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Salem Health: Infectious Diseases & Conditions, 2nd Edition

Time Line of Major Developments in Infectious Disease

by Rebecca J. Frey, , Ph.D.
Year Event 1700 b.c.e. The unknown writers of an ancient Egyptian text on trauma surgery known as the Edwin Smith Papyrus emphasize the importance of keeping wounds clean to prevent infection. They suggest applying such remedies as honey and moldy bread as anti-infectives. 420 b.c.e. Hippocrates of Cos classifies diseases as acute, chronic, endemic, or epidemic--terms still used in the diagnosis and management of infectious disease. Hippocrates also introduces the notion that human health is based on balancing four bodily fluids (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm) that he calls humors and that disease results from imbalance among the humors rather than infectious organisms. c. 350 b.c.e. Aristotle, philosopher-tutor of Alexander the Great, writes a treatise on zoology translated into Latin as the Historia animalium, in which he synthesizes the opinions of earlier Greek philosophers to outline the notion of spontaneous generation. Aristotle’s theory holds that life (including disease organisms) can emerge from nonliving matter that contains “vital heat.” 36 b.c.e. Marcus Terentius Varro, a Roman librarian, publishes Rerum rusticarum (On Agriculture), a treatise that enunciates an early version of the germ theory of disease. Varro warns against developing farms in swamps or marshes because “such locations breed certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, but which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and cause serious diseases.” 25 b.c.e. Vitruvius, a Roman architect and engineer, dedicates his book on architecture to Augustus Caesar. Explaining why cities should not be built on or near wetlands, Vitruvius outlines what is called the miasmatic theory of infectious disease--namely, that disease is caused and spread by a miasma, or foul air, emanating from rotting plant and animal matter. The miasmatic theory of disease will hold sway throughout the Middle Ages and last until the 1850’s. Although it will be disproved by the germ theory of disease, the miasmatic theory does lead to improvements in sanitation and water purification that reduce the severity of epidemics. 169 c.e. Claudius Galen, personal physician to three successive Roman emperors, describes the plague that decimates the Empire during the reign of Marcus Aurelius in sufficient detail to allow it to be identified by modern epidemiologists as smallpox. Galen’s emphasis on the importance of observation and keeping records of patients’ symptoms to guide treatment becomes a major legacy to Western medicine. Galen, however, also hands Hippocrates’ humoral theory of disease to the Middle Ages and to Islamic medicine. 1025 Ibn Sīnā (known in the West as Avicenna), a Persian physician, completes a fourteen-volume medical encyclopedia known as the Canon of Medicine. Based on the surviving works of Galen and Hippocrates, the Canon will be used in European medical schools as late as 1650. In the field of infectious disease, Ibn Sīnā identifies sexually transmitted diseases, recognizes tuberculosis as a contagious illness, and notes that infectious diseases can be spread by contaminated soil and water. 1346 In one of the earliest known episodes of germ warfare, the Mongol army besieging Kaffa (now Feodosiya) in the Crimea throws the corpses of Mongol soldiers who had died of bubonic plague over the city walls. This tactic is thought to have introduced the plague, or Black Death, to medieval Europe. 1545 Ambroise Par, a French surgeon considered the founder of battlefield medicine, publishes an essay recommending the application of topical antiseptics, rather than boiling oil (which was standard practice at the time), to prevent infection in soldiers' wounds. Par's preferred antiseptic is a mixture of turpentine, egg yolk, and rose oil. 1546 Girolamo Fracastoro, an Italian physician, writes a treatise on infectious diseases in which he introduces the concept of fomites--inanimate objects or substances that can be contaminated and can transfer disease organisms from one person to another. Fracastoro also identifies typhus for the first time and gives syphilis its present name. 1578 Li Shihzen, an eminent Chinese physician and pharmacologist, completes the first draft of the Bencao Gangmu, usually translated into English as the Compendium Materia Medica. Li not only compiles the largest reference work on anti-infective plants and prescriptions in Chinese medicine until its replacement in 1959 but also introduces the use of steam and fumigation to prevent the spread of infectious disease. 1668 Francesco Redi, an Italian physician, publishes an account of experiments with covered and uncovered jars containing pieces of meat and fish that disprove the commonly accepted belief that maggots arise spontaneously from decaying food. Redi’s experiments are the first step toward disproving Aristotle’s theory of spontaneous generation. 1680 Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch tradesman and scientist, is elected a fellow of the English Royal Society for his observations of single-celled organisms conducted with his handmade microscopes. Leeuwenhoek refers to these microorganisms as “animalcules,” or tiny animals. 1796 Edward Jenner, an English scientist, inoculates an eight-year-old boy with material from a milkmaid’s cowpox blisters and then goes on to demonstrate that the inoculation produced immunity to smallpox. By 1840, Jenner’s vaccine is so widely accepted that the British government provides vaccination to its citizens free of charge. 1847 Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician working in Vienna, reduces maternal mortality from puerperal fever from 35 percent to less than 1 percent by insisting that doctors and medical students disinfect their hands (at that time, by using a solution of chlorinated lime) before attending to patients in childbirth. 1855 John Snow, an English physician, publishes the second edition of his essay On the Mode of Communication of Cholera following an 1854 outbreak in the Soho neighborhood of London. Although the germ theory of disease has not yet been fully elaborated, Snow is skeptical of the prevailing miasmatic theory. He traces the Soho outbreak to a public water pump on Broad Street by interviewing residents and mapping clusters of cholera cases. Snow’s study marks the beginning of modern epidemiology. 1857 A controversy begins between Justus von Liebig, an eminent German chemist, and Louis Pasteur, a French bacteriologist, over the nature of fermentation. Liebig maintains that fermentation (and by extension human disease) can be explained as chemical changes taking place in the presence of oxygen without the involvement of microscopic organisms--sometimes called the mechanistic theory of disease. Pasteur argues that fermentation requires the presence of living (yeast) cells. Over the next two decades, Pasteur’s view slowly gains acceptance. 1862 Pasteur conducts the first test of the process eventually known as pasteurization to prevent the spoilage of milk, beer, and wine by bacterial or fungal contamination. His experiments with 1862 (cont.) boiled broths in vessels containing filters or long swan-shaped necks that trap dust particles follow up on Redi’s earlier experiments in disproving spontaneous generation. Pasteur’s 1870 experiments with yeasts growing in the absence of oxygen succeed in disproving Liebig’s mechanistic theory. 1867 Joseph Lister, an English surgeon, publishes a paper in the British Medical Journal, “On the Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery,” describing his use of carbolic acid to disinfect surgical instruments as well as practitioners’ hands inside the operating theater. Lister is one of only two British surgeons honored with a public statue. 1877 Robert Koch, a German physician, identifies the bacterium that causes anthrax. This discovery is followed by the identification of the tuberculosis bacterium in 1882 and the successful isolation of Vibrio cholerae in 1883. Koch is awarded the 1905 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on tuberculosis. 1884 Robert Koch and his colleague Friedrich Loeffler work out a set of four postulates for establishing a causal relationship between a specific microorganism and a specific disease. Published in 1890, Koch’s postulates stipulate the following: The suspected microorganism must be found in large numbers in all organisms with the disease but should not be found in healthy ones; the microorganism must be isolated from a diseased subject and grown in a pure culture; the cultured microorganism should cause disease when injected into a healthy subject; and the microorganism must be isolated from the diseased experimental subject and shown to be identical to the original causative microorganism. Koch eventually abandons the first postulate when he identifies asymptomatic carriers of cholera and typhoid fever. 1885 Louis Pasteur successfully treats a nine-year-old boy bitten by a rabid dog with a vaccine that he had developed but had tested only on animals. The success of Pasteur’s vaccine leads to the foundation of Pasteur Institute in 1887, a research institution that has produced many leaders in the field of infectious diseases. 1892 Dimitri Ivanovsky, a Russian biologist, identifies a virus as the cause of tobacco mosaic. The new type of infectious organism is given its name by Martinus Beijerinck, a Dutch microbiologist, in 1898. Beijerinck, however, mistakenly identifies viruses as liquid in nature, a theory later disproved by Wendell Stanley. 1894 Alexandre Yersin, a researcher at the Pasteur Institute, and Kitasato Shibasaburō, a Japanese bacteriologist, discover the bacterium that causes bubonic plague during an outbreak of the disease in Hong Kong. The plague bacterium, originally named Pasteurella pestis, is renamed Yersinia pestis in Yersin’s honor in 1967. 1897 Ronald Ross, a British physician working in India, works out the entire life cycle of the malaria parasite and its transmission by mosquitoes from sick animals or humans to healthy ones. He is awarded the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on malaria. 1900 Walter Reed, a U.S. military physician, and Carlos Finlay, a Cuban public health specialist, show that yellow fever is transmitted to humans by a mosquito vector rather than by direct contact. Their proof of Finlay’s hypothesis, first outlined in 1881, gives further impetus to the new field of epidemiology. UNESCO’s biennial prize in microbiology is named in honor of Finlay. 1909 Paul Ehrlich, a German researcher who had already been awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in immunology, discovers Salvarsan, an arsenic compound 1909 (cont.) that is more effective in treating syphilis than the mercury compounds then in use. Salvarsan becomes the most frequently prescribed drug in the world from 1910 until the emergence of penicillin as a treatment for syphilis in the 1940’s. 1932-1972 The Tuskegee Public Health Service Syphilis Study, a forty-year study of African American sharecroppers diagnosed with syphilis, becomes the most infamous study of infectious disease in U.S. history. It was revealed that the researchers failed to treat the infected men with penicillin after the antibiotic was shown to be effective against syphilis in the 1940’s. The scandal leads to the establishment of the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) and new regulatory safeguards to protect human subjects participating in clinical research. 1937-1945 The Imperial Japanese army operates Unit 731, a covert biological research unit that conducts lethal experiments on humans and develops methods of germ warfare for use on Chinese civilians. Experiments involve injecting women, infants, and the elderly as well as prisoners of war with disease organisms and vivisecting them to study the effects of the diseases on internal organs. The number of people estimated to have died as a result of Unit 731’s research is 580,000. 1942 The Office of National Defense Malaria Control Activities is founded in Atlanta as a branch of the U.S. Public Health Service. The organization is renamed several times: the National Communicable Disease Center (NCDC) in 1967, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in 1980, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1992. It is still known as the CDC. 1945 Sir Alexander Fleming shares the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Baron Florey, an Australian pathologist, and Ernst Boris Chain, a German-born British biochemist, for the discovery of penicillin. Penicillin is credited with permanently changing the treatment of bacterial infections. The U.S. Army introduces the first influenza vaccine made from inactivated viruses to protect soldiers against the epidemic expected during the upcoming winter. 1948 The World Health Organization (WHO) is constituted by the General Assembly of the United Nations as the successor organization of the League of Nations Health Organization. WHO’s mandate includes not only controlling outbreaks of infectious diseases but also distributing vaccines, diagnostic equipment, and drugs to prevent or treat these diseases. 1952 Dorothy Horstmann, an American epidemiologist, demonstrates that the polio virus reaches the brain through the bloodstream rather than growing within the nervous system itself, as was previously thought. Horstmann’s work makes possible the development of both the Salk and the Sabin polio vaccines. Horstmann becomes the first female full professor of medicine at Yale in 1961. Selman Waksman, a Russian-born American biochemist, is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of streptomycin, the first drug that proves able to cure tuberculosis. Waksman also coins the term “antibiotic.” 1955 The killed-virus polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh passes its field trials and is publicly announced as safe and effective. Salk is honored in 1956 with a gold medal presented by U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower. 1962 The oral live-virus polio vaccine developed by Albert Sabin at the University of Cincinnati is licensed for public distribution. 1967 The discovery of the first filovirus, Marburg virus, followed by the identification of Ebola virus in 1976, intensifies concern about previously unknown zoonoses--infectious diseases transmitted to humans by nonhuman animals. 1969 The retroviral disease later known as acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) enters North America through a single infected immigrant from Haiti. 1979 Robert Gallo, an American virologist, successfully isolates the first human retrovirus, HTLV-1, which causes T cell leukemia and lymphoma in adults. 1980 The World Health Organization declares smallpox to have been eradicated--the only infectious disease affecting humans to have been eradicated. 1982 Stanley B. Prusiner, an American neurologist, coins the term “prion,” from the words “protein” and “infectious,” to describe the causative agents of bovine spongiform encephalopathy and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Prusiner is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1997 for his work on prions. The CDC renames an emerging retroviral disease called gay-related immune deficiency (GRID) as AIDS. 1988 The World Health Organization, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the Rotary Foundation begin a global campaign to eradicate polio. 1993 Terry Yates, a biologist at the University of New Mexico, identifies a hantavirus as the cause of a mysterious respiratory illness killing people in the Four Corners region of the United States and identifies the deer mouse as the vector of the disease. 1994 The CDC certifies that the Americas are polio-free; in 2002 and 2014, the World Health Organization certifies that Europe and Southeast Asia, respectively, are polio-free. 1996 Maurice Hilleman, an American microbiologist, introduces the first vaccine against hepatitis A. Hilleman develops more than three dozen vaccines in the course of his career and is credited with saving more lives than any other twentieth-century scientist. Eight of Hilleman’s vaccines are still routinely administered; in addition to the hepatitis A vaccine, they include vaccines against chickenpox, Haemophilus influenzae, hepatitis B, measles, meningitis, mumps, and pneumonia. 2001 Two sets of letters containing anthrax spores are mailed to various U.S. politicians and American news organizations not long after the terrorist attacks of September 11. The Amerithrax case, as the Federal Bureau of Investigation names it, reawakens widespread fears of biological warfare and triggers one of the most complicated investigations in the history of American law enforcement. 2008 Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi of the Pasteur Institute share the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) as the cause of AIDS with Harald zur Hausen, a German virologist who discovered the role of human papillomavirus (HPV) infection in cervical cancer. 2010 A malaria vaccine developed by the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline begins late-stage clinical testing at eleven sites in seven African nations. It was hoped that the vaccine could be submitted for approval by regulatory bodies as early as 2011. 2014 The West African Ebola epidemic in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone (in chronological order of epidemic spread), among other countries, tears through the population with a case fatality rate of around 70%. 2015 An epidemic of the Zika virus breaks out in the Americas, originating in Brazil. The Pan-American Health Organization and World Health Organization certify rubella and congenital rubella as eliminated in the Americas. 2016 PAHO and WHO certify measles (morbilivirus) eliminated in the Americas. As a result of war leading to instability and crumbling infrastructure, Yemen has an outbreak of cholera. As of October 2018, over 1.25 million cases were suspected.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Frey, Rebecca J. "Time Line Of Major Developments In Infectious Disease." Salem Health: Infectious Diseases & Conditions, 2nd Edition, edited by H. Bradford Hawley, Salem Press, 2020. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Infect2e_0639.
APA 7th
Frey, R. J. (2020). Time Line of Major Developments in Infectious Disease. In H. B. Hawley (Ed.), Salem Health: Infectious Diseases & Conditions, 2nd Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Frey, Rebecca J. "Time Line Of Major Developments In Infectious Disease." Edited by H. Bradford Hawley. Salem Health: Infectious Diseases & Conditions, 2nd Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2020. Accessed September 16, 2025. online.salempress.com.