Lesson Objectives:

1. Lesson Objectives: • To examine the impact of technology on surgery. • Focusing on: Christian Barnard, transplant surgery, keyhole surgery and radiation therapy. By Mr Day Downloaded from SchoolHistory.co.uk

2. Key Individuals: Christian Barnard. The first man to transplant a human heart.

3. Key Individuals: Christian Barnard • Who was he?Christian Barnard was born in South Africa and worked as a surgeon at the Groote Schuur hospital in Cape Town. After, further training in America, he became a leading heart surgeon. • What brought him to prominence? • In 1967 he transplanted the heart of a road accident victim into a 59 year old man, Louis Washkansky. This was the first operation of its kind. • Unfortunately, Washkansky died 18 days later from pneumonia. the drugs used to prevent the body rejecting the new heart adversely weakened his resistance to infection.

4. Was Barnard successful? • One of Barnard's patients lived for over a year and a half after surgery, but patients needed drugs to prevent the body rejecting the donor heart. these left them open to infection and many died. After a while, all heart operations stopped because the risk of failure was considered too high. • In 1974 a new drug was discovered called cyclosporin. This drug helped to overcome the body's rejection of the donor organs and protected the patient against infection. • Subsequent heart transplants were more successful and since the late 1980s, the majority of patients have survived for more than two years after surgery.

5. High Technology Medicine • Keyhole surgery enables operations to be performed with the help of a miniaturised camera, while developments in micro surgery allow the finest of blood vessels to be reconnected. • Using miniaturised tools, including a tiny flexible camera, the surgeon can operate remotely, using a television monitor to see what is happening. • Many operations can now be performed without making an incision in the body at all - the surgeon can reach the upper parts of the body through the mouth and the lower part through the rectum. Ouch!

6. An Example of High Tech. Medicine: Magnetic resonance scanning

7. To Sum Up: High Technology Medicine • Advances in modern technology, and in particular, miniaturisation, have revolutionised surgery • Keyhole surgery uses an endoscope with a small camera attached to probe organs and perform surgery, sometimes using lasers • Micro surgery magnifies the area to be operated on, enabling surgeons to rejoin tiny nerves and blood vessels.

8. Impact of Technology • One of the impacts of Technology on Medicine is that stays in hospital are getting shorter. • New techniques, such as keyhole surgery mean that people are opened up less in operations, so they heal more quickly. • Because of new drugs, people recover more quickly from operations and by now, many operations, which were once new, and perhaps dangerous, have become much safer.

9. Radiation Therapy • What is radiation therapy? • Shortly after the discovery of the x-ray by German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen in 1895, the "powerful rays" were being used to effectively treat cancer. • Today, an increasing number of patients have their cancers treated successfully, with few side effects and preservation of normal tissue, using radiation therapy.

10. What is Radiation Therapy? • About 50 to 60 percent of cancer patients are treated with radiation at some time during their disease. • Radiation therapy is the careful use of high-energy radiation to treat cancer. • Radiation therapy works because the radiation destroys the cancer cells' ability to reproduce and the body naturally gets rid of these cells.

11. Radiation Therapy • Sometimes radiation therapy is only part of a patient's treatment. For example, a woman may have radiation therapy after breast conserving surgery. • She can be cured of her cancer and still keep her breast. When radiation therapy is only part of a patient's treatment it is called adjuvant treatment.