A History of Firsts

Yale has a history of contributions to the field of medicine that have had a major impact on the health of people around the world. Some of these are:

1896	Arthur Wright produces first X-ray
1942	Introduction of life-saving penicillin to the United States
1942	First use of chemotherapy as a cancer treatment in the U.S.
1946	First U.S. hospital to allow healthy newborns to say in rooms with mother.
1947	Yale-New Haven Hospital opens the first rheumatic fever-cardiac clinic, one of the nation's first regional heart centers
1949	Developed first artificial heart pump in the U.S.
1949	First U.S. hospital to introduce natural childbirth as a general service
1957	First hospital to use fetal heart monitoring
1958	Discovery of melatonin
1959	First antiviral drug developed
1960	World's first intensive care unit for newborns
1966	Phrenic nerve pacemaker allows quadriplegics to breathe without a respirator
1966	"Morning-After" birth control pill developed
1972	First hospital-based newborn screening program for sickle cell anemia in the U.S.
1975	Lyme disease identified and named
1978	FDA approved timolol to treat glaucoma, the first effective therapy for the disease since the early 1900s
1979	First insulin pump for diabetes
1980	The first genetically modified mouse (these are now used in the early stages of research to develop treatment for diseases
1985	First fetal cardiovascular center in the U.S.
1994	FDA approved Zerit, a drug to treat HIV and part of the three-drug “cocktail” that extended the lives of many tens of thousands of people with HIV/AIDS worldwide
1997	The discovery of a mechanism of protein folding, a step toward understanding neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's disease
1997	First documented heart transplants of adult identical twins, one in 1992, second in 1997
2010	First to use high-throughput DNA sequencing to diagnose a disease
2014	Genomic analysis leads to the discovery, diagnosis, and treatment of a rare disease