Category: Infectious Disease
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John Walker, vaccinator extraordinaire
JMS PearceHull, England Medicine has bred many odd but audacious characters, eccentrics, polymaths and “truants.” One might argue that those characteristics attracted such people to careers in medicine: a chicken and egg dilemma. Conversely, some have argued that modern regulated uniformity has infected medicine and stultified originality. A little-known medical eccentric and heretic was John…
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Leprosy and armadillos: Handle with care
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden Leprosy (Hansen’s disease) is a chronic, disfiguring, and handicapping infectious disease. It was known in the ancient world, and evidence of the disease has been found from 2000 B.C.1 In the sixth and seventh centuries it spread in Europe, peaking in incidence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.2 The disease may have…
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Rapid testing for the masses
Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece Ten young girls are queueing outside the makeshift surgery. They are between eleven and fifteen, they wear face masks, they giggle and tease each other and try to encourage the timid ones before the coming ordeal. What is this going to be? Their first visit to a gynecologist? Nothing so memorable. They…
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Diagnosis: Neurosyphilis. Treatment: Malaria, iatrogenic
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “The syphilitic man was thinking hard…about how to get his legs to step off the curb and carry him across Washington Street. Here was his problem: His brains, where the instructions to his legs originated, were being eaten alive by corkscrews.”– Kurt Vonnegut, The Breakfast of Champions Julius Wagner-Jauregg, M.D. (1857–1940) graduated…
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Dr. Gerhard Domagk and prontosil: Dyeing beats dying
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”– Albert Einstein Dr. Gerhard Domagk (1895–1964) was a German pathologist and bacteriologist whose research led to a discovery that saved innumerable lives. He worked for the Bayer chemical company and was also a professor at the University of…
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When Papa Doc treated yaws
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Our Doc who is in the National Palace for life, hallowed be Your name by present and future generations. Your Will be done in Port-au-Prince and in the countryside…” — Translation of part of the “Catechism of the Revolution” that was recited daily by Haitian schoolchildren François Duvalier, M.D. (1907–1971) was the…
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Robert Koch, M.D., and the cure for sleeping sickness: ethics versus economics
Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden Primum non nocere. (First, do no harm.)— Hippocrates Robert Koch, M.D., (1843–1910) started his career as a country doctor and discovered the causes of tuberculosis, anthrax, and cholera. He is considered to be, along with Louis Pasteur, the founder of the field of bacteriology. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology…
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Scotland’s Anthrax Island
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “They make a desolation and call it peace.”— Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001) During World War Two, the British government purchased from its owners the Gruinard Island, a one by two km island off the Scottish coast. The one inhabitant was evicted, and the island became the site of secret tests to weaponize…