Tag: Infectious Diseases
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The British Army and disease in Kipling’s “Cholera Camp”
Cristóbal S. Berry-CabánFort Bragg, North Carolina, United States Rudyard Kipling’s writing is inseparable from the British Empire in India, offering a vivid examination at how imperial power, military life, and disease collided. Among the many diseases that plagued the region, cholera was especially terrifying. Kipling’s “Cholera Camp” is a grim narrative poem told from the perspective of…
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Francisco Javier de Balmis and the first international vaccination campaign
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, England Smallpox was a human scourge until the early nineteenth century. It had caused almost half a million deaths in Europe alone when Edward Jenner introduced vaccination into clinical practice in 1798 with his famous publication “An enquiry into the causes and effects of the variolae vaccinae” and the 1801 publication “The…
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The belief in bacteria: An early history of microbiology
Mostafa ElbabaDoha, Qatar The history of microbiology is a compelling narrative of how humanity slowly unraveled the unseen world of microscopic life. The field has fundamentally transformed medicine, biology, and human understanding of disease. But for millennia, explanations for the origins of life and the causes of illness were rooted in philosophical speculation and ancient…
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Wasting away: The silent death of tuberculosis at sea
Richard de GrijsSydney, Australia In the suffocating hold of the William Nichol, twenty-year-old Sarah Dorrett lay dying. For over a year she had been “subject to cough,” but the voyage from England to Australia had hastened her decline. Surgeon-Superintendent Peter Leonard (1801–1888) watched helplessly as she passed through “every indication of tubercular disease of the…
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Vernian foresight: Anti-infective cryotherapy from science fiction to standard of care
George ChristopherMichigan, United States The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1866) is a fictional account of an Arctic expedition set in 1860–1861 written by Jules Verne, the master of nineteenth-century science fiction. In one of the novel’s many dramatic episodes, the crew’s physician, Dr. Clawbonny, cured Bell, the ship’s carpenter, of diphtheria by applying…
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Below deck and breathless: Pneumonia’s toll on seafarers
Richard de GrijsSydney, Australia In the tight, damp quarters of historical tall ships on the open sea, pneumonia was a common occurrence. More than just an unfortunate illness, it was often a death sentence, preying upon the weakened and crowded bodies of sailors, soldiers, convicts, and emigrants. Although less sensational than scurvy and not as…
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Gerhard Armauer Hansen’s unethical person-to-person leprosy transmission experiment in 1879
Douglas LanskaMadison, Wisconsin, United States Norwegian physician Gerhard Armauer Hansen (1841–1912)1 is remembered for his discovery in 1873 of Mycobacterium leprae as the causative agent of leprosy. However, Hansen’s legacy also includes unethical behavior for which he was convicted and lost his post at the Leprosy Hospital in Bergen, Norway (although in a legal-political compromise…
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The anti-vaccination movement
The anti-vaccination movement, a diverse coalition that opposes the use of vaccines, represents a serious public health challenge. Amplified by the internet and social media, it threatens society’s wellbeing by contributing to the resurgence of infectious diseases and undermining trust in established science. Its arguments, often rooted in misinformation, personal anecdotes, and distrust of authority,…
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The history of typhus
Typhus exanthematicus is an old disease long confused with typhoid fever. Some historians believe that it caused the Plague of Athens as described by Thucydides, and that it was introduced into Europe by the Spanish soldiers returning from the Americas in the sixteenth century. It likely caused the severe epidemic occurring during the confrontations between…
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Shingles
JMS PearceHull, England The physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia in the second century AD described a painful skin eruption that typically followed a band-like or “girdle-like” pattern, which corresponds to the dermatomal pattern of shingles.1 The Greek word herpein means “to creep,” and zoster (Latin cingulum) means a girdle or belt, referring to the rash’s unilateral…