Paul de Kruif's book, Microbe Hunters, published in New York in 1926, was a romanticized medical "history," written in a breathless style, that describes the lives and works of a dozen famous figures, ranging from Leeuwenhoek to Sir Ronald Ross. Ross, who received the Nobel Prize in 1902 for his discovery that certain mosquitoes transmit malaria, resented de Kruif's personal remarks and his version of the malaria story, especially concerning the disputes with Italian workers over priorities. In a little-known polemic "review" of Microbe Hunters, Ross castigated de Kruif for statements he considered libelous. While Ross could not sue for libel across the Atlantic, his threatened action for libel forced the publisher of the British edition of Microbe Hunters to delete the chapter about Ross and one about David Bruce, Ross's countryman. de Kruif's book, a best-seller in its day and influential among the young for a generation, now seems gauche and anachronistic. While Ross seems to have been justified in some of his complaints about Microbe Hunters, the bitter tone of his reactions all but confirms de Kruif's opinion of him. Ross died in 1932 with a permanent niche in medical history; de Kruif died in 1971 and is little remembered except, perhaps, for Microbe Hunters.

History, 20th Century↗

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Sir Patrick Manson's studies on the transmission and biology of filariasis.

In the obscurity of Amoy, South China, Patrick Manson first recognized that a bloodsucking arthropod can harbor--and presumably transmit--organisms of human disease: in particular, that the house mosquito is an intermediary of the filarial parasite Wuchereria bancrofti. Manson published his find in 1878 and within two years discovered that the parasite's "embryos" (microfilariae) exhibit "nocturnal periodicity," i.e., they absent themselves from the blood during the day and reappear at night coincident with the vector's greatest biting activity. The historical sequence of Manson's two findings have been confused and reversed in the literature, and in this paper evidence is adduced that the sequence given above is correct. Until the turn of this century, zoologists thought that mosquitoes took one blood-meal and died on water a few days later. Manson theorized that filarial larvae escaped from the mosquitoes into water and that people ostensibly infected themselves by drinking the contaminated water. When, however, infective larvae were found in 1900 in the mouthparts of mosquitoes, the concept that transmission occurred by bite (malaria transmission was by then understood) proved unavoidable. Nevertheless, about 70 years after the demise of Manson's old concept, workers succeeded in transmitting several kinds of W. bancrofti-related filarial organisms by mouth to gerbils. This finding served to support Manson's speculations of 1878-1900, altered the views of the parasite group to which the filariae belong, and now raises the difficult question of whether oral infection of humans does or does not occur naturally.

Animals↗

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Sir Patrick Manson: an annotated bibliography and a note on a collected set of his writings.

Explore the source record for details and available documents.

Africa↗

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A unique tribute to Theobald Smith, 1915.

From 1895 to 1915 Theobald Smith served as Professor of Comparative Pathology in the Harvard Medical School in Boston and concurrently as Director of the Massachusetts State Antitoxin and Vaccine Laboratory. On the verge of his departure for a new post at the Rockefeller Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, Smith's colleagues sponsored an elaborate dinner in his honor. Marshall Fabyan, who was the moving spirit behind the affair, also designed an eight-inch by ten-inch souvenir card on which twenty-six sketches depicted Smith's signal researches. This previously unpublished card is reproduced in the present paper, and a digest of the work represented by each sketch is provided. Collectively these summaries are evidence of the remarkable range of Smith's accomplishments, and they serve as a remainder of why Smith is universally regarded as the premier American microbiologist of his day.

Communicable Diseases↗

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Richard Pearson Strong and the iatrogenic plague disaster in Bilibid Prison, Manila, 1906.

In November 1906, Richard Pearson Strong, then head of the Philippine Biological Laboratory, inoculated 24 men--inmates of Manila's Bilibid Prison--with a cholera vaccine that somehow had been contaminated with plague organisms; 13 men died. The governor-general of the Philippines appointed a general committee to investigate the affair, and the U.S. Senate demanded information about the episode. Although the Senate, the secretary of war, and even the president were kept informed of developments, no mainland investigations ensued. The general committee concluded that Strong was negligent for not having locks on his incubators and for leaving a visiting physician alone in the laboratory, where he might have mixed up the cholera and plague cultures on the fateful day. The committee's charge was referred to the attorney general, who found Strong innocent of criminal negligence, whereupon the governor-general exonerated Strong. Strong was despondent over Bilibid but recovered and developed a noteworthy career in American tropical medicine. In retrospect, the disaster at Bilibid presents an epitome of the problems surrounding the use of prisoner-subjects without authorization and without their voluntary consent. Far ahead of its time, the general committee recognized and condemned the shortcomings and urged reform, pleas the government ignored. The Bilibid episode remains, however, as a cautionary tale for those engaged in clinical research.

Cholera Vaccines↗