Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Jim Kohn asks, “Why do you think it took until the late 19th and 20th centuries for medical care to advance when many other areas of science advanced even in the ancient world?”

For starters, there really wasn’t much in the way of scientific insights in the ancient world. Even if they got something right about how something worked, they almost always get it wrong when explaining why it worked.

The 17th and 18th centuries really began advances in systematically understanding physics. Likewise, if you remember back to my episode on John Snow, there was some progress in medical matters in the early 19th century. What often results in big advances is a theory that explains how everything works within a field. Natural selection did that in biology. Plate tectonics did that in geology. The structure of the atom and Newton’s Laws did that in physics.

A similar revolution in genetics took place with the discovery of the structure of DNA. Germ theory was the key that unlocked the big improvements in medicine. Sanitation, antibiotics, and vaccines all came from that understanding.