Discoveries

The Discoveries category gathers the landmark findings, identifications and technical breakthroughs of medical science: the isolation of a pathogen, the description of a mechanism of disease, the invention of a diagnostic or surgical technique, each treated as the event of first establishing something rather than as the institution, drug or procedure that later grew from it. It deliberately excludes the specialties that study a body system, the treatments and drugs a discovery makes possible, and the healers and institutions credited with making it, each of which the atlas records under its own type; a discovery entity holds the moment of finding out, not the practice built on it afterward.