Many discoveries made in the 19th century led to great advances in diagnosis and treatment of disease and in surgical methods.

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Many discoveries made in the 19th century led to great advances in diagnosis and treatment of disease and in surgical methods. Diagnostic procedures for chest disorders were advanced to an extent in the 18th century by the method of percussion first described by the Austrian doctor Leopold Auenbrugger von Auenbrugg in 1761. His work was ignored, however, until 1808, when it was publicized in a French translation by the personal doctor to Napoleon. In about 1819 the French doctor René Théophile Hyacinthe Laënnec invented the stethoscope, still the most useful single tool of the doctor. A number of brilliant British clinicians assimilated the new methods of diagnosing diseases, with the result that their names have become familiar through their identification with commonly recognized diseases. The doctor Thomas Addison discovered the disorder of the adrenal glands now known as Addison's disease; Richard Bright diagnosed nephritis, or Bright's disease; Thomas Hodgkin described a malignant disease of lymphatic tissue now known as Hodgkin's disease; the surgeon and palaeontologist James Parkinson described the chronic nervous disease called Parkinson's disease; and the Irish doctor Robert James Graves diagnosed exophthalmic, or toxic, goitre, sometimes called Graves's disease.

European Discoveries

Medicine is indebted to German universities for the scientific discoveries that did away with the lingering remnants of the traditional theory of humours. Of fundamental importance was the development by the German botanist Matthias Jakob Schleiden of the cell theory of organic development, which paved the way for the microscopic study of diseased tissues. The German anatomist and physiologist Theodor Schwann later applied Schleiden's cell theories to the evolution of animal life. The work of the French anatomist and physiologist Marie François Xavier Bichat in the systematic study of human tissue was a foundation stone of the science of histology. The Austrian pathologist and doctor Baron Karl von Rokitansky, who performed more than 30,000 post-mortem examinations, was the first to detect the bacterial origin of endocarditis. Other great founders of microscopic pathology include Schwann, the German physiologist and neurologist Robert Remak, the Czech physiologist Johannes Evangelista Purkinje, the Swiss anatomist and physiologist Rudolf Albert von Kolliker, and the German pathologist and anatomist Friedrich Gustav Jacob Henle. In Germany, the Estonian biologist Karl Ernst von Baer did his pioneering research in embryology to discover the human ovum, and the German physiologist Johannes Peter Müller introduced the concept of the specific energy of nerves. The culmination of this remarkable series of investigations is found in the work of the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow, whose doctrine that the cell is the seat of disease remains the cornerstone of modern medical science.

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Darwin, Pasteur, and Koch

The theory of evolution put forward by Charles Darwin revived interest in the science of comparative anatomy and physiology; the plant-breeding experiments of the Austrian biologist Gregor Johann Mendel had a similar effect in stimulating studies in human genetics and heredity.

The early studies of the French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur of fermentation resulted in the final destruction of the concept of spontaneous generation and brought about a revival of interest in the theory that disease might be the result of a specific contagium. Important in the development of the germ ...

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