The biggest medical milestone since 1840 is not antibiotics, DNA or vaccines, according to more than 11,000 physicians and members of the public. Although they all made the top five in the British Medical Journal's poll of favorite medical breakthroughs, the number-one choice was sanitation.

Sanitation just barely beat out antibiotics, and anesthesia took third place. Fourth and fifth places went to vaccines and DNA.

Professor Johan Mackenbach, of Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rottendam, was of the people who put sanitation higher than all others on the list.

"I'm delighted that sanitation is recognized by so many people as such an important milestone," he said.

"The great lesson, which still holds, is that passive protection against health hazards is often the best way to improve population health."

Those who made sanitation what it is today include John Snow, who proved that cholera was spread by water, and Edwin Chadwick, who was the first to conceive of sewage disposal and piping water into homes