Anne Hardy

The epidemic streets : infectious disease and the rise of preventive medicine, 1856-1900

Introduction 1. Whooping Cough 2. Measles 3. Scarlet Fever 4. Diphtheria 5. Smallpox 6. Typhoid 7. Typhus 8. Tuberculosis 9. The Impact of Local Preventive Medicine Appendix: Statistical Note Bibliography Index

Diagnosis, death, and diet: the case of London, 1750-1909.

The author questions the validity of recent research concerning the historical study of mortality trends in England. Specifically she suggests that the available data concerning the relationship between diet and mortality in London between 1750 and 1909 are too faulty to permit the application of sophisticated statistical methods. A critique is presented of a study by Mary K. Matossian on this topic. (ANNOTATION)

Questions of Quality: The Danish State Serum Institute, Thorvald Madsen and Biological Standardization

The opening of the Danish State Serum Institute (SSI) in Copenhagen on 9 September 1902 was a festive occasion, attended by renowned figures from the wider bacteriological community including the German scientists Paul Ehrlich, Carl Weigert, and Julius Morgenroth, future Nobel prize-winner Svante Arrhenius from Sweden, Ole Malm and Armauer Hansen from Norway, and William Bulloch and German Sims Woodhead from England.1 Established as a national resource for the production of diphtheria antitoxin, the SSI was from its inception concerned to deliver a quality product at a minimum price, and to link pharmaceutical production with research into, and further development of, biological products. In the course of the twentieth century, the institute acquired an international reputation for the quality of its products and its cutting edge research, and, in the 1920s, achieved international authority as the League of Nations Health Commission’s central laboratory for the preservation and distribution of all standard sera and bacterial products.2 The rise of the SSI to international prominence came about through a combination of factors, personal, scientific and political, but above all, perhaps, from its early association with questions of quality in the production of the new generation biological medicines, of which diphtheria antitoxin was the first to emerge.

A New Chapter in Medical History

Once the domain of physicians intent on recording and memorializing professional achievements, the history of medicine has become fully interdisciplinary, encompassing myriad topics. Oddly, however, the problems that actually generate medicine, the diseases themselves, havewith such notable exceptions as plague, cholera, smallpox, tuberculosis, and hiv/aidsattracted relatively little attention until recently. Disease history now appears ready to enter a new phase.