Tag: infectious disease
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Ronald Ross: polymath and discoverer
Satish SarosheIndore, India Sir Ronald Ross received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1902 for discovering the malaria parasite in the stomach of a mosquito, thereby proving that malaria was transmitted by mosquitoes and laying the foundation for future methods of combating the disease. Born in Almora, India, in 1857 to a Scottish general in the Indian Army and his English…
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Disclosure
Tafadzwa KasambiraSilver Spring, Maryland, United States Not long before she discovered her diagnosis, Rachel felt a flutter in her chest and a sense that the air seeping through her lungs was more agitated, as if moving through a maze. She had that feeling of foreboding you get as you slip into poor health―a sense of…
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Passionate medicine: The emotional fight against epidemic disease
Tom Koch Toronto, Canada 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 for acclaim, prestige, or a prize, but first and foremost in the researcher’s…
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Andrea del Sarto – plague in Florence
“The siege being finished . . . . Florence became filled with soldiers and stores from the camp. Among those soldiers were some mercenaries sick of the plague, who brought no little terror into the city and shortly afterwards left it infected. Thereupon, either through this apprehension or through some imprudence in eating after having…
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A view of syphilis from the 19th century
Sectional reprint of “Of the Venereal Disease, or Syphilis” from Modern Practice of Physic by Robert Thomas, 1822 The part of the world where this disease first originated has been much disputed, some looking upon it as of French extraction, and others supposing it could have been brought from America by the soldiers of Christopher…
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Chance in the origins of antibiotics
William KingstonDublin, Ireland The discovery of antibiotics has been described as the “domestication of microorganisms” and ranks in importance with the domestication of animals as part of settled agriculture about 10,000 years ago. It depends upon antagonism between bacteria, which had been noticed as early as 1874, and Pasteur commented then that if we could…