Democratic, divine and heroic: the history and historiography of surgery
Christopher Lawrence in Medical Theory, Surgical Practice, 2018
Even if many of the generation before Cheyne would have been surprised to hear that they were not scientific there were differences. The science of the Edwardian surgeons was not simply that of the surgeons themselves. It was the science of, for example, the physiologist and the bacteriologist and it was a science generated in a new area, the laboratory. It was also different in content; it was overwhelmingly experimental. Experimental or physiological surgery, as it was also called, introduced a new dimension to surgical practice. With the exception of dissection and the practising of operations on corpses the new sciences were the first disciplines to attack surgical problems away from the operating table. Shock was one of the first problems to fall to this new approach.184 The establishment of scientific surgery in the Edwardian era, however, must not be overstated. Many surgeons continued to hold that their clinical judgements, and not the pronouncements of laboratory scientists, were the ultimate arbiters of practice.185 Only, perhaps, when surgeons were sure that laboratory science was subservient to surgery was that science designated the basis of surgical practice. Professional scientists could, after all, have a totally different perspective on the object of surgical attention. As Lindsay Granshaw shows, rectal anatomy looked different to pedagogical anatomists from how it looked to surgeons.186 Similarly, anaesthetists could find laboratory experiments less relevant to their discipline than others suggested they were.187
Certainty? Maybe, Maybe Not: 1950 to 2000
John K. Crellin in A Social History of Medicines in the Twentieth Century, 2020
Although the history of antimicrobials133 starts well before the 1950s, even before the first investigations in 1935 on a sulfa medicine (Prontosil), the relative success of the latter, with demonstrations of its value for treating puerperal fever, opened the door to a new era.134 A flood of articles in medical journals soon showed its potential for treating life-threatening blood infections and chronic conditions (notably gonorrhea); public enthusiasm was raised.135 However, an article in a 1936 issue of The Practitioner hinted at caution when acknowledging that the "enthusiasm of this group of compounds in Germany and France is little short of astonishing." The article noted that a great deal of work will have to be done to investigate the mode of action and the chemical constitution associated with the maximum degree of activity. The whole field is one of the most fascinating that has been presented for some considerable time alike to the clinician, the chemist, and the bacteriologist.136
Epidemiology
Samuel C. Morris in Cancer Risk Assessment, 2020
As the name suggests, epidemiology started as the study of epidemics in an attempt to find out what caused them and how to control them. Every epidemiologist studies John Snow, who stopped a London cholera epidemic by removing the handle of the Broad Street pump. He plotted the location of cholera cases house by house and found the common factor to be the water supply (Snow, 1855). Snow’s basic methods are still used today. More important for our purposes, however, is Snow’s philosophical approach. He used epidemiology as a pragmatic tool for protecting public health. John Snow didn’t know about the germ theory of disease. He didn’t know about disinfection. Chlorination and immunization hadn’t been discovered. What he did know was that his cases all drew water from the Broad Street pump, and he could change that. The infectious disease epidemiologist today is backed up by the armamentarium of the bacteriologist, the virologist, the immunologist, the biochemist, and others. All of that and more is also available to the cancer epidemiologist. The epidemiologist, together with laboratory scientists and others, contributes to the scientific base that one day may bring a full understanding of cancer. Today our view of cancer is still somewhat akin to Snow’s view of cholera. The cancer epidemiologist essentially is still in the phase of looking for common factors. Laboratory-based aides, however, are growing in importance.
Parabacteroides distasonis: intriguing aerotolerant gut anaerobe with emerging antimicrobial resistance and pathogenic and probiotic roles in human health
Published in Gut Microbes, 2021
Jessica C. Ezeji, Daven K. Sarikonda, Austin Hopperton, Hailey L. Erkkila, Daniel E. Cohen, Sandra P. Martinez, Fabio Cominelli, Tomomi Kuwahara, Armand E. K. Dichosa, Caryn E. Good, Michael R. Jacobs, Mikhail Khoretonenko, Alida Veloo, Alexander Rodriguez-Palacios
Parabacteroides distasonis is a re-classified bacterium named after A. Distaso, a Romanian bacteriologist who was involved in the description of the Bacteroides phylum species in the 1910s.18,19 Originally, P. distasonis was considered part of the Bacteroides genus, where it bore the name Bacteroides distasonis. Prior to the 1980s, classification of bacteria was based on phenotypic features, which meant that all gram-negative rods with certain phenotypic profiles were designated as being part of Bacteroides.20 For decades, only minor changes in taxonomy were implemented, even though the Bacteroides genus increasingly started to contain vast numbers of strains and species (>50) that greatly differed phenotypically from one another.21
René Cruchet (1875–1959), beyond encephalitis lethargica
Published in Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 2022
Olivier Walusinski
On April 1, 1917, Cruchet, at that time working at the Bar-le–Duc neuropsychiatric center, presented a paper to the Hospital Medical Society in Paris covering 40 cases of subacute encephalomyelitis observed in a period of nine months, or 3% of the wounded and sick patients he had examined. It was published on April 27, 1917, with two famous coauthors: François Moutier (1881–1961), a student of Pierre Marie (1853–1940) at La Salpêtrière Hospital, and Albert Calmette (1863–1933), a bacteriologist at Institut Pasteur. The onset was characterized by extreme weariness, physical and mental weakness and headache. The fever was mild: “these patients, aged between twenty-five and forty-five years, all give the impression of being severely infected or intoxicated, with their inert facial expression, their emotional indifference, their semi-torpor, their weight loss, their ashen tint, sometimes semi-jaundiced, their lack of appetite” (Cruchet, Moutier, and Calmette 1917).
Biological challenges of phage therapy and proposed solutions: a literature review
Published in Expert Review of Anti-infective Therapy, 2019
Katherine M Caflisch, Gina A Suh, Robin Patel
The earliest accounts of phage, circa 1890s, are as storied as they are disputed, particularly regarding the individual(s) to whom credit for their discovery should be attributed. The majority of sources contend that in 1896, Ernest Hanbury Hankin, a bacteriologist commissioned by the British Commonwealth, observed in the waters of India’s Ganges and Yamuna rivers an inhibitory phenomenon which thwarted growth of Vibrio cholerae [3], and that in 1898, Russian scientist Nikolay Gamaleya made similar observations in his study of Bacillus subtilis [4]. English bacteriologist Frederick Twort is widely remembered as the next noteworthy individual in the phage narrative; in 1915, he observed phage in bacterial contaminants of Vaccinia virus, cultures, though he ascribed this to a bacterial co-factor negatively impacting cellular viability [2,3]. While this interpretation was ultimately incorrect, Twort’s research greatly contributed to the field’s understanding of phage biology [2]. Finally, a 1917 publication by Felix d’Herelle at the Pasteur Institute describing an “invisible microbe” [5] leads some sources to ascribe the discovery of phage to him. Nevertheless, most sources contend that it was d’Herelle who first developed the notion of using phages therapeutically [6].
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