Tag: infectious disease
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Casanova: Patient Zero and other insights into sexual health in the 1700s
Beth JaroszWashington, DC, United States Giacomo Casanova, the infamous rake, is responsible for providing historians and anthropologists with a veritable treasure trove of historical health information. His life spanned from 1725 to 1798, and his memoir, Histoire de Ma Vie, recounts nearly every day of his life with meticulous detail, from the most basic breakfast…
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Edward Jenner (1749-1823): from variolation to vaccination
Damiano RondelliChicago, Illinois, United States Smallpox virus is a linear double stranded DNA virus that belongs to the family of poxviridae. Because its surface is covered with filamentous proteins, it has the appearance of a wool knitting ball. Dr. Edward Jenner’s observations on immune protection from smallpox at the end of the eighteenth century were…
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Penicillin’s unique discovery
Emmanuel UgokweNigeria Southeast & South South Scottish-born Alexander Fleming spent almost his entire life as a doctor in London, studying the problems of infection and the use of antiseptics. In 1922 he made a remarkable observation. He took a test tube containing water mixed with inoffensive bacteria that turned the water milky. To this he…
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Fracastorius, the man who named syphilis
One of the great names in medical history, Girolamo Fracastoro appears in the National Gallery painting by Titian in full regalia. We owe him the name syphilis, derived from his poem (1530) Syphilis sive morbus gallicus (“Syphilis or The French Disease”) in which a shepherd boy named Syphilus was punished by Apollo with a horrible…
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Leith in the time of cholera – the story of Thomas Latta
George VentersEdinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom Introduction In June 1832, the editor of the Lancet thanked Dr. Thomas Latta for “the intrepidity, scientific zeal and assiduity he has displayed.”1 This was in response to Dr. Latta’s letter reporting on his treatment by intravenous saline infusion of moribund patients in the final stages of cholera. He had brought…
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Smallpox vaccination in the satirical work of James Gillray
Godfrey PearlsonUnited States James Gillray (1756-1815) was a skilled artist/draftsman and a full-time caricaturist, immensely popular in his own day, both in terms of sales of his prints and engravings in London and of contemporary reproductions of his work in Europe. A highly innovative printmaker, mostly of copperplate etchings enhanced with varied engraving techniques, he…
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Consumption, Collapse, and Family by Alice Neel
Gregory Rutecki “The personal images in Alice Neel’s work not only reflect her life, they also provide metaphors …There is no peace…in (her) paintings, only agitated recognition of inevitable struggles.”1 “…Alice Neel described the 20th Century as she experienced it, living in the ghetto with those against whom most of society discriminated. She has provided…
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Tuberculosis Retrenched at Saranac Lake: A Herald for Contemporary Hospitals
Gregory M. Rutecki “…progress is the retrenchment of diseases.”1 “In 1870, physicians could do little to cure…A hundred years later they intervene…in many…diseases. In a single century…understanding of disease increased more than in the previous forty centuries combined.”2 At the fin de siècle, American Medicine acquired a Promethean fire. Weapons would be forged against a…
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Recollections of a polio ward
Janet WolterChicago, Illinois, United States My first impression when I walked into the huge ward was of the strange rhythm/non-rhythm, visual and auditory, of ten rocking beds moving at different rates and inclinations, sometimes in synchrony but more often not, and the punctuating steady whoosh-whoosh of two iron lungs. The people in and on these…
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A flu that brought nations to a standstill
Jennifer A. SummersLondon, United Kingdom The year was 1918 and after four grisly years of the First World War, the longed-for peace was within the grasp of the Allied powers. But little did they know, that a threat far greater than any war experienced by humans loomed over their existence. An influenza virus, minute in…