1915 | Medicine
Medicine
Coal tar's cancer-causing properties are demonstrated by Japanese chemists Katsusaburo Yamagiwa and Koichi Ichikawa, who paint laboratory rabbits' ears with coal tar in some of the earliest experiments that produce cancer in animals (see Fibiger, 1913; Kennaway, 1933). Johannes Fibiger at Copenhagen will soon adopt their procedures for his own work.
Medics on both sides of the European conflict control tetanus infections by injecting a prophylactic antitoxin into all wounded men, using a serum prepared in the early 1890s by Emil von Behring and Shibasaburo Kitasato; the first large-scale trial of the serum confirms its efficacy, but no efficient vaccine will be developed until the 1930s.
British bacteriologist Frederick (William) Twort, 38, discovers a virus that attacks certain bacteria (it will soon be called a bacteriophage). Twort does not follow up on his discovery, but Montreal-born microbiologist Félix d'Hérelle, 44, at the Institut Pasteur in Paris noticed the viruses in the stools of locusts 5 years ago while working in the Yucatán, concluded that the insects were suffering from septicemia caused by coccobacilli bacteria, smeared some of the stool onto agar plates to grow cultures, and observed clear circular spots developing in the agar, an indication that something was eating the coccobacilli. Hérelle takes stools from a Paris-based cavalry squadron suffering from dysentery and observes the same phenomenon (see 1917).
A typhus epidemic in Serbia kills 150,000, but British troops have been inoculated against the disease and this will be the first war in which British losses from disease will be smaller than those from enemy fire (see 1909; Russia, 1917).
Austrian otologist Robert Bárány, 39, receives the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine. His work on the physiology and pathology of the inner ear's balancing (vestibular) apparatus have won international recognition, but Bárány is now a Russian prisoner of war (he has served in the Austrian Army).
Bacteriologist Friedrich Löffler dies at Berlin April 19 at age 62; bacteriologist and chemotherapy pioneer Paul Ehrlich at Bad Homburg August 20 at age 61; yellow fever pioneer Carlos J. Finlay at Havana August 20 at age 81 (the Cuban government establishes the Finlay Institute for Investigations in Tropical Medicine); bacteriologist-physician George M. Sternberg dies at Washington, D.C., November 3 at age 77.