Tag: Infectious Diseases
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Ancient remedies for modern times
Vicky Li Dallas, Texas, United States Artemisia absinthium. Found in Bērzi village near Bauska city, Latvia. Photo by AfroBrazilian, 2013, on Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 3.0. “To a synthetic chemist, the complex molecules of nature are as beautiful as any of her other creations.” – Elias James Corey (Nobel Lecture, 1990)1 As the Vietnam…
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William Budd and typhoid fever
William Budd. From lithograph published by A.B. Black, 1862. Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0. In the year 1811 when William Budd was born, medicine was still in its dark ages. Physicians dressed in black and wore top hats, surgeons operated in street clothes without anesthesia, and infectious diseases such as typhoid and cholera were thought…
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Scrofula or the king’s evil
Left: Scrofula. Photo from the Atlas of Clinical Medicine. US National Library of Medicine. Right: Queen Mary I healing scrofula. Illustration by Levina Teerlinc in Queen Mary’s manual for blessing cramp rings and touching for Evil. Via Wikimedia. Scrofula, the old name for tuberculous lymphadenitis of neck, was once a common condition. The name was…
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Book review: Pandemic Obsession: How They Feature in our Popular Culture
Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, UK Cover of Pandemic Obsession: How They Feature in Our Popular Culture by Stephen Basdeo. Following the worldwide COVID pandemic, there has been a plethora of books published on the theme of epidemics and pandemics. Readers may be forgiven if they feel they are now suffering from literary pandemic fatigue.…
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The climate cure: Treating tuberculosis in the nineteenth century
Brendan Pulsifer Atlanta, Georgia “California, Cornucopia of the World,” 1876. Western states encouraged migration by advertising the region’s “climate for health.” Granger Collection. Via Wikimedia. Tuberculosis pervaded nineteenth-century American life like no other disease. More commonly known as consumption at the time, it was responsible for one in five deaths, making it the deadliest…
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Palo Seco: A leper colony in Panama
Enrique Chaves-Carballo Overland Park, Kansas Fig 1. Indian 50 paisa stamp shows Armauer Hansen at work in his laboratory. Via Wikimedia. Copyright Post of India, licensed under the Government Open Data License. The history of leprosy goes back to antiquity and is replete with unscientific prejudices, including the belief that the disease was highly…
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Koch’s postulates revisited
JMS Pearce Hull, England Van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1722), a Dutch botanist, using his early microscope observed single-celled bacteria, which he reported to the Royal Society as animalcules. The science of bacteriology owes its origin to two scientists of coruscating originality, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. Pasteur may be described as master-architect and Koch as master-builder…
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Leprosy and armadillos: Handle with care
Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden A nine-banded armadillo in the Green Swamp, central Florida. Photo by Tomfriedel (BirdPhotos.com), June 27, 2008, on Wikimedia. CC BY 3.0. 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…
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Rapid testing for the masses
Anthony Papagiannis Thessaloniki, Greece A summer camp of flowers. Photo by author. 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?…