Bassocco

5 million years ago the first hominides appeared in the face of the earth, 2.5 million years later the first stone tools were manufactured and 1.5 million years ago appears the gender homo finally. Since then the humanity's bigger fight has been for the preservation of health and the continuation of life.

The illness has always existed and it is any status where deterioration of health in the human organism exists. The human being evolution and the development of the civilizations for about 5 thousand years, have explained the illness along the time.

In ancient times, it was believed that illnesses were propitiated by the influence of malicious demons and they should be taken by means of incantations, dances, magic effects, charms, talismen and other measures.

It was also common to think that the demon entered in the victim's body, therefore, the efforts were centered in making uninhabitable this body with beatings, tortures or starving the patient. Other forms of throwing away the malign spirit was through a violent vomit, caused by potions or through a hole made in the skull. This last procedure, denominated trepidation, was considered a remedy for the madness, the epilepsy and the headache.

It was until 1850 that the French scientist Louis Pasteur, discovered that many of the illnesses and plagues that burden the human being are caused by the microbes that are in our environment. If we think attentively, the microbes are the true owners of the planet because they possess sophisticated mechanisms to survive the changes and the dangers, natural or invented by the man.

Pasteur used tools like the microscope and invented very effective ways to combat them as the vaccines, the serums and the method that carries his name, the pasteurization. But nothing is definitive against the microbes because they transform and assimilate the products created to exterminate them, transmitting this information later on to their descendants that will be prepared and protected against these exterminator agents since birth.

The immunization consists on offering resistance against the infections introducing a special form of the patogen organism that doesn't produce illness with the purpose of inducing the formation of antigens. Edward Jenner carried out the first immunization in 1796 against the pock, but it was the creation of the vaccine against the hydrophoby by Louis Pasteur what impelled its general use and saved millions of lives. In this point, the man finally had been able to control the microbes relatively.

Soon after the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming discovered the penicillin accidentally in 1928 in the course of his investigations on the flu, when observing that a mold that contaminated one of its cultivation badges had destroyed the bacteria inside it, a new horizon toward the use of the antibiotics was opened. Mankind already seemed to be prepared to face almost any health challenge.

This way and with the running of time the medicine has been establishing, as the science and art about the cure and prevention of illness, as well as the maintenance of the health.