1908: A Critical Year
Our country was an eminently different place one hundred years ago. Part of the reason it was so incredibly disparate from its present state is that the entire country was shrouded in a massive wave of rapid change at that time. Everything about America was evolving expeditiously in 1908, and as the nation sped out of the turn of the century, every faction of its culture was developing and expanding. Taking a look at each individual area of growth in early 20th century America, a clear link to the present day begins to show itself. Everything that happened one hundred years ago in the United States was a step forward that eventually led to the current state of our country.
Science and medicine were advancing at a particularly quick rate in the year 1908. On January 1st, the American Association for the Advancement of Science published a paper written by Simon Flexner, the head of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, which first predicted that one day it will be possible for surgeons to replace diseased organs with healthy ones through transplants. It seems like a no-brainer to people living in today’s world, where organ transplants are extremely common and we hear about them all the time, but this article is the first documented suggestion of such a thing ever becoming possible. It wasn’t tangible progress in the medical field just yet, but it was a sign of knowledge and advancement all the same. On April 5th, a notable physical achievement in science occurred when Drs. Edward Duffy and Philip McCormick of St. Joseph’s Hospital in Yonkers, NY stitched up a stab wound in the heart of 23-year-old Robert Inglis by removing two of his ribs and placing three stitches in the organ and two stitches in the layer of fat surrounding it. Prior to this year, the standing records stated that an operation like this only succeeded once every 14 years. (Daniel et. al.)
Perhaps one of the most useful scientific achievements of that year...
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