guan Yu took an arrow to his arm; not surprisingly, a potentially fatal infection set in. To save the general’s life, physician Hua Tuo performs the first-known debridement of the bone.
Battlefield medics
Julius Caesar (circa 100-44 BC) brought doctors to the front, where they could treat soldiers at “dressing stations.” The wounded soldiers would then recover in hospital-like settings, known as “valetudinaria.”Flying ambulances
In about 1796, French chief military surgeon Baron Dominique Jean Larrey created “flying ambulances” to transport wounded soldiers during Napoleon’s invasion of Italy. Staffed with battlefield caregivers, these ambulance volantes were light one-horse wagons that could move the wounded off the battlefield and to a hospital quickly. Larrey also created the triage process to improve the overall survival rate.
Sutures pull it all together
Healers have been stitching up wounds for thousands of years. In fact, fossilized remains of Neolithic skulls suggest the use of eyed needles to tie wounds together as far back as 30,000 BCE. Greek surgeon Galen of Pergamon used catgut or silk to suture the severed tendons of gladiators in 1600 BCE. Silk and catgut were commonly used well into the 20th century. Sterile sutures became widely available in 1887, eyeless needled sutures were introduced in the 1920s, and topical skin adhesives hit the market in 1998.
Emergency rooms open their doors
The world’s first dedicated emergency room opened in 1911 at the University of Louisville Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky. At first, four University of Louisville medical students manned the emergency service. In 1970, Bruce Janiak, MD, became the first resident to train in emergency medicine at the University of Cincinnati.
Emergency room physician scheduling software
Scheduling shift workers has always been complicated. In fact, a large portion of the ancient book “The Art of War” focuses on scheduling military workers. In the early days, scheduling was done with physical media, such as pen and paper. Introduced in 1725, punch cards were the earliest type of automated scheduling. In the mid-20th century, IBM developed punch card technology, which remained a popular scheduling solution until the 1980s, when computers made them obsolete.
ByteBloc revolutionized emergency medicine scheduling software in 1989. Packed with features, such as multi-location schedules, highly customizable summary statistics, customizable print layouts, and flexible schedules with a variety of day types, ByteBloc’s innovative software is still a leader in emergency room physician scheduling software. For more information on shift scheduling, connect with ByteBloc.
|