Orthopedic Surgeon Chronicles History Of Medicine In Overview Of Book At Grace
Orthopedic Surgeon Chronicles History Of Medicine In Overview Of Book At Grace
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Amanda Bridgman-abridgman@timesuniononline.com
Orthopedic Surgeon Chronicles History Of Medicine In Overview Of Book At GraceWINONA LAKE – Orthopedic surgeon Dr. David Schneider spoke about his new book Thursday at the Manahan Orthopaedic Capital Center at Grace College.
Schneider’s book, “The Invention of Surgery,” is out this week and explains how surgery became modern, in particular celebrating the “implant revolution.”
Schneider is a graduate of the University of Kansas School of Medicine and completed orthopedic training at Penn State. He went on to complete a sports medicine fellowship at the Kerlan-Jobe Orthopedic Clinic in Los Angeles, and he continues to work as a medical consultant to the Los Angeles Dodgers and practices at Panorama Orthopedics & Spine Center in Colorado.
Brad Bishop, OrthoWorx executive director, introduced Schneider Thursday, noting that the implant revolution affected this community when joint replacement became practical. Bishop said Schneider was in Warsaw for meetings at Zimmer Biomet, for which Schneider is a consultant for implant designs.
“I can’t imagine actually a better town to be in, you know for people that haven’t been to Warsaw or considered the history, it’s just mindblowing what goes on here, it truly is, it’s great to be here,” Schneider said, then acknowledging the Warsaw Community High School engineering students in attendance.
“I have been lucky to also be on the design side and work with engineers, which has helped me contemplate even more to how we got to now,” he said.
Schneider’s new book is described as an in-depth biography of the practice that has leapt forward over the centuries from the dangerous guesswork of ancient Greek physicians through the world-changing implant revolution of the 20th century. Schneider spoke about that Thursday, explaining the progress and personalities of the practice’s most dynamic historical figures – from pioneering scientists who first understood what causes disease to the transformation of the hospital from a place of dying to a place to heal.
“Nature is revealed through science. That’s what we know now. We know how science works, we know how nature works, because the scientists have helped us explore how our human bodies work,” he said.
“People have been trying to figure out how the world works from the beginning of time,” he said. “And we’re still doing that to this day.”
Schneider told a story about how the Greeks adopted a system of medicine called the humoral theory where the human body contains blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. These are the things that make up its constitution and cause its pains and health. Health is primarily that state in which these constituent substances are in the correct proportion to each other, both in strength and quantity, and are well mixed. Pain occurs when one of the substances presents either a deficiency or an excess, or is separated in the body and not mixed with others.
“If you had too much of a thing, that’s why you got screwed up. They didn’t understand germs, they didn’t understand disease,” he said. “So if you got sick, they had really primitive ways trying to explain why you got sick.”
He said that if someone was too red in the face, they would say you had too much blood. “And if you have too much blood, what do you do? You drain it. So this is why people were bled.”
Now we know that’s the body’s way to try to cool the body off, Schneider said. “When you’re ill, and septic, the last thing in the world you would want would be to have your blood drained. That’s where barbers, that’s one of the reasons barbers had knives. They were barber surgeons. They were there to bleed you. The barber pole, that’s the ‘we are bleeding here sign,’” he said.
He highlighted the four waves of the industrial revolution. In 1784, there were mechanism, steam power and the weaving loom. In the 1870s, there was mass production, assembly lines and electrical energy. In the 1960s, it was automation, computers and electronics; and now, it’s cyber physical systems, the internet of things and networks, where everything is wireless and everything is connected.
Schneider talked about the invention of clear glass, and how that just made possible the telescope, the microscope and eyeglasses. He also talked about when disease first began to be understood, when Isaac Newton invented calculus and about Giovanni Morgagni, who was regarded as the father of modern anatomical pathology in the 1700s.
Schneider said that in that time in Europe, surgeons were considered the lowest of the low of professions. Morgagni published his work in 1761 about the 640 dissections he had done, which were just reports of what he saw – there was no microscope at this time. But the conclusion was that diseases are not randomly dispersed throughout the body. Schneider said Morgagni figured out what heart attacks were, what appendicitis was, and who said that symptoms are nothing more than the groaning of suffering organs.
Next, Schneider highlighted John Hunter, who he said was a grave robber who would go to town hangings or out to where people were buried with his medical schools buddies and take the bodies then dissect them. Hunter and his friends dissected a body of a dead woman who was about to give birth, and he figured out the placenta.
“There’s nothing John Hunter wouldn’t do,” Schneider said.
Schneider also highlighted Robert Koch, who is credited with proving germs are real; Rudolf Virchow, who figured out cancer; and Joseph Lister, a pioneer of antiseptic surgery.
American hospitals came about in 1889 with St. Marys, the John Hopkins Hospital and the Hospital for the Ruptured and the Crippled.
“Now you can go to a doctor,” Schneider said.
He said the Hospital for the Ruptured and the Crippled is now the Hospital for Special Surgery and is the number one total joint volume hospital on earth. “And there’s all kinds of stuff going from Warsaw to these three hospitals. ... with thousands of bits of metal coming from Warsaw, Indiana,” he said.
Schneider referenced the contributions from Revra DePuy and Justin Zimmer.
“Most of the world’s greatest thinkers tend to come from little towns,” Schneider said.
He said he wrote his book because he wanted to write about how all of this came together.
Speaking about the future of medicine and the human body, Schneider said he believes there will come a time when people become “cyborgs,” or in other words, half man, half machine, adding that that’s already starting to happen now with Parkinson’s patients who use deep brain stimulation using Bluetooth technology.
“Only disease allows you to see function. Humanity has only figured out how our body works until it doesn’t work,” he said. “We went from solving a problem, then we want to make it better.”?
He also added that robots are also trending for the future when it comes to the practice of medicine.
“It worries me,” he said. “I always joke that one day it will be, ‘The robot will see you now.’”
