Triumph of Reason: Medicine
  by Groff Schroeder

Little Jimmy is hit by a car. After a flight in a helicopter staffed by nurses and paramedics, receiving specialized care in the regional trauma center from an emergency physician, an extended visit with an experienced neurosurgeon and months of high tech critical care, hospitalization and rehabilitation, Jimmy experiences full recovery. In widely publicized special interest stories, his thankful family attributes his recovery to a "miracle from god."

Few things today owe more to reason and science than high tech medical care. The telephone system that took the report of Jimmy's accident exists because of experiments with electricity by Leyden, Franklin, Coulomb, Galvani, Volta, Oersted, Ampere and Ohm, the elucidation of magnetism by Maxwell, and Alexander Graham Bell's desire to help the deaf. The radios dispatching the rescue truck, police, ambulance and helicopter exist because of scientific principles discovered and explored by Maxwell, Hertz, Calzecchi-Onesti, and Marconi.

The rescue vehicles operate because engineers applied the science of the steam engine to create the internal combustion engine and adapted it to ground vehicles. Frank Whittle's jet turbine engines power the helicopter, which would not exist without the Wright Brothers' pioneering wind tunnel science or aeronautical engineers like Igor Sikorsky.

The highly skilled medical personal that stabilized Jimmy at the scene of his accident are a part of a coordinated emergency medical care system based on military systems of trauma care that evolved between WWI and Viet Nam when scientists realized that experienced physicians and medical teams saved more lives. Surgery too has improved as physicians applied the scientific method to the practice over more than 100 years, evolving away from rapid and unceremonious amputation of wounded limbs to the point where amputated limbs may be successfully reattached with little or no loss of function.

Improvements in closed head injury care in just the last thirty years or so mean that electronic intracranial monitors and barbiturate coma can prevent the deadly "herniation" of injured brains. Jimmy's ability to avoid and conquer infections after surgery and during recovery stems from the science of Pasteur, Fleming, Watson and Crick. Without the dedication, personal sacrifice, hard word, and sometimes even blood of the scientifically trained medical professionals who cared for him, none of Jimmy's care would have been possible at all.

Jimmy and countless others like him who receive modern medical care do not survive because of miracles, the power of prayer or special dispensation from god. These patients survive because of humans' continuing application of the scientific method to the treatment of illness and injury. Generations of scientists performed research, published data, performed rational mathematical data analysis, and performed countless controlled experiments. Over hundreds of years, thousands of physicians, nurses, allied professionals and patients sacrificed their time, trouble and in many cases even their lives so that humans could develop the medical science that now saves the lives of patients like Jimmy.

While faith offers emotional refuge in times of loss and trouble, science delivers verifiable, repeatable, predictive results. Old-fashioned hard work and the science-based disciplines of electronics, telecommunications, mechanical engineering, aeronautical engineering, medical education, coordinated medical systems, surgery, and pharmacy are what create "miracles" in medicine. Perhaps someday we will hear about them in a highly publicized special interest story about an amazing medical recovery.

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