Tag: Typhus
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Ship fever: A malignant disease of a most dangerous kind?
Richard de GrijsSydney, Australia During the Age of Sail, “road,” “workhouse,” “hospital,” “army,” “camp,” “emigrant,” “jail”/“gaol,” and “ship” were routine noun adjuncts pertaining to the deadly fevers frequently occurring in overcrowded spaces in cold weather. Although “fever” diagnoses were common, most such instances in ships’ surgeons’ journals related to typhus or typhoid fevers—until 1869, they…
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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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The Great War and the other war
Maryline AlhajjBeirut, Lebanon The reverberations of October 29, 1914 would carry throughout the lands of the Ottoman Empire and serve as an ominous premonition of disastrous years to come. On that day, following a surprise attack on Russia’s Black Sea coast,1 the Empire entered World War I. It was the beginning of the end, as…
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The Warsaw ghetto hunger study
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “The organism which is destroyed by prolonged hunger is like a candle which burns out: life disappears gradually without a shock to the naked eye.”– Emil Apfelbaum, M.D., prisoner in the Warsaw Ghetto Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. One year later, the 450,000 Jews of Warsaw were confined to a…
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The secret medical school in the Warsaw Ghetto
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden In September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The invaders quickly started to repress the Jews of Poland and confiscate their property and businesses. In November 1940, the Jews of Warsaw were confined to a walled-in area of about three-and-one-half square kilometers. About 400,000 to 500,000 people, the second largest Jewish community in…
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Review: The History of the World in 100 Pandemics, Plagues and Epidemics
Arpan BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom The publication of this book could not have been better timed. The book sets out to show how pandemics, epidemics, and infectious diseases have shaped human history over the last 5,000 years. Its contents help us place the current COVID-19 epidemic in its rightful historical context. Famine, war, and pestilence have…
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The hectic life of Leonardo Fioravanti
The first part of Leonardo Fioravanti’s life was uneventful; the second was tumultuous.1 Born in Bologna in 1517,1-4 he was fortunate in 1527 to survive a violent epidemic that may have been typhus. At age sixteen he began to study medicine, probably as an indentured apprentice to a barber-surgeon. At twenty-two he began practicing medicine…
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“Moonlight” and silence
Anne JacobsonOak Park, Illinois, United States At seventeen, I knew little about the limitations or losses that might cause a person to second-guess a vocation, deeply held belief, or identity. Perhaps those questions about the unknowable future inhabit the soul of a teenager under the guise of general angst and anxiety, or alternatively are tamped…
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Citizen Zinsser: Portrait of a Renaissance man
Philip R. Liebson In the September 16, 1940 issue of TIME Magazine an intriguing obituary was found: After a patient wait, death came last week to Hans Zinsser, bacteriologist, physician, philosopher, poet, ironist, historian, raconteur. At 61, he died of chronic leukemia, a slow-moving, mysterious disease of the blood for which there is no known…