Analgesia was not an option while giving birth until the mid 19th century as pain was believed to be a crucial part of the birthing experience. In 1591, Euphemia Maclean, a woman from Edinburgh, Scotland requested analgesia during the birth of her twins and was burned at the stake for this request. Analgesia started with Queen Victoria who used chloroform for the birth of her 8th child Leopold. It was Victoria’s experience that she told to others which made the practice catch on so quickly as Victoria felt that analgesia was an amazing invention which helped her immensely. In the 1950’s, the no medication approach swung back into fashion with Dr. Grantly Dick-Read, the first modern physician to suggest against analgesia as he believed the pain of childbirth to be psychological
Bacteriophages, which are viral infections that reproduce to target and kill bacteria, were studied in Eastern Europe during the 1950’s by countries which did not have access to western medicine, including antibiotics. In 1 milliliter of sea water, billions of phages are present, with countless different varieties. Phages have tendril like appendages which are used to probe and identify hosts, clinging onto them, then forcing its own deoxyribonucleic acid down into the bacterial host. When this genetic code is introduced, it destroys the bacteria as a direct result. This leads to a chain reaction as hundreds more are produced each time this instance occurs, copies which then fledge out and find hosts of their own, building populations exponentially and wiping out bacterial infections completely. Bacteriophages were found prior to chemical antibiotics but when Penicillin was discovered, because it is so easy to develop and administer, chemical antibiotics became the clear path of choice in medicine with scientists not realizing the severity of this error until decades later. Antibiotics are often broad spectrum which is another reason antibiotic research overshadowed bacteriophagic research as different phages affect different bacteria and are therefore not broad spectrum. Because phages are self-replicating like bacteria, they have the ability to completely annihilate all bacteria presented before them in the same way that bacteria have the ability to totally annihilate their own host as well. Because of this, bacterial infections can be knocked out with 100% efficacy in all cases, regardless of the severity of the the infection, provided the correct phage is alotted enough time to do so. This is a task antibiotics often struggle to achieve and even if achieved, cannot be guaranteed in perpetuity as reinfection or resistance can occur at any time
Recently, many of the improvements made within the artificial intelligence sector have been due to the technology of “deep learning” which is also referred to as an “artificial neural network”. Traditional software is not intuitive as it simply follows a set of instructions predetermined by a programmer. If the software runs into a new problem which it has no answer prewritten for, it crashes. Deep learning is different as software can now write its own instructions instead of reading the instruction(s) of a programmer. Currently, as of 2021, deep learning is the equivalent of an all powerful, dim witted genie as it has the ability to evaluate the pixels of a photograph of a bottle of water, and can recognize with astonishing accuracy photographs of other water bottles, however it has no idea what the concept of water or the water bottle itself is, what the end user does to drink from the water bottle, what the end user needs the water for etc. This differs in human beings however as humans learn from a sample size of one, and are able to surmise the purpose of water and everything else which is relevant from witnessing it being used upon a single occasion