Looks at the miracle workers who changed the face of medicine
As research continues for a Covid-19 cure MARION McMULLEN
T 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