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"Bacteriology history"
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The great stink of Paris and the nineteenth-century struggle against filth and germs
Ultimately, the attitudes of physicians and the French public were shaped by political struggles between republicans and the clergy, by aggressive efforts to educate and \"civilizethe peasantry, and by long-term shifts in the public's ability to tolerate the odor of bodily substances.
eBook
Fred Neufeld and pneumococcal serotypes: foundations for the discovery of the transforming principle
During the first decade of the twentieth century, the German bacteriologist Fred Neufeld, later Director of the Robert Koch-Institute in Berlin, first described the differentiation of pneumococci into serotypes on the basis of type-specific antisera. This finding was essential for subsequent research at the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research (RIMR) in New York, and elsewhere, aiming for the conquest of human pneumococcal pneumonia, including antiserum therapy, the discovery that the type-specific antigens were carbohydrates, and the development of effective multivalent pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccines. Moreover, on the basis of pneumococcal serotypes Fred Griffith, in 1928 in London, discovered pneumococcal transformation, and Oswald T. Avery and coworkers, in 1944 at RIMR, identified DNA as the transforming substance. This sequence of events, leading to today’s knowledge that genes consist of DNA, was initiated by a farsighted move of Simon Flexner, first Director of the RIMR, who asked Neufeld to send his pneumococcal typing strains, thus setting the stage for pneumococcal research at RIMR. Here, we describe Fred Neufeld’s contributions in this development, which have remained largely unknown.
Journal Article
From the ports to the hinterland. Plague, bacteriology, and politics in Argentina (1899–1940)
In 1899, the first cases of plague were recognised in Paraguay and a few months later in Buenos Aires as part of the third plague pandemic. In the first decades of the twentieth century, plague slowly advanced towards the Argentinian hinterland. In this paper we focus on the production of scientific knowledge about plague in Argentina, where a core of bacteriologists emerged early on. We show how they not only played a central role in the complex process of plague recognition and intervention, but also influenced the scientific development of bacteriology in Argentina and potentially in South America. We argue that bacteriology became a key tool in articulating the promises of modern science with political and economic interests, allowing the Argentinian government to extend its territorial control over Buenos Aires and the hinterland. This can be seen in two different configurations of the plague as an epistemic and political object in Argentina. In the first period, from 1899 to 1910, plague was a problem linked to the ports. In this section of the article, we show how plague became an important issue in the development of bacteriology in Argentina, how this research contributed to new intervention measures and, in some cases, developed innovative ideas about serotherapeutic treatments and the characteristics of the disease. In the second period, from the mid-1910s until the 1940s, research in Argentina provided new evidence of the 'rural' nature of plague, a process in deep dialogue with research on plague among peri-domestic and wild rodents carried out in other parts of the Americas, Europe and Africa. This article thus aims to contribute to a history of bacteriology that highlights the role of non-European centres, like Argentina, in the production and circulation of bacteriological knowledge.
Journal Article
Van Leeuwenhoek – the film: remaking memory in Dutch science cinema 1925– c. 1960
This paper examines how the production, content and reception of the film Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1924) influenced the historical framing of science. The film features microcinematography by the pioneering Dutch filmmaker Jan Cornelis Mol (1891–1954), and was part of a dynamic process of commemorating seventeenth-century microscopy and bacteriology through an early instance of visual re-creation – a new way of using scientific material heritage, and of enabling audiences to supposedly observe the world of microscopic organisms in just the same way as the Dutch scientist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) had observed them for himself. Knowledge transfer concerning material culture, around both historical and contemporary instruments, was the determining factor in the microcinematography practices applied in this film. The production and experience of the film also mirrored the seventeenth-century process of experimentation, playing with optics, and visualizing an entirely new and unknown world. Unlike other biographical science films of the 1920s, Antony van Leeuwenhoek featured abstract depictions of time and movement that allowed the audience to connect the history of science with microcinematography, contributing to the memory of Van Leeuwenhoek's work as the origins of bacteriology in the process.
Journal Article
Inventing with bacteriology: controversy over anti-cholera therapeutic serum and tensions between transnational science and local practice in Tokyo and Berlin (1890–1902)
The present article examines the material, epistemological, and social dimensions of late nineteenth-century anti-cholera serum controversies that unfolded in Tokyo and Berlin. It seeks to shed light on the conflicting values embedded in the construction of scientific evidence during the transnational exploration of bacteriology as an effective response to controlling epidemics. Driven by Japanese health authorities’ initiatives, Japanese bacteriologist Kitasato Shibasaburo participated in the elaboration of bacteriological research oriented toward therapeutic application during his stay in Berlin. This work coincided with the rise of a controversy over anti-cholera serum in relation to the animal experiments conducted by Richard Pfeiffer, a German bacteriologist. After presenting a series of animal experiments and certain clinical cases conducted in Germany, France, and Egypt in the context of the controversies, the article analyzes a therapeutic trial conducted by Kitasato in Japan during an 1895 cholera epidemic. His strategy, bringing new data to the transnational debate through an intensive investment of resources in the trial, provoked criticism from his Japanese and German colleagues. These critics questioned Kitasato’s method and pointed out the low social value of this experimental serum therapy, performed in highly equipped conditions. Through this case study, the present article highlights: a) a strong tension between transnational research interactions among bacteriologists and local medical practices during public health campaigns against epidemics at the turn of the twentieth century; b) the importance of analyzing the interconnected effects of local, national and transnational frameworks of medical science when examining the increasingly intertwined relationships between laboratory science and clinical medicine.
Journal Article
Antibiotic antagonist: the curious career of René Dubos
Only rarely do historians mention another miracle drug, gramicidin, and the Rockefeller researcher who discovered it, René Dubos. To some extent this is understandable: despite being hailed in 1939 as a \"hundred thousand times\" more powerful than the sulpha drugs, gramicidin proved highly toxic when administered intravenously and although it was widely used during World War 2 to treat wounds and other topical infections it was soon eclipsed by streptomycin.
Journal Article
'Tipping the Balance': Karl Friedrich Meyer, Latent Infections, and the Birth of Modern Ideas of Disease Ecology
The Swiss-born medical researcher Karl Friedrich Meyer (1884-1974) is best known as a 'microbe hunter' who pioneered investigations into diseases at the intersection of animal and human health in California in the 1920s and 1930s. In particular, historians have singled out Meyer's 1931 Ludwig Hektoen Lecture in which he described the animal kingdom as a 'reservoir of disease' as a forerunner of 'one medicine' approaches to emerging zoonoses. In so doing, however, historians risk overlooking Meyer's other intellectual contributions. Developed in a series of papers from the mid-1930s onwards, these were ordered around the concept of latent infections and sought to link microbial behavior to broader bio-ecological, environmental, and social factors that impact hostpathogen interactions. In this respect Meyer—like the comparative pathologist Theobald Smith and the immunologist Frank Macfarlane Burnet—can be seen as a pioneer of modern ideas of disease ecology. However, while Burnet's and Smith's contributions to this scientific field have been widely acknowledged, Meyer's have been largely ignored. Drawing on Meyer's published writings and private correspondence, this paper aims to correct that lacuna while contributing to a reorientation of the historiography of bacteriological epidemiology. In particular I trace Meyer's intellectual exchanges with Smith, Burnet and the animal ecologist Charles Elton, over brucellosis, psittacosis and plague—exchanges that not only showed how environmental and ecological conditions could 'tip the balance' in favor of parasites but which transformed Meyer thinking about resistance to infection and disease.
Journal Article
