In the 1960s, patients benefited from considerable recent changes in medicine. New pharmaceutical treatments for a variety of needs had been developing rapidly since WWII, polio had recently been all but conquered, and diagnostic technologies were making great strides forward. At MGH, this decade saw a reorganization of the Department of Medicine into over a dozen specialties. Some had already split off into their own hospital units, like the Cardiac Unit and Thyroid Unit, and other specialties became their own sub-department of medicine for the first time, such as the Pulmonary Disease Unit and Diabetes Unit.