Louis Pasteur

Following my last post about Robert Koch's visit to India in 1897, I have been reading about another world renowned scientist's contribution to veterinary medicine. Louis Pasteur (1822-1895, pictured) is credited with discovering that microbes cause disease and is admired still for his pioneering work in microbiology. The French scientist began studying anthrax and fowl cholera in the late 1870's. Inspired by Jenner's inoculation against smallpox, Pasteur weakened (attenuated) the fowl cholera bacteria and created a vaccine that prevented animals contracting the disease.
In 1855 his rabies vaccine was tested on 9 year old Joseph Meister who had been bitten many times by a rabid dog. The boy lived and the vaccine was another one of his achievements that saved millions of human and animal lives.
Rabies features heavily in the Medical History of British India Project as it infects both animals and humans. Notable volumes I have worked with include:
Sir David Semple's work in India on his 1911 vaccine
Pasteur Institute at Kasauli
Pasteur Institute of Southern India
Various articles featuring in the Indian Journal of Veterinary Science and animal husbandry
Plus a recent book (2007) on rabies in Britain Mad Dogs and Englishmen

There is no doubt that both Koch and Pasteur were brilliant scientists, but there are also many more who did important work in the field of microbiology and veterinary medicine. I will be writing about those I have found in the veterinary volumes in the coming weeks.
Picture of Pasteur holding eyeglasses credit: Wellcome Images.

Mad dogs and elephants

I have just started adding metadata for each volume of the Veterinary medicine material (from the India Papers), which forms Phase 3 of the Medical History of British India project. These 146 volumes will be online in late 2009. The first batch is about veterinary diseases and includes books on elephants. Elephants were used in India in the timber trade and also for transporting goods. It was vital that these animals, like many others employed by the government or army, were kept in good health, and these books give much detail about care and handling of elephants as well as how to treat elephant diseases. I wasn't aware until recently that elephants could contract rabies. Here is an account of a rare incident from A treatise on elephants by G.H. Evans (1901):"A mad dog, about five years ago, appeared in the elephant lines at Hyderabad. During the night it attacked an elephant when asleep and bit it on the trunk. The bite marks having been distinctly observed the next day, a little oil was applied, but nothing more was done and nothing particular occured till a month after the bite. During the first three days the [elephant] took food, ratib, and water, but afterwards took nothing. It did not appear to be afraid of water, as it drew it into its trunk and squirted it about, but did not drink any. It continued furious for two days, not allowing even the mahout to approach, after which it fell down and died suddenly."
The picture above shows "probably one of the finest workers in the Province [Burma]" and comes from the same volume. It appears as though this elephant was nearing the end of his life, which could have spanned eighty years or more.

Scientific Memoirs

This week I finished cataloguing (adding metadata to a database for each page) a series called Scientific Memoirs by Officers of the Medical and Sanitary Departments of the Government of India. This was the first Anglo-Indian publication entirely devoted to biological research. Published in Calcutta from the late 1890's to 1913, there is much pioneering medical work in these volumes.

There is still no vaccine for malaria, but in these memoirs scientist S. R. Christophers, a celebrated and lifelong malariologist, was studying the transmission of malaria (it is now known from Ronald Ross that the Plasmodium parasite was carried in female mosquito saliva and injected into its victim). There are reports of anti-malarial operations at Mian Mir, where standing water, breeding grounds of the Anopheles mosquito, were being destroyed in an attempt to control the disease.

Christophers also worked on kala azar, a deadly disease caused by the parasite Leishmania donovani, which causes fevers, enlargement of the liver and lowers immunity. It is known as Dum Dum Fever or Black Fever and is transmitted via the bite of a female sandfly.

Another microbiologist, W. S. Patton, was sure that the parasite was present in bedbugs and he spent many years studying these insects and his work is also in the Scientific Memoirs. It makes me feel itchy just thinking about his experiments!

Also in the Memoirs is a book by David Semple from 1911 when he developed his Semple rabies vaccine from Pasteur's original. There is work on cholera by D. D. Cunningham who was born in Prestonpans, and plenty of reading about snake venoms and anti-venomous sera, dysentery, typhoid fever and black-water fever.

Click on the image to see David Prain's 1904 drawings of cannabis plants.

What I find fascinating about these volumes is the scientific rigour that was applied to the work and the excitement of new discoveries. These scientists are truly amazing and as Robert S. Desowitz says, "they pursued their microbial quarry with a tenacity that by today's standards of paid-for-by-project research seems almost quixotic." (The Malaria Capers, p.41)