Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Yellow Fever

  • How conflict and bureaucracy delayed the elimination of yellow fever

    Edward McSweeganKingston, Rhode Island, United States The Golden Age of Bacteriology (1876–1906) saw the emergence of techniques to cultivate bacterial pathogens and develop vaccines and anti-toxin therapies against them. The new bacteriologists rapidly identified the agents causing anthrax, gonorrhea, typhoid, tuberculosis, cholera, tetanus, diphtheria, plague, and other infectious diseases. One microbe that remained stubbornly elusive…

  • Philadelphia’s plague

    Hayat El BoukariTetouan, Morocco On August 3, 1793, a young French sailor rooming at Richard Denney’s boarding house was desperately ill with a fever.1 As he was a poor foreigner, no one bothered to find out his name. His fever worsening, he died a few days later, as also did eight residents from two houses…

  • William Gorgas – Life and medical legacy

    Mariel TishmaChicago, Illinois, United States The Panama Canal Zone in the early 1900s was described as “one of the must unhealthful places in the world.”1 Ridden with mosquitoes, the Isthmus of Panama was a hotbed of yellow fever, malaria, and pneumonia. Previous efforts to render the Isthmus healthy and habitable to outsiders had been unsuccessful.…

  • Clara Maass, yellow fever, and the early days of ethical medical testing

    Mariel TishmaChicago, Illinois, United States Clara Maass was born on June 28, 1876, in the quiet New Jersey township of East Orange. The oldest daughter of Hedwig and Robert E. Maass, she grew up helping to raise and provide for her eight younger siblings. She learned quickly to put others’ needs before her own, finding…

  • Physician: study thyself

    Susan HurleyVictoria, Australia In 2016 one man died and five others suffered brain damage during a drug trial in Rennes, France.1 A similar disaster occurred during the 2006 London trial of a novel monoclonal antibody: six men experienced an immediate systemic inflammatory response and became critically ill with multi-organ failure.2 These tragedies are a poignant…

  • 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…