1917 - Medicine

Medicine

Typhus sweeps Russia, compounding problems of defeat and revolution (see Serbia, 1915). The epidemic will kill up to 3 million in the next 4 years (see 1918; Armand Hammer, 1921).

A paper published by Félix d'Hérelle of the Institut Pasteur at Paris gives the name bacteriophage to the virus that "eats" certain bacteria (see 1915). He predicts that it will bring a revolution in the treatment of infectious diseases, but it will turn out that there are hundreds of different types of phages, each kills only one variety of bacteria, and when a phage bursts out of a patient's cell it leaves behind debris that can contaminate the solution and prove fatal (see penicillin, 1928).

Shock treatment for mental illness has its beginnings at the University of Vienna, where Julius Wagner-Jauregg, now 60, infects syphilis patients with malaria to induce fevers that arrest the syphilitic meningoencephalitis, or general paresis, that has heretofore been incurable and fatal (see 1887). The results are dramatic (see Sakel, 1933).

Bacteriologist Emil von Behring dies of pneumonia at Marburg March 31 at age 63; Nobel surgeon Emil Kocher at his native Berne July 27 at age 75, having introduced a type of forceps and gallbladder surgical incision that will bear his name; osteopathy founder Andrew T. Still dies at Kirksville, Missouri, December 12 at age 89.