1897 - Medicine

Medicine

The parasite that causes malaria is carried by the Anopheles mosquito, says British physician Ronald Ross, 40, in famine-stricken India (see Laveran, 1880). Ross has been investigating the possibility that mosquitoes may spread malaria, as was suggested in the case of yellow fever by Carlos J. Finlay in 1881; he shows that the Anopheles mosquito is the vector for malaria, and his discovery will lead to the draining of swamps where mosquitoes breed, to expanded use of window screens and mosquito netting, and—eventually—to widespread use of insecticides (see Reed, 1900; DDT, 1943).

The International Medical Congress publishes a report by Danish bacteriologist Johannes (Andreas Grib) Fibiger, 30, confirming the effectiveness of a serum he has developed to help children resist diphtheria (see Ehrlich's antitoxin, 1891). Persuaded to undertake doctoral work at the University of Copenhagen on the virulent childhood disease, Fibiger has found two distinct forms of the bacillus that causes it and produced an experimental serum (see cancer, 1907).

Cleveland-born Johns Hopkins pharmacologist and physiological chemist John Jacob Abel, 30, isolates adrenaline in the form of a chemical derivative (see Takamine, 1901).

Chemist Felix Hoffmann of the 47-year-old German dyestuffs firm Farbenfabriken vorm. Friedrich Bayer und Company succeeds August 10 in acetylating the phenol group of the compound salicylic acid (see Gerhardt, 1853). Concerned about his father's arthritis, Hoffman 4 years ago obtained a substance from willow tree bark that suppressed the enzyme cyclo-oxygenase, which plays a major role in pain and inflammation; he and his colleague Hermann Dreser will go on to develop a powdered analgesic (painkiller) and fever reducer from coal tar (see Aspirin, 1899).

Studies in the Psychology of Sex by English physician (Henry) Havelock Ellis, 38, is published in the first of seven volumes that will appear in the next 31 years. The work provides the first detached treatment of the subject untainted by feelings of guilt but creates a storm of controversy and is banned in Britain.