A healthy man is a wealthy man. But when the very food we eat, the water we drink; the air we breathe is so full of stuff that shouldn’t be there, we are bound to suffer from some or the other malady. Depending upon the severity of the disease/disorder man ignores it, pops pills, goes to the doctor and then pops pills so on. During all this, have you wondered how all of these medicines came to be about? It is quite an interesting journey and very much influenced by human behavior like migration, wars, advances in science so on.
The early days – As the Homo sapiens dude began to experiment with fire and tools, started to live in groups etc. he also began to discover medicinal properties of herbs and fruits. As human culture evolved, medicine men, magicians, healers began to abound. Medicine was herbal and mineral. Later apothecaries were established and medicines or raw materials were sourced from distant places as man traveled. In fact, apothecaries gave birth to many pharmaceutical companies as we know them today. They also gave rise to pharmacies. As science evolved, chemistry, human physiology gained many students.
The industrial revolution and beyond – Industrial revolution made transport and manufacturing possible. It also gave rise to discovery and production of several drugs like morphine, epinephrine, and vaccines for diphtheria and rabies. This revolution however also brought along migration and modern human diseases and epidemics. The 1900s were marked by discoveries of penicillin, barbiturates and several antibiotics. The pharmaceutical industry was beginning to get established. Previous apothecaries’, merchants and governments began to sponsor doctors and scientists. The two world wars brought on severe demands on the pharmaceutical sector for medicines, surgical equipment, vaccines, artificial limbs etc. The pharmaceutical sector began to expand beyond essential drugs. This millennium saw massive leaps and bounds in drug discovery, mass production, and distribution, the establishment of regulatory authorities, patent laws etc. The end of the 1900s was marked by the advent of ‘lifestyle diseases’, addiction treatments, cosmetic procedures etc.
The new millennium – While the earlier millennium established pharmaceutical industry worldwide, the new one is all about preventive medication, cosmetic corrections, healthy diets, fighting new mutated varieties of epidemics and cancers and genetic medicines. Gene therapy, stem cell banking, microsurgeries, nanotechnology are the ‘in’ things. One should not be surprised to see robot-assisted surgeries, identification of diseases one is likely to suffer from by help of extremely hi-tech sequencing machines and then paying for precise genetic correction. The possibilities of genetic science are endless and thrilling.
While people do fear scientific breakthroughs resulting in biological warfare (https://www.pharmacyreviews365.com/), one cannot do without the pharmaceutical industry which has saved millions of lives and continues to do so.