The current healthier living and enhanced life-expectancy in humans around the world resulting from great advances in medicine (including vaccines, medical equipment and procedures) over past three centuries

It was not until only a few centuries ago that humans around the world faced regularly the onslaught of serious epidemics including plague, cholera, smallpox etc., which, due to the lack of proper medicines (including vaccines etc.), would invariably make many people sick and kill them (numbering sometimes in thousands and hundreds of thousands), thus leaving sometimes the entire villages, towns and cities empty. Malaria and tuberculosis (TB) similarly had been posing serious threat to humans throughout history, without reliable medicines to cure people from malaria and TB until recently.

There would be nothing else for people to do to stay safe while the diseases arrived and spread, except waiting for the disease to disappear on its own after incurring much sickness and deaths. Moreover, lacking any reliable medicines and medical treatments, people often resorted to isolating themselves from others (both the healthy and the sick) usually through physical separation and by running away to other places whereto the disease had not yet spread.

People also had difficulties with small cuts and wounds on their bodies which could easily and quickly turn infectious and pose serious and life-ending situation due to the lack of timely doses of antibiotics (penicillin etc.) and vaccines. Similarly, even the small and insignificant dog-bites proved sometimes fatal without the required anti-rabies shots (medicines and vaccines).

The unavailability of antibiotics (penicillin etc.) and other modern medicines in the past had also severely limited the use of lifesaving surgical procedures. The childbirths among women could become a life-threatening ordeal for the mother and the newborn. Moreover, the children, even as old as eight or ten years, were very vulnerable a few centuries ago to minor infections and sicknesses because of the lack of antibiotics, modern medicines and vaccines.

The modern medicines (including vaccines) and medical procedures (surgeries etc.) have enhanced the life-expectancy among humans (men, women and children) around the world these days, while people currently are staying healthy and surviving easily into their eighties and nineties, which incidentally is several decades longer than human life-expectancy a few centuries ago (humans surviving then till the age of only forty or fifty).

We obviously owe much of our current longer and healthier living to the medical miracles (great advances in medicines, vaccines, medical equipment and procedures) over past three centuries, some of which (including the significant ones, along with the names and nationalities of inventors / discoverers) are listed in the following (#1 through #7).

(1) Smallpox vaccine: in 1796 by Edward Jenner (English);

(2) Rabies vaccine: in 1885 by Louis Pasteur (French);

(3) Penicillin: in 1928 by Alexander Fleming (Scotsman). The discovery / invention of Penicillin led to other antibiotics also. Penicillin and other antibiotics led to curing and saving people from infections and infectious wounds and were effective in curing and saving people from cholera, plague and TB (tuberculosis);

(4) Streptomycin: in 1943 (first antibiotic treatment effective against TB) by Selman Waksman (American);

(5) Insulin: in 1921 (to treat people suffering from diabetes) by Frederick Banting (Canadian) & Charles Best (American-Canadian);

(6) X-rays: in 1895 by Wilhelm Roentgen (German); and

(7) Quinine: in 1737 (as effective medicine / cure against infectious Malaria) by Charles Marie de La Condamine (French).