1933: New Haven Hospital introduced stainless steel instruments in a urology surgery procedure. Unlike the white enamel instruments which had to be replaced every three months, those made of stainless steel could withstand repeated sterilization, greatly improving infection control.
Also in 1933, the hospital began one of the nation’s first organized volunteer programs in the country, a prototype for programs at virtually all modern hospitals.
1942: New Haven Hospital was the first in the U.S. to successfully use penicillin to treat a life-threatening infection. Within 24 hours of her first shot, a 33-year-old woman with a raging strep infection saw her temperature return to normal for the first time in weeks. She lived to age 90.
In another 1942 breakthrough, Louis S. Goodman, MD, and Alfred Gilman, PhD (pictured), assistant professors in Yale’s new Department of Pharmacology, began to study nitrogen mustard, a derivative of the deadly mustard gas used in World War I, in the hopes of finding an antidote. They accidentally found the mustard gas could shrink cancerous tumors, essentially uncovering the first effective chemotherapy for cancer.
