Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: cholera

  • How conflict and bureaucracy delayed the elimination of yellow fever

    Edward McSweegan Kingston, Rhode Island, United States   Army Surgeon General George Miller Sternberg. US government photo. Via Wikimedia. Public domain. The Golden Age of Bacteriology (1876–1906) saw the emergence of techniques to cultivate bacterial pathogens and develop vaccines and anti-toxin therapies against them. The new bacteriologists rapidly identified the agents causing anthrax, gonorrhea, typhoid,…

  • Health, wellness, and their determinants

    Travis Kirkwood Ottawa, Ontario, Canada   Original map made by John Snow in 1854. Cholera cases are highlighted in black. 2nd Ed by John Snow. Public Domain due to age. John Snow is often referred to as the father of modern epidemiology. His work is certainly worthy of this1 and present-day public health2 still strives toward…

  • Children at play in the East London Hospital for Children

    The first hospital for children in London was established with ten beds in 1866 during a terrible cholera epidemic. It relied entirely on charity, was enlarged in 1875 and subsequently expanded, merged, and incorporated into larger facilities until it was closed after the introduction of the National Health Service in 1948. At the time it…

  • Disease mapping: tracing the urban epidemic

    Astrid Primadhani Jakarta, Indonesia   Snow’s map analysis to Thessian polygons (Cliff & Haggert) (1988): Atlas of Disease Distributions In August 1854 a deadly cholera outbreak struck the Soho neighborhood of London.1 Within thirty-six hours, rapid death ensued as the dense and unsanitary condition of the working-class neighborhood became a haven for the spread of…

  • Ernest Black Struthers: missionary life, kala azar, and military strife

    Peter Kopplin Toronto, Canada     Kala azar disease In 1934 the third edition of Cecil’s A Textbook of Medicine contained a chapter by an academically obscure missionary in China.1 Russell Cecil, still editing the book by himself with only the help of a neurology colleague, chose Ernest Black Struthers to write about kala azar…

  • Bari in the seventh cholera pandemic

    Salvatore Barbuti Moro, Italy Domenico Martinelli Rosa Prato Foggia, Italy   Gazzetta del Mezzoggiorno, Bari, Italy, 31st August 1973. Photo Courtesy of Prof. Salvatore Barbuti’s private collection. It all began on a quiet warm afternoon in August 1973 when an infectious diseases specialist called his friend in public health and hesitantly asked for a test…

  • A disease of society: cholera through the ages

    Khameer Kishore Kidia United Kingdom Cholera is something else, it is the invisible, it is the curse of the olden days, of times passed, a sort of evil spirit that comes back and that surprises us so much that it haunts us, because it belongs to what appears to be a forgotten age. Doctors make…

  • A Return to a Moralistic Perception of Disease: Prudence in the Time of Cholera

    Lauren Lewis   During the 1830s, a critical shift in thinking occurred about the causes of disease as medical practitioners increasingly shifted their views of causation towards the environment and away from morality and the individual. However, not all followed this shift in thinking, as evinced by Sylvester Graham, a deeply spiritual Presbyterian minister and…

  • Passionate medicine: the emotional fight against epidemic disease

    Tom Koch  Toronto, Canada   The Plague at Ashdod, 1630 Nicolas Poussin Musée du Louvre, Paris Great medicine is driven by great passion, by a sense of outrage at the indignity that a disease visits on its victims. Across history the search for a solution to epidemic diseases has been rooted not in a desire…