The next revolution came after 1930 and the discovery of sulfa drugs, the precursors to penicillin and other antibiotics, which gave doctors their first effective weapons against germs. Today, physicians are struggling with their own success, with the development of bacteria resistant to many basic antibiotics. Researchers at the Trudeau Institute in Saranac Lake, for example, are currently trying to come up with a vaccine to treat tuberculosis, one disease that has proven particularly adept at changing itself in order to survive. Public health experts have documented a shift away from infectious diseases in terms of causing death during the past century. Today, with people living longer, physicians are seeing more deaths attributed to diseases of aging, including diabetes, cancer, obesity and heart disease, the number one cause of death in the United States and the Capital Region.
Statistics illustrate how profound that change has been.
In 1900, 37.3 percent of all deaths in the United States could be attributed to infectious disease, according to Lehman. By 1975, that percentage dropped to a mere 4.4 percent, with stroke and heart disease accounting for most deaths, at 48 percent. Advances in bacteriology laid the groundwork for improvements in medical education and treatment, a fact that underscores how primitive much of medicine was in its earliest years, particularly during the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 1700s, seeing a doctor was often worse than suffering from the disease or malady. Two of the most common treatments at that time were bleeding and vomiting.