Exoskeletons for medical rehabilitation are starting to be used in high tech medical facilities with sufficient funds to rent or purchase these devices. Though they still seem futuristic, medical exoskeletons can benefit from substantial improvement...
Behold the boldest medical steampunk from yesterday's bright future. Courtesy of the National Heart Institute and the Atomic Energy Agency, and in a story relayed by Shelley McKellar in journal Technology and Culture, two parallel projects between...
We cover medical devices on a daily basis, and some of these gadgets get to be pretty big. Proton therapy systems, for example, use particle accelerators the size of buildings and U.S. Navy's Mercy hospital ship is 894 feet (272 m) long. Yet, due...
Dr Jacky Finch at the University of Manchester has been studying a couple ancient Egyptian wooden toes to find out whether they are the world's oldest known prostheses or are simply aesthetic devices from a time when everyone wore sandals. One...
The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), one of the most prestigious periodicals in the world, celebrated its 200th anniversary this past week. Medgadget was there for the proceedings, "Dialogues in Medicine," which consisted of panels on...
It can be fascinating to explore the cutting edge of medical and surgical interventions, but we should not forget that modern day innovations have their roots steeped in a rich history of medicine. One place to explore these roots is...
On July 31, 1790, the first United States patent was issued to Samuel Hopkins for a process for making potash. Millions of patents have been issued in the 221 years since, many of them related to medical devices and technologies. This week, the...
While today's seafarers usually have to worry about the occasional breakout of norovirus, the 19th century Royal Navy frequently dealt with "exotic" disease such as yellow fever, cholera, and malaria. The Wellcome Trust has written an insightful...
NIH, the source of so much knowledge and red-tape, had to start somewhere. The Scientist magazine recently published an article on where the organization was in its early days. Think of it like preliminary data for the NIH's application to...
Every day, we're inundated with ads for the newest devices and pills that claim to improve our well-being. Often times we laugh and scoff at such remedies, but once in a while we're irresistibly drawn to an ad that creates a picture of a happier...
Weeks after Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen published about the development of his X-ray machine, a physicist and a hospital director in Maastricht, The Netherlands, built their own version of the device. Recently, this 115 year old machine was taken...