Sonography is the most commonly used diagnostic tool in medicine today. By sending high frequency sound waves into the body, receiving the echoes, and transforming them into a visual image, doctors can see everything from the sex of an unborn child to whether or not a heart has any structural abnormalities. While it’s been used for over fifty years in various forms, most people are unfamiliar with just what the history of sonography involved. A number of different scientists and medical professionals had a hand in the rise of sonography and ultrasounds, and each of them deserves credit for their contributions. Because of them, medicine has never been the same since.
Sonography in the US really began in the late 1940s when George Ludwig applied ultrasound technology to a patient in Maryland. But as for real advances in diagnostics, that came in 1949 from John Wild. He utilized an ultrasound to study a patient’s bowel tissue and its thickness. Most people refer to John Wild as the father of medical sonography. Overseas in Sweden a heart was first examined through ultrasound technology in 1953 by a pair of doctors – Inge Elder and Carl Hertz. They followed this up by completing the first echo-encephalogram. Their findings were published the very next year, in 1954.
A small group of Scottish doctors truly led ultrasound technology into the future in 1958 with their publication of "Investigation of Abdominal Masses by Pulsed Ultrasound", which detailed the usage of ultrasounds for diagnostic purposes. Their names were Ian Donald, John MacVicar, and Tom Brown, and had taken industrial boilermaker equipment, refined it, and used it to scan various specimens. Shortly thereafter Ralph Joseph Holmes finished developing the first compact B Mode Scanning device in 1962. A year later the device was released for sale, and quickly revolutionized medicine.
The technology rapidly found its way into every medical institute in the world. The ability to look inside a patient without the need for surgery was groundbreaking and led to saving millions of lives. Even today, with countless other diagnostic tools and techniques readily available, it is still the ultrasound that is relied on the most. It’s inexpensive, noninvasive, and completely safe to use. And since it works as well in the cardiology department as it does in obstetrics, it sees plenty of regular use. More than fifty years after its inception, sonography remains one of the single most important medical breakthroughs in history.
