The brilliant minds who fought for all our lives
As research continues for a Covid-19 cure MARION MCMULLEN looks at the miracle workers who changed the face of medicine
‘IT IS surmounting difficulties that makes heroes,” French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur once pointed out. Diseases like cholera, typhoid and smallpox once killed millions across the globe and children born in the UK in the mid-19th century faced a life expectancy of around 40.
Smallpox alone is estimated to have caused up to 500 million deaths in the 20th century before the World Health Organisation announced it had finally been eradicated in 1980, after mass vaccinations.
Queen Victoria mourned for the rest of her life after her beloved husband Prince Albert died of typhoid fever at the age of 42 and wrote in a letter to her uncle King Leopold of Belgium: “... to be cut off in the prime of life – to see our pure happy, quiet domestic life, which alone enabled me to bear my much disliked portion, cut off at forty-two – when I hoped with such instinctive certainty that God would never part us, and would let us grow old together – is too awful, too cruel.”
Cholera led to the death of Russian composer Tchaikovsky at 53 while famous Native American Pocahontas is thought to have died from smallpox aged just 21.
Major medical advances have since proved life-savers, but some have come about by accident, such as Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming’s initial discovery of penicillin in 1928 which led to more new antibiotics from the 1940s onwards.
Notoriously untidy, he was working on an influenza virus when he went on holiday for two weeks and left a petri dish in his lab containing a type of bacteria.
He returned to find mould in the dish after accidental contamination leading to a bacteria-free circle that he isolated and initially called mould juice before naming his discovery penicillin and reporting it in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology in 1929.
He later said: One sometimes finds what one is not looking for.”
British doctor Edward Jenner noticed in 1796 that people who became ill with the relatively mild cowpox did not catch the often-fatal smallpox. It led to him injecting a farmer’s son first with pus from a milkmaid’s cowpox blisters and then with smallpox to prove his theory.
The boy became mildly ill, but did not develop smallpox and made a full recovery in a few days. The discovery led to the development of a vaccine to combat the deadly disease.
Edward Jenner said: “While the vaccine was progressive, the joy I felt at the prospect before me of being the instrument destined to take away one of the world’s greatest calamities, blended with the fond hope of enjoying independence and domestic peace and happiness, was often so excessive that, in pursuing my favourite subject among the meadows I have sometimes found myself in a kind of reverie.”
Louis Pasteur was also a pioneer in germ theory in the 19th century and, as well as giving his name to “pasteurisation,” developed the first vaccines against rabies and anthrax.
Surgeon Joseph Lister, who was born in 1827, stopped many patients from dying from infection with his pioneering work in antiseptics using Pasteur’s studies to guide him.
It led to cases of gangrene falling and handwashing and the sterilisation of surgical instruments becoming the norm at a time when many surgeons regarded unwashed hands and bloodstained surgical gowns as a symbol of their work... with patients often dying from post-op infections.
Lister’s hygiene regime was mocked by his peers until the survival rates on hospital wards rose dramatically.
He has been called the father of modern surgery and proudly recorded of his methods used on his wards “during the last nine months not a single instance of pyaemia, hospital gangrene or erysipelas has occurred in them”.
Marie Curie’s discovery of radium and polonium led to ground-breaking cancer treatments, although she died herself at the age of 66 in 1934 as a result of exposure to radiation from her experiments.
She famously said: “Nothing is life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now it the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
New Zealand doctor Archibald Mcindoe led the way in the field of plastic surgery treating pilots with burns during the Second World War. Previous treatments had included acid to remove damaged skin which often left burns victims severely scarred for life.
Archibald introduced new saline bath treatments after noticing that pilots whose planes had ended up the sea in salt water healed better than those who had crashed on land.
His pioneering techniques also included skin grafts and his patients at Queen Victoria Hospital in Sussex fondly called themselves The Guinea Pig Club.
Archibald, known as The Boss, was knighted for his work in 1947 and by the end of the war the Guinea Pig Club had 649 members.
Prince Philip unveiled a memorial stone at the National Memorial Arboretum, Staffs, in 2016.
One one side it was inscribed, “Out of the flames came inspiration”. On the reverse was Sir Archibald’s face.