First direct plasma application to treat diseases can be attributed to experimental works of French physicist and physiologist Jacques-Arsène d’Arsonval in early 1900s. The relevant devices had beeen made feasible at that time by Nikola Tesla, who worked with extremely high-frequency currents at high voltage, creating “impressive light phenomena which proved harmless to humans in the case of direct contact with the effusions”. In early 1900s Germany, the devices were further developed for the caloric treatment of patients (diathermy). Rumpf developed a device which differed from the French ones by implementing a capacitively coupled electrode consisting of a Leydener bottle which was directly applied to the patient’s skin. This device can be considered the first DBD plasma source in medicine. Starting from 1920s, thermal electrosurgical devices and then argon plasma coagulator became an important step in medical applications of plasma. Important initial development in this direction is related to works of American scientist and inventor William Bowie in 1920s.

Starting from1960s first patents and pablications started to appear all over the world with a focus on cold plasma sterilization, plasma control of biological activity of microorganisms, as well as plasma regulation of biological properties of medical polymer materials. Number of relevant patents and publications started growing in 1990s, which can be seen from that time materials of the IEEE International Conferences on Plasma Science (ICOPS), the Gaseous Electronics Conference (GEC), the International Conference on Phenomena in Ionized Gases (ICPIG), and the International Symposium on Plasma Chemistry (ISPC). Based on these initial successes, as well as breakthrough development of novel devices able to be directly applied to human body for medical treatment, the new field of PLASMA MEDICINE was born in early 2000s on the nexus of plasma physics and modern medicine.