Medicina del Xx Secolo – Wikipedia

At the turn of the 19th and XX centuries, three conceptions or medical paradigms developed:

• anatomoclinic paradigm (the origin of the disease is located in the “lesion”)
• Pastahopathological paradigm (the origin of the disease is in the “altered process”)
• etiological paradigm (the origin of the disease is in external causes),

All heirs of the scientific model, especially biological.
In this century less individual genes emerge as investigation is carried out by interdisciplinary teams or by people dedicated to increasingly specialized research.
The twentieth century is the century of medicine based on evidence: the standardized protocols, endorsed by scientific studies, must be replaced the opinions and personal experiences of each doctor and allow to obtain medical knowledge body valid in a more interconnected world. Among the doctors who stand out, Sigmund Freud, the great revolutionary of psychiatry, Robert Koch, discoverer of the Bacillo of the TB, Paul Ehrlich, father of immunology, Harvey Williams Cushing, father of neurosurgery, and Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin, should be reported. , with which the “was antibiotic” of medicine began.

In this dense network of research groups and superspeciations, a new way of understanding the disease, or rather the sick, also develops, in line with a society that discovers environmentalism (understood as a social movement that tries to integrate the again single in the environment).
The centuries from the seventeenth to the XIX, deeply rationalist, had endeavored to classify organs, tissues and diseases and to establish the laws that regulate the functioning of the physiological and pathological processes. However, the evidence of the complexity of human beings leads to the conclusion that there is no infirmity without a sick person. In this context, health and infirmity models, proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO) develop, which incorporate the psychological sphere, the sociological and biological, as decisive for the health of people.

In 1978 the declaration of Alma ATA on primary health care was celebrated, where that declaration of principles is manifested, as well as the crucial importance of social measures (adequate distribution of drinking water and food, vaccinations), and primary attention health for improving the health level of populations. The motto of this conference was: “Health for everyone by 2000”. ^[first]

Without a doubt, in parallel with this evidence, the development of pharmacology on an industrial and economic level has led medicine to be tax of the medicine as a health icon.
The aspirin, summarized by Felix Hoffmann in 1897 became one of the symbols of the culture of this century. These contradictory lines (a dehumanized and mercantistic medicine that has however allowed the eradication of diseases such as smallpox or polio and which has made it possible to increase life expectancy over 70 years in most developed countries ^[3] They are the synthesis of modern medicine.

Starting from Emil Kraepelin and Eugen Bleuler, and subsequently from Sigmund Freud one of the most recent specialties of medicine detaches himself: psychiatry.
The first was the pioneer in proposing that psychiatric diseases are mainly caused by biological or genetic disorder. Bleuler provides some fundamental contributions to clinical psychiatry (the terms of schizophrenia and autism is due to him), while Freud can be said that he is the founder of the psychoanalytic movement. In the psychoanalytic school, renewed by his disciples, it has followed in greater or lesser way, after the death of its founder, the central ideas, which spread to psychiatry, reaching so separate disciplines such as art, religion, or l ‘Anthropology, going to form part of the general culture. Subsequently, psychiatry will resume, through Karl Jaspers, the influences of phenomenology and existentialism and, through John Broadus Watson, behaviorism.

In the last decades of the century, a psychopharmacological school developed, based on the premise that the mechanism of action of psychotropic drugs revealed the secondary pathophysiological mechanism by thus approaching neurophysiopathology.

Other remarkable technical successes are the Sanguinea transfusion, completed for the first time successfully in this century thanks to the works on the blood groups developed by Karl Landsteiner, or the organ transplant, conquered, not by the first, but from the most media and of Success of his developers: Christiaan Neethling Barnard, the first surgeon to successfully create a heart transplant.

Molecular genetics is born, and physics applications are developed in different fields of medicine: the use of radioisotopes, electrophoresis, chromatography, spectrophotometry, the use of laser, electronic microscope, ultrasound techniques in ultrasound , CT or magnetic resonance imaging.
The use of IT systems has transformed the company of the late twentieth century. His tools have provided a great impulse to many sciences applied such as medicine. Probably the greatest success of the twentieth century was the sequence of the human genome, and yet they will still take tens of years to understand and use all the amount of information: there is no doubt that will still bring a new revolution in the way of treating many diseases, and also in the way of understanding and defining the human.