Medical Science successful surgeries and discoveries.

Courtesy :Facebook page: Mirror মিরর
Writer: Dr. Adnan Mahmud Tamim (ডা.আদনান মাহমুদ তামিম)

Just like making a machine requires countless experiments, today in medical science, there have been so many successful surgeries and discoveries. But did they happen easily? Behind these successes lies a history of the torture and suffering of countless people. To properly understand human body anatomy, countless experiments have been performed on cadavers (dead bodies). In fact, experiments have even been conducted on living humans!

In the image below, we can see Anarcha Westcott*—a 17-year-old African American girl, who was an enslaved girl.

In front of her is *Dr. James Marion Sims, known as the “father of gynecology,” who is famous for the Sims speculum. Anarcha suffered from a condition called vesicovaginal fistula (a connection between the bladder and the vaginal canal, which caused urine to pass through the vagina). To figure out how to treat this condition, Dr. Sims had to experiment with surgery. After approximately 30 experiments on Anarcha, Sims succeeded in the surgical treatment for vesicovaginal fistula. It is said that Sims was very racist and performed these trials without anaesthesia.
Anaesthesia was available at that time, but it wasn’t as accessible as it is today, and Sims was unwilling to use it on a Black slave. Can you imagine this today? Trials without anaesthesia, repeated so many times! During World War II, Nazi doctors conducted many experiments on Jews, some of which are noted in history:

1. They drilled nails into the brains of living Jews to discover the areas of the brain related to different functions, such as how each lobe of the brain works, and what happens when a particular lobe is damaged.

2. Prisoners were subjected to freezing temperatures to conduct hypothermia experiments.

3. Prisoners were infected with diseases like tuberculosis, malaria, plague, and cholera to study and develop vaccines for these diseases.



Also, 400 African American men with syphilis were denied treatment, even though penicillin was available, just so the long-term complications of syphilis could be understood. As for radiation exposure, many people were deliberately exposed to radiation for extended periods to study its complications. So many torturous experiments on people have led to the medical science we have today. Now, the medical field has advanced tremendously, especially in Bangladesh, where the healthcare system is much improved. Many significant surgeries take place in the country, though they may not always be seen or reach the public eye. Learning to perform each surgery requires surgeons to dedicate many years of their lives.

In Bangladesh, if you seek the right advice from a good doctor with awareness, you can receive excellent medical care.

Thanks Dr. Adnan Mahmud Tamim (ডা.আদনান মাহমুদ তামিম) For your article about Medical Science, successful surgeries and discoveries. We are also thanking our readers and specially Facebook page Mirrorমিরর to permission primelore for again publish in our website for our National and International readers.