Historical Medical Library

What do you think about when someone mentions Benjamin Franklin? Do you think of the statesman, the inventor, the man with the kite in the thunderstorm, or the first Postmaster General? Among his many activities and accomplishments, Benjamin Franklin also managed to include a little bit of epidemiology when he wrote the introduction to a pamphlet about variolation in 1759. Epidemiology is the study of “that which comes upon the people.” Two forms of epidemiology are descriptive epidemiology and analytical epidemiology. Analytical epidemiology is done through the use of statistics to research diseases and interventions based on the observations done through descriptive epidemiology. Franklin performed descriptive epidemiology in showing the number of cases of smallpox, the number of deaths attributable to smallpox, and similar descriptive numbers of people who received variolation in colonial Boston. More

We set ourselves the task yesterday of examining a set of materials in the College’s Historical Medical Library from the Anti-Vaccination Society of America. This organization was active in the late 1800s and early 1900s, along with a collection of other anti-vaccination leagues of somewhat confusing overlap and origin. The materials we have seem to come from the period that the society was active from the Terre Haute, Indiana, home of Frank D. Blue. Blue served as secretary of the society and seems to have been responsible for much of its day-to-day activity, including editing the society’s periodical, Vaccination. The society’s president at the time, L.H. Piehn, was a Nora Springs, Iowa, banker whose daughter was reported to have died from the effects of smallpox vaccination in 1894. Blue corresponded widely with other anti-vaccination societies, including the American Anti-Vaccination League in New York and societies in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Massachusetts, and England. Moreover, he seems to have been involved with a collection of other reform groups active at the time, including anti-vivisectionists (who often objected to the idea that rabies was an infectious disease), temperance advocates, vegetarians, homeopaths, phrenologists, “scientific palmists,” and a society for the prevention of premature burial (that latter was a particular interest of British anti-vaccinator William Tebb). More

We were pleased to see Lisa Rosner, PhD, in the Historical Medical Library here at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia the other day. Rosner, who is professor of history at Stockton College as well as an advisor to History of Vaccines, is the recipient of an NEH grant in the digital humanities to develop a role-playing game about early smallpox vaccination in Scotland. She was in the library finding great materials for the game, and we’re looking forward to playing it and promoting it when it’s completed. Keep an eye on her blog to read about the progress her team is making on the game. You can also follow her on Twitter to enjoy her musings on the history of medicine and her book The Anatomy Murders. The post below is reproduced from her blog with her permission.

Imagine a world in which there are no antibiotics, no routine medical checkups, no blood tests, and no sterile surgery. Imagine a world in which people are surrounded by deadly microbes, with no way to hold them in check. And now imagine that there exists one, and only one, proven vaccine: the vaccine for smallpox. The trouble is, that vaccine is very new and largely untested.

Now imagine that you live in Edinburgh in 1802. A young doctor in the city, Alexander Robertson, is trying to set up a vaccination dispensary, to protect people from the deadly smallpox virus while establish a paying medical practice. More

It’s National Influenza Vaccination Week, and we’re taking a look back to 1918, the time of the “Spanish” influenza pandemic. When the illness emerged, several useful vaccines had already been developed: smallpox, typhoid fever, and rabies, for example. Scientists and physicians tried many different approaches to develop influenza vaccines during the pandemic even though the cause of influenza was not clear. We look at several of them below.

No other epidemic has claimed as many lives as the Spanish influenza epidemic in 1918-1919. Worldwide, at least 40 million people died as this virulent illness swept through city after city (some estimates put total deaths closer to 70 million). Newspaper reports described people dying within hours of first feeling ill. The mortality rate was highest among adults under age 50, who were, for unknown reasons, particularly vulnerable to serious disease resulting from this strain of influenza.

The first reported cases of an unusual influenza appeared in U.S. Army camps in Kansas in early spring 1918. Later that spring, officials reported large numbers of cases from Europe, though this flu did not seem particularly dangerous. However, influenza became more deadly in late summer. Soon waves of infection moved through towns, nations, and continents, overwhelming hospitals and medical personnel. Because of wartime censorship, reports of influenza were not widely distributed, but news from Spain continued to flow. The name Spanish influenza came from the devastating effects of the flu in Spain in autumn 1918. More

Robert D. Hicks, PhD, Director, Mütter Museum/Historical Medical Library, The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, contributes today’s blog post. In preparation for an exhibit on Civil War medicine at the Mütter Museum in 2012, Dr. Hicks has been researching, among other topics, the occurrence of spurious vaccination in the Civil War. Spurious vaccination was smallpox vaccination that either did not produce immunity in the recipient or that resulted in a transfer of a communicable disease such as syphilis. While physicians in the United States frequently used humanized smallpox vaccine during the Civil War, French physicians at the time were popularizing a mode of smallpox vaccination that relied solely on serial propagation of vaccine in cows. Human transmission of smallpox vaccine disappeared by the turn of the century.

According to Joseph Jones, MD, Professor of Physiology and Pathology, University of Nashville, vital medical research was “brought to a sudden and unexpected close, by the disastrous termination of the civil war.” Writing in 1866, in a radically changed and changing South in the aftermath of the Civil War which ended the previous year, Jones expressed frustration that a Confederate medical investigation on smallpox vaccinations “was destroyed during the evacuation of Richmond.” Confederate medical records in Richmond, Virginia, disappeared after the victorious Union Army torched the city. Vexed by these circumstances, Jones surveyed physicians throughout the South who served in the Confederate Army to elicit data about “spurious vaccinations” and resurrect the destroyed report. Spurious cases were smallpox vaccinations of soldiers deemed “accidents” because they conferred no subsequent immunity to the disease or, compounding misery, introduced other diseases incident to vaccination, particularly syphilis. Jones paints a dire portrait of a Confederate Army that experienced far too many deaths and disabilities due to spurious vaccinations. More

Research for new articles about typhoid fever and cholera have kept us busy in The College's Historical Medical Library over the past week, and as usual, we stumbled across some great holdings. One that we particularly wanted to share was this map showing deaths from typhoid fever and malaria in Washington, D.C., from 1888-1892.

Click on the image or click here to be taken to its page in the Gallery, where you can zoom in on the map to see how the diseases affected the city's districts. With red dots representing deaths from typhoid, and blue representing deaths from malaria, the map documents 626 typhoid deaths and 363 from malaria over the five-year period. More

If you've been following our blog over the past few months, you'll notice that our look has changed. Our website, historyofvaccines.org, is now in previews after several years of planning and about a year of development.

The site provides a historical and scientific context for the development of immunizations. It features not only holdings of the Historical Medical Library and Mütter Museum of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, but also images, text, and video from a variety of public and private sources.

We invite you to explore the site -- the media-rich timelines on yellow fever, polio, smallpox, measles, diphtheria, and other diseases; the educational activities on how vaccines work, how vaccines are made, and how the scientific method is employed; the variety of articles on social and medical issues surrounding vaccination; and the gallery, which houses over 400 images and videos.

The History of Vaccines will officially launch on November 3, 2010, with an event here in Philadelphia: Stanley A. Plotkin, MD, developer of the rubella vaccine in current worldwide use, and emeritus professor of The Wistar Institute and The University of Pennsylvania, will give the Samuel X Radbill lecture entitled "Four Centuries of Vaccinology." Register HERE for the free event.

If you'd like to be notified about future History of Vaccines events and content releases, join our email list. More

In anticipation of the launch of the full History of Vaccines website on September 29, we offer here an excerpt from our collection of smallpox information.

Dover's Title Page Dover's Title Page, The College of Physicians of Philadelphia Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689), a noted English doctor, had observed that the rich seemed to have a higher mortality rate from smallpox than the poor. This led him to conclude that contemporary medical treatments, largely inaccessible to the poor, might be more harmful than helpful in mild smallpox cases. And yet, the care he provided his own patients was quite elaborate. Thomas Dover, a patient of Sydenham and a future doctor, documented his treatment at Sydenham’s hands for a serious case of smallpox. Below is Dover’s description; it is likely that the year is 1684. More

Darin Hayton, PhD, recently wrote a post for The Philadelphia Area Center for the History of Science blog about Marie Curie’s 1923 visit to The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. While here, Curie presented the College with her piezo-electric apparatus (which later needed to be decontaminated). At this event, Robert Abbe, about whom we have written, donated to the College his collection of Louis Pasteur memorabilia.

Please take a look: History of Science in Philadelphia: Curie’s Early Piezo-Electric Apparatus

Many of the items from the Curie and Pasteur collections are on display in the lobby of the College, and others are held in the Historical Medical Library. More

Early in our vaccine research at The Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, we came across an interesting reprint from a 1911 medical journal. In honor of the anniversary of the birth of the article’s subject, we’ll share some of the images here.

Sir Almroth Edward Wright, born August 10, 1861, died 1947, was a British bacteriologist who co-developed an inactivated typhoid vaccine (1896) and pneumococcal vaccine (1911). He promoted the use of autogenous vaccines for bacterial infections—that is, removing bacteria from a patient’s own infection and inactivating it, and then treating the patient with the material. This type of therapy became largely obsolete with the development of antimicrobials.

As one book reviewer states, Wright had “a deep aversion to statistics,” and some of Wright’s own claims for efficacy of his vaccines were difficult or impossible to evaluate. (Wright was colorful in other ways: he opposed women’s suffrage to such a degree that he wrote a 1913 treatise titled The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage, from which we will avoid quoting here–as this post is, remember, in honor of his birthday. You are, however, invited to read it at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5183.) Wright’s typhoid vaccine, however, was shown to be effective in a large trial by the British War Board, and it protected thousands of soldiers in the British Army during World War I. More