Kitasato, Shibasaburo: The Physician Who Built Modern Immunology and Shielded Japan from Epidemics
Worldwide, infectious diseases were responsible for millions of deaths during the late nineteenth century. Only recently had science…
The Eccentric Japanese Microbiologist Who Died in Africa Proving Yellow Fever Was Bacterial Hideyo Noguchi
Few international scientists captured the imagination of the public in the early decades of the twentieth century as…
Controlled human volunteer trials at Walter Reed confirmed Finlay’s Mosquito Theory systematically
A crisis faced the United States Army in occupied Cuba in summer 1900 that bullets could not resolve.…
Doctor Carlos Finlay: The Cuban who argued mosquitoes are the only carrier of yellow fever for decades
Throughout history, yellow fever has been one of the most fearsome diseases in the Western Hemisphere. In tropical…
Rebecca Lee Crumpler: First Black Female Doctor in U.S. Who Fought in Post-Civil War South to Heal Freed Slaves
The history of American medicine in the middle of the nineteenth century was almost entirely a history of…
Virginia M. Alexander: The Black Doctor Who Conducted Early Public Health Surveys. Unmasking Structural Racism in Infant Mortality
In the first decades of the 20th century, public health authorities in the US often explained high rates…
T.A.I. Grillo. The Structural Challenges and Baseline Triumphs of Building West Africa’s Early Indigenous Medical Faculty
In the middle of the twentieth century, as countries across West Africa emerged from colonial rule, the search…
Thomas Adeoye Lambo The Nigerian Psychiatrist Who Revolutionized Mental Health Through The Use Of Traditional Community Networks
In the mid-twentieth century, while Western countries continued to erect fortress-like, isolated mental institutions to segregate patients from…
Albert Schweitzer: The Organist And Philosopher Who Abandoned European Fame To Build A Jungle Hospital In Gabon
At the turn of the twentieth century, few European intellectuals had a future as bright or as certain…
Selman Waksman: The Screening Pioneer Who Coined “Antibiotic” But Had a Bitter Legal Lawsuit Over Streptomycin
The discovery of antimicrobial drugs in the mid-twentieth century revolutionized medicine across the globe. Penicillin had already proven…