Hugh Pennington

There is nothing romantic about Alzheimer’s disease, a condition as different as could be from the spes phthisica, the heightened creativity and sensitivity said to be caused by tuberculosis. The only similarities are that in the days when the spes was being celebrated by La Traviata and La Bohème, tuberculosis was as common – and incurable – as Alzheimer’s is today. It was no surprise, then, that massive media interest was generated earlier this year when the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly announced that its monoclonal antibody donanemab slowed cognitive decline by 35 per cent in some Alzheimer’s sufferers.

Ronald Hare, a bacteriologist at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in London, worked on Group A Streptococci in the 1930s, a time when they regularly killed women who had just given birth and developed puerperal fever. He collaborated with Lancefield to prove that GAS was the killer. On 16 January 1936 he pricked himself with a sliver of glass contaminated with a GAS. After a day or two his survival was in doubt. His boss, Leonard Colebrook, had started to evaluate Prontosil, a red dye made by I.G. Farben that prevented the death of mice infected with GAS. He gave it to Hare by IV infusion and by mouth. It turned him bright pink. He was visited in hospital by Alexander Fleming, a former colleague. Fleming said to Hare’s wife: ‘Hae ye said your prayers?’ But Hare made a full recovery.

Werner Zoege von Manteuffel has had a hard time from history. He was the first to publish a paper describing the benefits of wearing rubber gloves during surgery, on 22 May 1897 in the Centralblatt für Chirurgie, then the most influential journal of its kind, and using lively language (‘the “boiled Hand” gives absolute security!’), but medical historians today give the credit to William S. Halstead of Johns Hopkins Hospital on the basis of an anecdote, told many years after the event, that he had introduced them to protect the hands of his girlfriend, the theatre sister, from dermatitis caused by exposure to corrosive disinfectant.

The Weigl typhus vaccine was made by the intrarectal inoculation of lice. Twelve-day-old lice were put in a clamp with their rears in the air. A very fine glass pipette was inserted into the anus and a tiny drop of fluid containing the typhus bacterium was pumped in. The intestines were harvested and ground up with phenol to make the vaccine. These processes needed people: injectors, who could infect up to two thousand lice per hour; dissectors, who could harvest three hundred guts per hour; and feeders to propagate the lice, kept in cages strapped to their legs.

Cattle plague was a lethal disease of bovines cause by the rinderpest virus, an agent closely related to measles. It came to Britain from Europe in the mid 1860s and killed at least 420,000 cows. Rinderpest is not a coronavirus. Its R number is probably three times greater than that of Covid-19, and its mortality rate is much higher. But as a model it still has relevance to contemporary events.