Respiratory care - has been defined as the health care discipline that specializes in the promotion of optimal cardiopulmonary function and health

Respiratory Therapist - apply scientific principles to prevent, identify, and treat acute or chronic dysfunction of the cardiopulmonary system.

• assessment

• treatment

• management

• control

• diagnostic evaluation,

• education

• and care of patients with deficiencies and abnormalities of the cardiopulmonary system.

Respiratory Care Practitioners - are health care professionals who are educated and trained to provide respiratory care to patients

HISTORY OF RESPIRATORY MEDICINE AND SCIENCE

Ancient Times

- Humans have been concerned about the common problems of sickness, disease, old age, and death since primitive times.

- Physicians practiced medicine in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China.

- However, the foundation of modern western medicine was laid in ancient Greece, with the development of the Hippocratic corpus

Hippocrates - a Greek physician who lived during the fifth and fourth centuries bc.

Hippocratic corpus - collection of medical treatises is attributed to the “father of medicine”

• Hippocratic medicine was based on four essential fluids, or “humors”

  • phlegm

  • blood

  • yellow bile

  • black bile

• Hippocrates believed that an essential substance in air was distributed to the body by the heart.

Aristotle - a Greek philosopher and perhaps the first great biologist, believed that knowledge could be gained through careful observation.

• He made many scientific observations, including some obtained by performing experiments on animals.

Erasistratus - regarded by some as the founder of the science of physiology,

• developed a pneumatic theory of respiration in which air (pneuma) entered the lungs and was transferred to the heart.

Galen - was an anatomist in Asia Minor whose comprehensive work dominated medical thinking for centuries.

• also believed that inspired air contained a vital substance that somehow charged the blood through the heart.

The Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Enlightenment Period

Leonardo da Vinci - studied human anatomy, determined that sub atmospheric intrapleural pressures inflated the lungs, and observed that fire consumed a vital substance in air without which animals could not live.

Vesalius - considered to be the founder of the modern field of human anatomy, performed human dissections and experimented with resuscitation

Boyle - published what is now known as Boyle’s law, governing the relationship between the volume and pressure of a gas.

Torricelli - invented the barometer in 1650

Pascal - showed that atmospheric pressure decreases with altitude

van Leeuwenhoek - known as the “father of microbiology,” improved the microscope and was the first to observe and describe single celled organisms, which he called “animalcules

Black - described the properties of carbon dioxide

Priestley - described oxygen, which he called “dephlogisticated air.

Scheele - performed the laboratory synthesis of oxygen, which he called “fire air”

Spallanzani - worked out the relationship between the consumption of oxygen and tissue respiration.

Charles - described the relationship between gas temperature and volume, now known as Charles’ law.

Lavoisier - showed that oxygen was absorbed by the lungs and that carbon dioxide and water were exhaled

Beddoes - began using oxygen to treat various conditions at his Pneumatic Institute in Bristol.

Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Dalton - described his law of partial pressures for a gas mixture in 1801 and his atomic theory in 1808.

Young 1805 and de LaPlace in 1806 - described the relationship between pressure and surface tension in fluid droplets.

Gay-Lussac - described the relationship between gas pressure and temperature in 1808

Avogadro - determined that equal volumes of gases at the same temperature and pressure contain the same number of molecules

Graham - described his law of diffusion for gases

Pasteur - advanced his “germ theory” of disease, which held that many diseases are caused by microorganisms.

Koch - discovered the tubercle bacillus, which causes tuberculosis, in 1882, and the vibrio bacterium, which causes cholera, in 1883

• He also developed Koch’s postulates, which are criteria designed to establish a causative relationship between a microbe and a disease.

Roentgen - discovered the x-ray, and the modern field of radiologic imaging sciences was born.