Dr Alexander Wood independently invented a version of the hypodermic syringe needle, used across the world. Sadly his wife became the first person in the world to die as an injecting opium addict.

Lord Joseph Lister applied carbolic acid to ensure cleanliness of equipment and theatre, and applied it to a wound of a boy injured by a cart. The dramatic reduction in infection was key to the success of surgery as a lifesaving treatment.

Along with Frederick Banting and Charles Best, Dr John JR Macleod was a Nobel Prize winner for the discovery and purification of insulin, which contributed to the successful treatment of diabetes for the first time.

In 1960, Sir Michael Woodruff and his team performed the first successful kidney transplant in the UK at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Later, in 1968, the Nuffield Transplantation Surgery Unit was built to his specifications at Edinburgh's Western General Hospital and he was appointed its director.

Fife born Sir David Jack, who qualified in pharmacology at Glasgow’s Royal Technical College, went on to develop ground breaking drug discoveries in his role as research director at GlaxoSmithKline. He developed salbutamol or Ventolin, the default treatment for asthma. This led him to develop the first inhaled steroid, beclomethasone, still the most widely used inhaled steroid, and the bectotide inhaler. These medical breakthroughs have saved the lives of millions of asthma sufferers worldwide. He also discovered Zantac, used to treat peptic ulcers which has alleviated the suffering of many and rapidly became the fastest-selling drug in the world.

MRI is a medical imaging technique used in radiology to investigate the anatomy and function of the body in both health and disease. MRI scanners use strong magnetic fields and radiowaves to form images of the body. The technique is widely used in hospitals for medical diagnosis, staging of disease and for follow-up without exposure to ionizing radiation. During the 1970s a team led by Scottish professor John Mallard built the first full body MRI scanner at the University of Aberdeen. On 28 August 1980 they used this machine to obtain the first clinically useful image of a patient’s internal tissues using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which identified a primary tumour in the patients chest, an abnormal liver, and secondary cancer in his bone.

Professor Keith Muir of the Southern General in Glasgow reached a successful conclusion of the stage 1 PISCES clinical trial of stem cell therapy for stroke.

Early in 2014, scientists at Strathclyde University developed a new test to speed up the diagnosis of bacterial meningitis. It uses nanoparticles and lasers to "fingerprint" more than one bacterium at a time - and so opens the way for targeted treatment. Unless caught quickly, bacterial meningitis can lead to blood poisoning and brain damage. Bacterial meningitis is most common in children under five and it can often take time to diagnose precisely which bacteria are responsible. The new process - called Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) - scatters laser light from a sample that has been combined with silver nanoparticles. It can fingerprint more than one bacterium at a time, allowing treatment to then be targeted. This scientific breakthrough is now primed for adoption by health authorities worldwide.