Tag Archives: Typhus

The Great War and the other war

January 10, 2022

Maryline Alhajj Beirut, Lebanon   Starving man and children in Mount Lebanon. 1915–1918. Unknown photographer. Via Wikimedia. Public domain due to age.   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 […]

The Warsaw ghetto hunger study

January 6, 2022

Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   A photo documenting clinical research on hunger performed by a group of Jewish doctors in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942. From Emil Apfelbaum (red.)… 1942, American Joint Distribution Committee. a photo between pages 20 and 21. Via Wikimedia. “The organism which is destroyed by prolonged hunger is like a candle […]

The secret medical school in the Warsaw Ghetto

December 9, 2021

Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   Poland, Warsaw Ghetto. Passers-by next to a Jewish child in rags lying on the sidewalk (sleeping, sick or dying?). 1941. German Federal Archives. Via Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 3.0 DE. In September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The invaders quickly started to repress the Jews of Poland and confiscate their property […]

Review: The History of the World in 100 pandemics, plagues and epidemics

September 24, 2021

Arpan Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom   Cover: The History of the World in 100 pandemics, plagues and epidemics. 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 hectic life of Leonardo Fioravanti

November 19, 2020

Leonardo Fioravanti. Via Wikimedia. 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 […]

Darling of Panama

August 24, 2020

Enrique Chaves-Carballo Kansas City, Kansas, United States   Samuel Taylor Darling at age 51, portrait by Underwwod & Underwood, 1923. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Samuel Taylor Darling, widely considered as the foremost American tropical parasitologist and pathologist of his time, was born in Harrison, New Jersey on April 6, 1872. […]

“Moonlight” and silence

October 2, 2019

Anne Jacobson Oak Park, Illinois, United States   Woman at the Piano. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1875/76. Art Institute of Chicago. 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 […]

Citizen Zinsser: portrait of a Renaissance man

January 30, 2017

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 […]