The history
From Hippocrates’ bedside and Sushruta’s surgery to germs, antibiotics, fair trials, and a polio-free India.
For most of history, doctors had theories but few ways to tell which treatments truly worked. Over five centuries, people mapped the body, measured how it works, found the germs behind many diseases and learned to make medicines that hit specific targets. The decisive step was the fair test: comparing treatments in randomised trials and pooling the results. India played its part, from Sushruta and Haffkine’s vaccines to the Madras TB trial, ORS and the end of polio.
1747
First planned comparison of treatments
James Lind, HMS Salisbury
1796
First vaccine
Edward Jenner, England
16 October 1846
First public operation under anaesthesia
Morton and Warren, Boston
1886
First Indian women doctors
Anandibai Joshi and Kadambini Ganguly
1948
First modern randomised controlled trial
Medical Research Council, London
1980
Only human disease eradicated
Smallpox (India’s last case 1975)
500 BCE – 1500
Hippocratic doctors in Greece and Sushruta’s surgeons in India describe disease carefully and treat it with skill, but without tests of what works.
400 BCE
c. 400 BCE (author and date uncertain)
Greek doctors linked to Hippocrates argued that illness has natural causes, not divine ones, and taught careful watching and note-taking at the bedside. The Hippocratic Oath, a promise to help and not to harm, is credited to this school, though its real author is unknown.
Why it mattered. Observing the patient and "first, do no harm" are still at the heart of how doctors are trained.
200 BCE
early centuries BCE (dates debated)
The Sushruta Samhita, a Sanskrit text on medicine and surgery, describes more than a hundred instruments, the removal of cataracts and the rebuilding of a nose with a flap of skin from the cheek. Scholars date the text over several centuries around the turn of the era.
Why it mattered. Its nose reconstruction was copied by British surgeons in 1794 and helped start modern plastic surgery.
1540 – 1860
Anatomy, the circulation, the first comparison of treatments, the first vaccine, anaesthesia, hand-washing and the cholera map.
1543
Vesalius, a young Flemish anatomy teacher in Padua, dissected human bodies himself instead of reading old books aloud. His De humani corporis fabrica, printed in Basel, showed the body in detailed drawings and corrected hundreds of errors copied for over a thousand years.
Why it mattered. Anatomy, the first foundation of modern medicine, became something you check with your own eyes.
1628
Harvey measured how much blood the heart pushes out with each beat and showed it was far more than the body could make from food. Blood must go round and round: the heart pumps it out through arteries and it comes back through veins.
Why it mattered. It made physiology, how the body works, a science of measurement and experiment.
1747
20 May 1747
Lind, a naval surgeon, took 12 sailors with scurvy, as alike as he could find, and gave pairs of them six different remedies. The two given oranges and lemons were almost well within a week; the others barely improved.
Why it mattered. It is one of the first planned comparisons of treatments, the seed of the fair test.
1796
14 May 1796
Jenner scratched cowpox from a milkmaid’s hand into the arm of eight-year-old James Phipps, then later exposed him to smallpox. The boy did not fall ill. Jenner called the method vaccination, from vacca, Latin for cow.
Why it mattered. Vaccines would go on to wipe out smallpox and drive polio out of India.
1846
16 October 1846
In a packed operating theatre, the dentist William Morton had a patient breathe ether vapour until he was unconscious, and the surgeon John Collins Warren removed a tumour from his neck. The patient felt no pain. News of anaesthesia spread around the world within months.
Why it mattered. Before anaesthesia, surgery had to be done in minutes on a screaming patient; after it, careful operations became possible.
1847
May 1847
Mothers were dying of childbed fever far more often in the ward run by doctors, who came straight from dissecting bodies, than in the midwives’ ward. Semmelweis made the doctors wash their hands in chlorinated lime, and deaths fell from about 18% in April to about 1–2% within a few months.
Why it mattered. Hand-washing is still one of the cheapest life-savers in medicine, though Semmelweis was mocked for it in his lifetime.
1854
September 1854
During a cholera outbreak, the doctor John Snow marked each death on a street map and found them clustered around one water pump on Broad Street. He persuaded the local council to take off the pump handle, and showed that cholera spreads through dirty water, not bad air.
Why it mattered. It founded epidemiology: finding the cause of disease by counting who gets ill and where.
1860 – 1945
Pasteur and Koch find germs; X-rays, vaccines in India, aspirin, insulin and penicillin follow.
1861
1859–1862
Pasteur boiled broth in flasks with long swan-shaped necks. Air could get in but dust and microbes were trapped in the bend, and the broth stayed clear. When he broke the neck, it went cloudy with microbes. Germs come from other germs.
Why it mattered. It led to the germ theory of disease, pasteurisation and, later, Pasteur’s own vaccines.
1882
24 March 1882
After proving in 1876 that a bacterium causes anthrax, Koch announced that a rod-shaped bacterium causes tuberculosis, then the world’s biggest killer. His rules for proving that a germ causes a disease are still called Koch’s postulates.
Why it mattered. Each disease could now be traced to a specific cause, the first step to a specific cure.
1886
Anandibai Joshi earned a medical degree from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in March 1886, and Kadambini Ganguly graduated from Calcutta Medical College the same year and went on to practise for decades. Both faced fierce opposition for wanting to become doctors.
Why it mattered. They opened modern medicine to Indian women, at a time when many families would not let a male doctor examine a woman.
1895
8 November 1895
Röntgen noticed a screen glowing across his dark lab while he worked with a cathode-ray tube. The invisible rays passed through paper, wood and flesh but not bone. Within weeks, doctors were using X-rays to find bullets and broken bones.
Why it mattered. It began medical imaging, which now includes CT and MRI scans.
1897
10 January 1897
During the plague epidemic in Bombay, Haffkine made a vaccine from killed plague bacteria and tested it first on himself. Earlier, in 1893–94, he had vaccinated thousands of people against cholera in Calcutta and villages of Bengal and Assam. His Bombay laboratory is today’s Haffkine Institute.
Why it mattered. India became one of the first places where vaccines were tried at large scale and their results counted.
1897
20 August 1897
Working in an army hospital in Secunderabad, Ross found malaria parasites in the stomach of an Anopheles mosquito that had fed on a patient. He later worked out the whole cycle in birds. He won the Nobel Prize in 1902.
Why it mattered. Knowing the mosquito spreads malaria made nets, drainage and insect control part of medicine.
1897
10 August 1897 (credit disputed)
For centuries people chewed willow bark for pain and fever. Its active part, salicin, becomes salicylic acid, which upsets the stomach. At Bayer, Felix Hoffmann made a gentler form, acetylsalicylic acid, sold from 1899 as aspirin.
Why it mattered. It showed how a plant remedy can be purified, tested and improved into a medicine.
1922
11 January 1922
Fourteen-year-old Leonard Thompson was dying of type 1 diabetes when he was given an extract of insulin from animal pancreases. After Collip purified it, his blood sugar fell and he recovered. Banting and Macleod won the Nobel Prize in 1923.
Why it mattered. A disease that killed every child who got it became one people live with for a lifetime.
1928
September 1928
Back from holiday, Fleming saw that a mould growing on one of his dishes had killed the bacteria around it. He named the substance penicillin. It became a medicine only in 1940–41, when Howard Florey, Ernst Chain and Norman Heatley in Oxford purified it and tested it.
Why it mattered. Antibiotics turned deadly infections into curable ones.
1946 – 2000
Randomised trials in London and Madras, AIIMS, ORS, artemisinin, the end of smallpox and the Cochrane Collaboration.
1946
The Bhore Committee proposed that every Indian should get health care regardless of ability to pay, through a network of primary health centres linked to bigger hospitals, and that a national medical institute should train doctors and do research.
Why it mattered. It shaped India’s ladder of sub-centres, PHCs and district hospitals, and led to AIIMS.
1948
30 October 1948
Streptomycin was new and scarce, so the MRC tested it fairly. 107 patients with tuberculosis were allocated by random numbers in sealed envelopes to streptomycin plus bed rest or bed rest alone. After six months, 7% of the streptomycin group had died, against 27% of the others.
Why it mattered. Its design, random allocation that nobody could predict, became the gold standard for testing treatments.
1956
An Act of Parliament created the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, as the Bhore Committee had proposed, with India’s first health minister, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, leading the effort. It was to set the standard for medical teaching, patient care and research.
Why it mattered. It became the model for the new AIIMS institutes since set up across India.
1959
1956–1959
Patients with tuberculosis were randomly given medicines either in a sanatorium, with rest and good food, or at home in the city’s poor neighbourhoods. A year later both groups had done about equally well, and families at home were not infected more often.
Why it mattered. This Indian randomised trial changed TB care worldwide: medicines, not sanatoriums, cure tuberculosis. The centre is today’s ICMR National Institute for Research in Tuberculosis.
1971
During the Bangladesh war, cholera broke out among refugees at Bangaon and intravenous fluid ran out. Dr Dilip Mahalanabis’s team gave oral rehydration solution, water with glucose and salt, by the bucket. Deaths fell to about 3.6%, where about 30% had been expected.
Why it mattered. ORS has since saved tens of millions of children; The Lancet called it potentially the most important medical advance of the century.
1972
Searching old Chinese remedies for fever, Tu Youyou read a 4th-century text telling people to soak sweet wormwood in cold water. Extracting it at low temperature, her team isolated artemisinin in 1972 and tested it in patients. She won the Nobel Prize in 2015.
Why it mattered. Artemisinin drugs are now the front-line treatment for malaria, showing traditional knowledge can yield medicines once tested.
1980
8 May 1980
After a global campaign of vaccination and tracing every case, the World Health Assembly declared smallpox eradicated. India’s last case had been in May 1975, after tens of thousands of Indian health workers searched house to house.
Why it mattered. It is the only human disease ever wiped out.
1993
Inspired by the epidemiologist Archie Cochrane, a group of researchers set out to find every fair trial on each health question, combine them and keep the answers up to date. Its South Asia centre is at CMC Vellore.
Why it mattered. Systematic reviews made it harder for one lucky trial, or an unpublished dull one, to mislead doctors.
By the numbers
Census 1951 and Sample Registration System life tables (Registrar General of India). The small dip in 2017–21 reflects COVID-19.
2001 – today
A polio-free India, PM-JAY insurance, a new medical regulator and COVID-19 vaccines made in India.
2014
27 March 2014
Pulse Polio days sent oral polio drops to every child, even on trains and at bus stands. India’s last case of wild polio was a girl in Howrah in January 2011. After three years with no cases, WHO certified the South-East Asia region polio-free.
Why it mattered. Few thought it possible in a country so large and crowded; it showed what vaccines and persistence can do.
2018
23 September 2018
The Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana began covering hospital care of up to ₹5 lakh per family per year for poorer families. In 2024 it was extended to everyone aged 70 or over. Alongside it, sub-centres and PHCs are being upgraded to Ayushman Arogya Mandirs.
Why it mattered. It is one of the world’s largest government health-insurance schemes, aimed at the heavy out-of-pocket costs Indian families pay.
2020
25 September 2020
The National Medical Commission replaced the Medical Council of India as the regulator of medical education and doctors. It oversees the MBBS course, the NEET entrance exam system for medical colleges and the rules doctors practise by.
Why it mattered. India now has over 800 medical colleges and more than 1.2 lakh MBBS seats a year.
2021
16 January 2021
India began vaccinating against COVID-19 with Covishield, the Oxford–AstraZeneca vaccine made by the Serum Institute in Pune, and Covaxin, an inactivated vaccine developed by Bharat Biotech with ICMR’s National Institute of Virology. Both had been tested in large trials, and more than 200 crore doses were given within about 18 months.
Why it mattered. Vaccines were designed, tested in fair trials and given to billions within about two years of a new virus appearing.
By the numbers
National Health Accounts estimates (NHSRC, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare): falling as public spending and insurance grow.
Did you know?
The word "allopathy" was coined around 1810 by Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, as a label for the medicine he opposed.
James Lind’s 1747 scurvy test worked, but the British navy took until 1795 to give lemon juice to all its sailors.
In the 1948 streptomycin trial, doctors didn’t know which treatment the next patient would get: the allocation was hidden in sealed envelopes.
A 1959 randomised trial in Madras showed TB could be cured at home, changing tuberculosis care around the world.
Only about 8 in every 100 drugs that start human trials are finally approved.
The people
c. 460 – c. 370 BCE · Physician · Kos, Greece
Taught that illness has natural causes; the oath bears his name.
1514 – 1564 · Anatomist · Brussels (worked in Padua)
Drew the body as it really is.
1716 – 1794 · Naval surgeon · Edinburgh, Scotland
Compared six scurvy remedies side by side in 1747.
1818 – 1865 · Obstetrician · Buda, Hungary
Showed that doctors’ hand-washing saves mothers’ lives.
1843 – 1910 · Microbiologist · Germany
Found the germs of anthrax, tuberculosis and cholera.
1865 – 1887 · Doctor · Kalyan, India
One of the first Indian women to earn a medical degree.
1861 – 1923 · Doctor · Bhagalpur, India
Among the first women to graduate and practise modern medicine in India.
1860 – 1930 · Bacteriologist · Odessa (worked in India)
Made cholera and plague vaccines and tested them in India.
1897 – 1991 · Statistician · London, England
Designed the 1948 streptomycin trial.
1934 – 2022 · Paediatrician · Kolkata, India
Proved ORS works at scale in the 1971 refugee camps.
1930 – · Pharmaceutical chemist · Ningbo, China
Found artemisinin in a 1,600-year-old remedy.
1887 – 1964 · India’s first health minister · Lucknow, India
Led the founding of AIIMS.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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