Know about drugs that changed history and present

Could you imagine undergoing a surgery without being given anaesthesia? Can you imagine what would the world be without some medicines? Well, we cannot too. But we have also learnt in our evolution that today’s wonder drug could be tomorrow’s problem drug.

Here are five drugs we can safely say made a huge difference to our lives, often in ways we didn’t expect.

1. Anaesthesia

It was late 1700s, English chemist Joseph Priestley made a gas which English chemist Humphry Davy thought could be used as pain relief in surgery, but instead, it became a recreational drug until the 1830s. That’s when French chemist Jean Dumas made the gas named chloroform which Scottish doctor James Young used it in 1847 to assist birth. The medicine relieved surgical patients who would often die of shock from the pain. But anaesthesias are still dangerous because of the risks of suppressing the nervous system.

2. Nitroglycerin

1800s was the century of inventions but none was probably more important that the world-changing drug Nitroglycerin. Invented in 1847, Nitroglycerin displaced gunpowder as the most powerful explosive in the world and was also the first one to treat angina, the peculiar chest pain that is linked with heart disease. Known to have increased the average life span, particularly in the West, it also paved the way for medications used to lower blood pressure, and other heart ailments.

3. Penicillin

There are several instances where you must've come across some accidental miracles and this is a classic example of that. In 1928, Scottish physician Alexander Fleming went on a holiday and left some cultures of the bacterium streptococcus on his laboratory bench. Well, when he came back from his vacation what he witnessed was going to change history and of course, he wasn't aware of that. He saw some airborne Penicillium which is a contaminated fungal that had stopped the streptococcus from growing. Later, it was mass produced and it changed the course of history as it was used in World War II. This drug surely saved the lives of several people who were suffering from septicemia.

4. Diazepam

Anti-depressant and stress relieving medication are today's things but it started as Diazepam. In 1959, Polish-American chemist Leo Sternbach chemically altered Librium in 1959 and produced a much stronger drug called diazepam. This drug was marketed in 1963 as Valium. It was cheap and easily available and from 1969 till 1982 it was the most selling drug in the US. From this drug, the culture of managing stress and anxiety with the help of medication came into existence. However, this drug had some side effects.

5. The Pill

The Pill was a game changer when it comes to contraceptive methods. In 1951, the US birth control advocate Margaret Sanger asked researcher Gregory Pincus to develop a hormonal contraceptive. During the research, Pincus found that progesterone was helpful to stop ovulation and was used to develop a trial pill.

In 1960, the new drug was released and it took almost ten years to prove a link between oral contraceptive use and its serious side effects.

Due to the drug, now there are small families and increased incomes as women also started joining the workforce. However, it’s still raising questions about how the medical profession has experimented on women’s bodies.

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