Ian Donald 10198

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Ian Donald McKenzie Hosenfeld Salt Lake Community College Biographical Term Paper Howard Demars October 2, 2015

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Now a popular and commonly used instrument in hospitals and clinics alike, the ultrasound machine was created in 1956 by a team of medical researchers in Glasgow, Scotland. The head of this group was a professor named Dr. Ian Donald. To understand how Ian Donald came up with the inspiration to invent the ultrasound machine, it is necessary to tell the story of his life. Ian Donald was born in Cornwall, Scotland on December 2, 1910. Early in his childhood, he and his family moved to South Africa, where he attended the University of Cape Town. There, he chose to study Music and French. After he graduated with Honors in Arts, he began attending medical school at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. His studies were disrupted by the Second World War, in which he decided to serve in the Royal Air Force Medical Branch. (Ian DonaldDiagnostician and Moralist) When Japan surrendered to the Allies and the army was disband, Donald returned to St. Thomas’s, where he finished his studies and became an obstetrician and gynecologist. While the work he accomplished in the medical branch of the Royal Air Force was starkly different than his work in obstetrics and gynecology, he used many of his wartime experiences in his new field. (History of Ultrasound) The first time he was introduced to radar sciences was while he serving in the war; this technology was used on boats in Glasgow shipyards to look for flaws and weaknesses in the hull’s metallurgy. He also acquired an understanding of echo-sounding, a recent development that was used to detect the presence and

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movement of submarines. He often credited his experiences in the Royal Air Force to his discovery of using ultrasounds upon his patients. Ian Donald began investigating the use of sonography for medical diagnosis in the 1950’s when he visited a boiler-making company to use their instruments to scan tumors and lumps. He was surprised at the unrestricted view he had while looking at the soft-tissues,a large difference to the images produced by x-ray machines. With x-rays alone, it was difficult to identify abnormalities in soft tissues, but by using their new machine, they were much easier to recognize. He quickly realized the benefits that his machine would have on diagnostic imaging. Donald’s discovery is what we now refer to as “ultrasound” or “sonography”. Ultrasound waves are high frequency sound waves produced by a hand-held probe, also called a transducer. These sounds waves are silent to the human ear because they are within the frequencies of 2 and 18. (Ultrasound) The transducer both emits ultrasound waves and also detects the ultrasound echos that are reflected back. The materials that make up the probes are made of special ceramic materials that produce sound waves when an electrical current es through them. The probe sends sound waves into the body and the reflection of the waves back produces the images that are seen on the ultrasound machine. Ian Donald and his team published an article about the the ultrasound machine in The Lancet, a medical newspaper based in the United Kingdom. Entitled, ‘Investiagion of abdominal masses by pulsed ultrasound’, the article describes the research and results that Donald and his team gained by scanning more than 100 pateints with their simple ultrasound machine. (Ian Donald )Their machine, which they refered to as ‘The Spinner’, was a rough prototype made by

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assembling any materials that they could get their hands on. Tom Brown, the researcher in charge of building the machine, said that building it was “a case of scrounging for parts wherever I could.” These parts including bits of Maccno and a hospital bed. Because of his ion in obstetrics and gynecology, he first used his new invention to discover information on growing fetuses in wombs. He quickly realized that by using his machine to study the fetus’ growth and development, he was able to diagnose abnormality in the fetuses and use those tools to make pregnancy and labor safer. (Ian Donald and the birth of obstetric ultrasound) In just a few short years after the ultrasound machine was developed, it because a routine part of pre-natal care. While ultrasound is widely used today, the medical field in the 1950’s and 1960’s was suspicious of the images that came from Donald’s invention. For many years after the discovery, Ian Donald set out to prove the efficiency of the ultrasound machine. He noted the case of a woman who was diagnosed with an inoperable stomach cancer. After performing a vaginal ultrasound and finding an ovarian cyst, she was operated on and recovered entirely. On another occasion, Donald and colleage Tom Duggan, a physicist, used their machine to measure babies’ heads on multiple women. (The Development of Ultrasound )Through the images, they were able to recognize problems such as fetal abnormality and hemorrhaging. As Donald had more and more positive experiences, the ultrasound machine became less taboo and was eventually used by doctors for a wide array of diagnostic needs. In time, he grew to understand that this new development in technology could be used in more applications than simply fetuses. Ian Donald had a personal need for his ultrasound

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machine when his doctor diagnosed him with severe heart disesase that required major heart sugery. A bit doubtful of his doctors’s diagnosis, Donald used his invention, ‘The Spinner’, to scan his heart to find evidence that the surgery was required. Only after studying his heart and diagnosing himself with heart disease did Donald permit to be operated on. (A Short History of the Development of Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology) The medical world has benefited greatly through Ian Donald’s inspiration to create the ultrasound machine. Not only are used to check on babies in wombs, but are also used to detect problems in the liver, heart, kidney, abdomen, or sexual organs. Ultrasounds are becoming more popular than ever because it is a safe diagnostic tool and do not emit radiation, unlike x-rays. Our society’s health has improved because of Ian Donald and his invention, the ultrasound machine.

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History of Ultrasound. (2011). Retrieved from http://www.ultrasoundschoolsinfo.com/history/

Ian Donald- Diagnostician and Moralist. Malcolm Nicolson Centre for the History of Medicine University of Glasgow. (2010).

Ian Donald. Brought to Life. Science Museum UK, 2011. Web.

J Willocks, ‘Ian Donald and the birth of obstetric ultrasound’, Obstetric ultrasound, 1 (1993), pp 1-18

Ultrasound. National Institute on Biomedical Imaging and Biomedical Engineering . (2008). Retrieved September 1, 2008.

Withers, Blithe. "The Development of Ultrasound." Web. (2015)

Woo, Joseph. "A Short History of the Development of Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology." 2002. Web.