William H. Welch, MD, and the Discovery of Bacillus welchii

2004 ◽  
Vol 128 (10) ◽  
pp. 1193-1195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendan P. Lucey ◽  
Grover M. Hutchins
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Blood Vessels ◽  
Case Reports ◽  
Gas Gangrene ◽  
Postmortem Examination ◽  
Johns Hopkins Hospital ◽  
World War ◽  
Medical Institutions ◽  
Series Of Experiments ◽  
Bacterium Bacillus

Abstract William H. Welch, MD, and his colleagues performed an autopsy at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in October 1891 on a 38-year-old man and discovered a new bacterium, Bacillus aerogenes capsulatus. During the postmortem examination, gas bubbles were noted within many of the patient's blood vessels. Welch's laboratory personnel determined that a previously unknown bacterium was the source of the gas. Through a series of experiments, the organism's characteristics were described and its pathophysiology was detailed, findings that proved accurate in explaining gas gangrene during World War I. Welch never followed up these initial investigations with more experimentation. His subsequent writings regarding the bacterium that came to be known, appropriately, as Bacillus welchii consisted mostly of case reports from other medical institutions and summaries of previous data.

Abrupt treatments of hysteria during World War I, 1914–18

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
AD (Sandy) Macleod
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Publication Bias ◽  
Medical Practice ◽  
Case Reports ◽  
World War ◽  
Modern Medical Practice

Case reports of the abrupt recovery of hysterical disorders during World War I (1914–18), though undoubtedly subject to publication bias, raise both aetiological and treatment issues regarding pseudo-neurological conversion symptoms. Published clinical anecdotes report circumstantial, psychotherapeutic, hypnotic, persuasive (and coercive) methods seemingly inducing recovery, and also responses to fright and alterations of consciousness. The ethics of modern medical practice would not allow many of these techniques, which were reported to be effective, even in the chronic cases.

“The Absurd Disordering of Notes”

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth Keyes
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Traumatic Stress ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Post Traumatic Stress ◽  
World War ◽  
Psychic Trauma ◽  
Shell Shock ◽  
Medical Reform ◽  
Medical Institutions ◽  
Post Traumatic

Railway spine, nerve prostration, combat neurosis, post-traumatic stress disorder: throughout the twentieth century, a complex array of terms has been codified by cultural, national, and medical institutions to describe a body and mind made dysfunctional by the inability to process intensely disturbing memories. In the wake of World War I, trauma-induced mental illness—diagnosed and treated as “shell-shock” in countless veterans—became an imperative focal point for sociopolitical and medical reform throughout Europe. This essay explores the connections between this historically contextualized psychiatric disorder and the music of Ivor Gurney, a soldier in the British Army whose life and work was significantly affected by his diagnosis in 1918. Through particular disturbances of form, structure, and texture, Gurney’s musical landscapes reenact the conditions of psychic trauma by creating a world in which memories are disruptive, invasive, and ultimately disabling.

Managing Disease

2018 ◽  
pp. 92-129
Author(s):  
Michitake Aso
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Mosquito Species ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Poor Health ◽  
Human Suffering ◽  
Medical Doctors ◽  
World War ◽  
Administrative Policy ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Medical Institutions

After World War I, colonial administrative policy, environmental necessity, and economic logic converged to promote Vietnamese migration to meet plantation demands for labor. Peasants from the Tonkin delta travelled by ship and by road to southern plantations, where they sometimes displaced previous inhabitants. These workers helped carry out the deforestation that created the limpid, sunny streams in which mosquito species associated with malaria in the region bred. Malaria, beriberi, and horrible living conditions resulted in the illness and deaths of thousands of plantation workers. These outbreaks, along with the more famous cases of abuse, provided much fodder for opponents of colonialism, French and Vietnamese alike. Even as medical doctors recognized the poor health of plantation workers, they found it more plausible to blame workers’ moral failings and culture rather than the colonial system. By placing the human suffering of laborers in the context of changing disease environments, chapter 3 further investigates the relationships among science, business, and government. Industry played a key role in creating medical institutions and knowledge in Indochina during the colonial period and, partly because of this role, economic concerns trumped humanitarian impulses.

scholarly journals Chronicle of the "Anglo-Yugoslav Children’s Hospital" in Sremska Kamenica

2015 ◽  
Vol 68 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 277-282
Author(s):  
Dusanka Dobanovacki ◽  
Zelimir Mikic ◽  
Nada Vuckovic
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Hospital Treatment ◽  
World War ◽  
Osteoarticular Tuberculosis ◽  
Humanitarian Mission ◽  
Medical Institutions ◽  
Advanced Therapy ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Novi Sad ◽  
Privately Owned

As a peacetime work of Katherine S. Macphail (Glasgow, 1887- St. Andrews, 1974) MB ChB (Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery), the Anglo-Serbian Children?s Hospital in Belgrade was established after World War I, and the English-Yugoslav Children?s Hospital for Treatment of Osteoarticular Tuberculosis was founded in Sremska Kamenica in 1934. Situated on the Fruska Gora slope, the hospital-sanatorium was a well-equipped medical institution with an operating theatre and x-ray machine providing very advanced therapy, comparable to those in Switzerland and England: aero and heliotherapy, good quality nourishment, etc. In addition, school lessons were organized as well as several types of handwork as the work-therapy. It was a privately owned hospital but almost all the children were treated free of cost. The age for admission was up to 14. During the period from 1934 to 1937, around 458 children underwent hospital treatment, most of them with successful results. During the war years the Sanatorium was closed but after the war it was reactivated. In 1948 by the act of final nationalization of all medical institutions in the communist Yugoslavia, the hospital was transformed into a ward of orthopedic surgery under the supervision of the referent departments in Belgrade and Novi Sad. Today, hospital is out of work and deprived of its humanitarian mission. The building is neglected and in ruins although it has been proclaimed the national treasure by the Regional Institute for Protection of Monuments of Culture.

Through the prism of Spain. Socio-economic causes of different outcomes of Russian and Spanish civil wars

2017 ◽  
pp. 142-155
Author(s):  
I. Rozinskiy ◽  
N. Rozinskaya
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Russian Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Economic Well Being

The article examines the socio-economic causes of the outcome of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1936), which, as opposed to the Russian Civil War, resulted in the victory of the “Whites”. Choice of Spain as the object of comparison with Russia is justified not only by similarity of civil wars occurred in the two countries in the XX century, but also by a large number of common features in their history. Based on statistical data on the changes in economic well-being of different strata of Spanish population during several decades before the civil war, the authors formulate the hypothesis according to which the increase of real incomes of Spaniards engaged in agriculture is “responsible” for their conservative political sympathies. As a result, contrary to the situation in Russia, where the peasantry did not support the Whites, in Spain the peasants’ position predetermined the outcome of the confrontation resulting in the victory of the Spanish analogue of the Whites. According to the authors, the possibility of stable increase of Spanish peasants’ incomes was caused by the nation’s non-involvement in World War I and also by more limited, compared to Russia and some other countries, spending on creation of heavy (primarily military-related) industry in Spain.

‘Grey Dawn’ in the British Pacific: Race, Security and Colonial Sovereignty on the Eve of World War I

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Cooperative Security ◽  
Strategic Defense ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
The Way

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.

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