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05 Oct 2021 11:35 #394112
by ketchim
It was highly contagious, lethal and mysterious
Then medical experts developed treatments
and vaccines, and the affliction disappeared
—but not entirely
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05 Oct 2021 11:36 #394113
by ketchim
Even Noah Webster, that master of words, did not have a name for the terrible sickness. “In May 1735,” he wrote in A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases, “in a wet cold season, appeared at Kingston, an inland town in New-Hampshire, situated in a low plain, a disease among children, commonly called the ‘throat distemper,’ of a most malignant kind, and by far the most fatal ever known in this country.”
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05 Oct 2021 11:39 - 05 Oct 2021 11:42 #394114
by ketchim
In 1821, a French physician, Pierre Bretonneau, gave the disease a name: diphtérite. He based it on the Greek word diphthera, for leather
—a reference to the affliction’s signature physical feature, a thick,
leathery buildup of dead tissue in a patient’s throat,
which makes breathing and swallowing difficult, or impossible.
And children, with their relatively small airways, were particularly vulnerable.
Last edit: 05 Oct 2021 11:42 by
ketchim.
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05 Oct 2021 18:02 - 05 Oct 2021 18:04 #394139
by ketchim
“The greatest care and thoughtfulness should be exercised
in these cases of simple sore throat, as in the severer cases; and it should be constantly borne in mind that the kissing of children
at such times is most dangerous.”
Last edit: 05 Oct 2021 18:04 by
ketchim.
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How Science Conquered Diphtheria : VACCINE !
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