250 Years of Healing

In 1776, American medicine was closer to medieval than modern. Doctors bled their patients, disease theories involved humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. George Washington himself likely died faster in 1799 because physicians drained nearly half his blood treating a throat infection. Life expectancy hovered under forty. That the same nation would, within 250 years, eradicate ancient plagues, transplant human hearts, decode the genome, and add nearly four decades to the average life is among the most consequential achievements of the American experiment—and its story is one of relentless, often unsung, discovery.