“Nous portons tous des microbes”

World Tuberculosis Day fell yesterday, March 24th. The choice of date commemorates the day Dr. Robert Koch announced his discovery of the TB bacillus, Mycobacterium tuberculosis. In 1882, the year of Koch’s announcement, TB was responsible for seven million deaths.

Cracher à terre est un Danger. From the Osler Library Prints Collection.

Cracher à terre est un Danger. From the Osler Library Prints Collection.

This “image d’Épinal” is part of a series called “Propagande pour l’hygiène publique.” It was part of a wide campaign in the first half of the 20th century to sensitize the French public to tuberculosis and other infectious diseases, infant mortality, and alcoholism: the inevitable scourges that decimate humanity. “Images d’Épinal” were popular prints that illustrated traditional or country life. In this example, entitled “Cracher à terre est un Danger (Spitting on the ground is a danger),” a young instructor named Monsieur Ledoux visits a country home, where he is alarmed to see the sick grandfather spitting on the floor. He explains that tuberculosis germs are found in saliva and can be easily be transmitted through the air, as when the young wife sweeps the floors and sends up microbe-filled dust.

Monsieur Ledoux’s three crucial pieces of advice? Don’t sweep the floor when it’s dry, make sure people don’t spit on the floor, and give pocket spitoons to sick people.

 

Refs.

Robert Koch and Tuberculosis: Robert Koch’s famous lecture. December, 2003. Nobelprize.org.

Albert Calmette. La propagande pour l’hygiene sociale par le cinematographe. L’art à l’école. Bulletin de la Société Française de l’art à l’école, 78 (1922): 81-82.

Darwin, Osler, and McGill

Forget Valentine’s Day, did you wish someone Happy Darwin Day this week? International Darwin Day, which the Darwin Day Foundation describes as a “global celebration of science and reason,” is marked annually on February 12th, the birthday of the intrepid naturalist himself.

Sir William Osler (1849-1919) was an admirer of Charles Darwin’s (1809-1882) and counted in his personal library many of Darwin’s works, including a 3rd edition of his On the origin of species, containing the theory of evolution based on a process called natural selection, his 1871 The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex, examining the process of natural selection of humans, and his Journal of researches (also known as “The voyage of the Beagle”), a compilation of zoological and geological notes and observations made while on expedition with the HMS Beagle.

In his introductory essay to the catalogue of his collection, “The collecting of a library,” Osler shares some personal recollections that point to Darwin’s influence on his own intellectual development. As a student at the Toronto School of Medicine during the 1860s, the future Sir William lived, worked, and studied with Dr. James Bovell, for whom he kept the books and prepared specimens for microscope slides. Osler writes of the “mental tumult” of the sixties, during which “really devout students, of whom Dr. Bovell was one, were sore let and hindered, not to say bewildered, in attempts to reconcile Genesis and Geology.” Dr. Bovell himself was the sort of instructor, according to Osler, “more likely to lecture on what was in his mind than on the schedule, and a new monograph on Darwin or a recent controversial pamphlet would occupy the allotted hour.” Osler also waxes nostalgic over his student vacations spent with a microscope and copies of Darwin’s “’Voyage’ and the ‘Origin.’” (Bibliotheca Osleriana, xv-xxvi [McGill users])

In his catalogue notes for his copy of Darwin’s On the tendency of species to form varieties (1858), Osler recounts a meeting with Charles Darwin:

I only saw Darwin once. During the winter of 1872-3 his son Francis worked at the table next to me in Burdon Sanderson’s laboratory at University College. Several times in the spring he talked on taking me to Down for the week-end, but his father was ailing. It was, I think, the next spring, I mean in ’74, that I saw him at the Royal Society reception (?) He spoke much of Principal Dawson of McGill, for whose work on fossil botany he had a great regard. I remember how pleased I was that he should have asked after Dr. Dawson. He was a most kindly old man, of large frame, with great bushy beard and eyebrows. (B.O. 1565)

From the Osler Library Prints Collection. Photo-mechanical reproduction (photogravure). Published in Leipzig by Georg Thieme in 1909.

From the Osler Library Prints Collection. Photo-mechanical reproduction (photogravure). Published in Leipzig by Georg Thieme in 1909.

World Leprosy Day

January 30th is World Leprosy Day. Observed either on this day or the nearest Sunday, the day is designed to raise public awareness of leprosy, historically one of the most stigmatized illnesses.

Portrait of Gerhard Henrik Armauer Hansen (1841-1914), a Norwegian physician best known for identifying Mycobacterium leprae, the bacterium that causes leprosy, or Hansen’s disease. (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1912.) From the Osler Library Prints online.

Portrait of Gerhard Henrik Armauer Hansen (1841-1914), a Norwegian physician best known for identifying Mycobacterium leprae, the bacterium that causes leprosy, or Hansen’s disease. (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1912.) From the Osler Library Prints online.

See an article from the current issue of The Lancet about the success of eradication strategies in Iran. (McGill users)

The authors write:

Although leprosy was officially eliminated more than a decade ago, the disease has not been completely eradicated and the scars from the past linger on. Iran, with an annual incidence of less than 100 cases, is among the regions in which strategies recommended by WHO have been implemented successfully thanks to the availability of free multidrug therapy and leprosy elimination campaigns.

 

Read all about it with some resources from our circulating collection:

Boeckl, Christine. Images of leprosy: disease, religion, and politics in European art. Kirksville, Mo. : Truman State University Press, 2011.

Liang, Qizi. Leprosy in China: a history. New York : Columbia University Press, 2009.

Rawcliffe, Carole. Leprosy in medieval England. Woodbridge, UK ; Rochester, NY : Boydell Press, 2006.

Demaitre, Luke. Leprosy in premodern medicine: a malady of the whole body. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.

 

Or take a virtual tour of New Brunswick’s 19th century leper hospital here. Between 1844 and 1949, 327 patients with leprosy were housed and treated at this lazaretto.