INGENIOUS: Medicine

Although scientific medicine has been delivering more and more, in recent decades it has been trusted less and less. This paradox reflects worrying tales of medical misfortune as well as a decreasing trust in authority in general. Symbols of this paradox in the Science Museum collections include relics from both the development of penicillin, the original 'wonder-drug', and from the MMR vaccine, the subject of contemporary controversy. Antibiotics, vaccines and pills to treat mental torment were once all treated as wonder drugs. Today, despite their undoubted benefits, we often hear of side-effects, addiction and bacterial resistance. Patients worry that addiction, for instance, can result from drugs prescribed by doctors, so increasingly they select their own treatments. Ironically, while there has been an increase in self-treatment, there has also been an increase in cosmetic surgery, where healthy individuals have chosen to seek medical help to alter their appearance, not cure their ills.