Modern history of chicken pox

Muhammad Ibn Zakariya Razi, also known as Razi, collected some of the first known information on chickenpox and noted the differences between the measles and small pox. Giovanni Filippo (1510-1580) of Palermo gave the first description Chicken Pox. In 1600s, English Physician named Richard Morton mistook this disease with small pox he thought it was a milder form of smallpox.

It's believed the disease was brought to the Americas in the 15th century by European explorers and settlers. Once on the continent, it (and other diseases) spread among Native Americans since Indigenous people had not previously been exposed to the virus.

In 1767, English physician William Heberden demonstrated that small pox was different from chicken pox. He showed that chickenpox is different from the more deadly disease, smallpox. He also showed that once a person has had chickenpox, that person usually never gets it again.

In modern times, the scientists who first described the chickenpox were E.Paschen, 1919; EE Tyzzer, 1906; von Bokay 1909. Paschen described elementary bodies in smears of vesicles obtained from patients with varicella while Ernest Tyzzer developed a bedside test to distinguish smallpox from chickenpox based on the presence of multinucleated cells in varicella lesions that were not found in smallpox. In 1888, von Bókay of Budapest reported the relationship between herpes zoster and chickenpox. He was first pointed out when he reported cases of the latter disease in members of two families after episodes of herpes zoster in other members.

Prior to 1995, when the chickenpox vaccine was introduced, nearly all U.S. children got infected with chickenpox by age 10. Although usually mild, rare complications resulted in more than 10,000 hospitalizations and 100 deaths per year.

In the 1950s, scientists isolated the varicella-zoster virus for the first time, paving the way for efforts to vaccinate against chickenpox and shingles. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first chickenpox vaccine in 1995 and the first shingles vaccine in 2006.
Modern history of chicken pox

Edward Jenner: English physician who pioneered the concept of vaccines

Edward Jenner is well known English physician around the world for his innovative contribution to immunization and the ultimate eradication of smallpox. His work is widely regarded as the foundation of immunology—despite the fact that he was neither the first to suggest that infection with cowpox conferred specific immunity to smallpox nor the first to attempt cowpox inoculation for this purpose. In May 1796, Edward Jenner found a young dairymaid, Sarah Nelms, who had fresh cowpox lesions on her hands and arms.

On May 14, 1796, using matter from Nelms’ lesions, he inoculated an 8-year-old boy, James Phipps. Subsequently, the boy developed mild fever and discomfort in the axillae. Nine days after the procedure he felt cold and had lost his appetite, but on the next day he was much better. In July 1796, Jenner inoculated the boy again, this time with matter from a fresh smallpox lesion. No disease developed, and Jenner concluded that protection was complete.

Nearly two years were to elapse between Dr. Edward Jenner's first vaccination in May 1796 and his subsequent experiments, which began in March 1798. In all, perhaps 15 persons were vaccinated. Publication of the findings quickly followed. Jenner published at his own expense, in September 1798, his now famous Inquiry (shorthand for its proper title, An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, a Disease Discovered in Some of the Western Counties of England, Particularly Gloucestershire, and Known by the name of the Cow Pox).

By the summer of 1799, Jenner's observations had been confirmed by a number of practitioners, and upwards of 1000 persons had been given the vaccine.

Subsequently, Jenner followed-up his original publication with a 1799 “Further Observations on the Variolae Vaccinae,” in which he detailed how to recognize typical Cow Pox lesions and to discriminate them from other similar pustular lesions that were not Cow Pox.
Edward Jenner: English physician who pioneered the concept of vaccines

History of immunology in modern era

John Fewster (1738-1824), a surgeon in Gloucestershire, England observed that a person who had been naturally exposed to cowpox, a viral disease of cattle related to smallpox, did not exhibit the normal mild case from smallpox when variolated.

He presented his observation to London Mdical Society in 1765 but never investigated further.

In 1798, Edward Jenner (1749-1823) inoculated a young man by named James Phipps with material obtained from a cowpox lesion. The results were conclusive but were met with great resistance by the Church.

It is the first demonstration of vaccination (smallpox vaccination). Jenner was a physician who practiced in the rural English countryside. As a country doctor, he was familiar with the ancient and unsafe technique of variolation – the administration of biological matter from smallpox sufferers to create immunity among those who survive the procedure.

One of which was that milkmaids who had caught cowpox never became infected with the more serious smallpox. Jenner suspected there to be a connection between the fact that milkmaids were commonly known to get cowpox, but not smallpox. That’s why he decided to try this theory by pacing the scab from a cowpox lesion into a cut made in arm of a young man James Phipps.

Élie Metchnikoff

Modern immunology begins with the research of Metchnikoff (1845-1916), who discovered the phenomenon of phagocytosis in starfish and extrapolated it to macrophages in humans as cells that engulf infections agents; this was the beginning of cellular immunology.

In 1840 the first modern proposal of the germ theory of disease was proposed Jakob Henle. He was a German physician, pathologist and anatomist. He is credited with the discovery of the loop of Henle in the kidney. Paul Ehrlich investigated the formation of antibodies recognized later as protein that destroyed infectious agents.

Ehrlich predicted autoimmunity calling it “horror autotoxicus”. He is the one coined the term of “chemotherapy”.

Louis Pasteur played a pivotal role in the evolution of the science. While Pasteur's work at the Pasteur Institute in Paris was concerned with bacterial infectious disease, he was most concerned with the prevention of diseases that bacteria caused and how the human body was changed subsequent to infection so as to resist further insults. Louis Pasteur became the first experimental immunologist.

Around 1960, it was appreciated that lymphocytes are the cells that mediate the immune reactions and experimentation moved for the first time from in vivo to in vitro, which allowed one to manipulate and investigate an immune reaction of cell population. Kendall A. Smith in 1983 discovered of the first interleukins 1 and 2.
History of immunology in modern era

History of yellow fever

These diseases are produced by invisible germs floating in the atmosphere, which, taken into the blood though the lungs, are afterward propagated by the excreta and invisible emanations of the patients. The yellow fever virion targets the cells of the immune system (lymph nodes, spleen, and bone marrow) as well as the cells of the liver, kidneys and digestive tracts.

Yellow fever in its history has been so intimately connected with the old African slaves trade in its rise and decline, both as to time and place, not only at the ports of debarkation in Westerns but also on the ports of the Eastern Hemisphere where the disease prevailed so violent.

The yellow fever is claimed by some to have originated and it have prevailed epidemically in Africa, through Cortez found in prevailing in Mexico, to whose people it was known by the name of matzlazahuatl; and the Indian of San Domingo and other West Indians were decimated by it before and soon after the discovery of America.

The first authentic appearance of yellow fever was in 1647, shortly after the first arrivals of slave ships in the West Indies a terrible epidemic occurring at Bridgetown, Barbados, an English possession and settlement.

Its first appearances in the United States were at Boston in 1693, in Philadelphia and Charleston, South Carolina in 1699 and in New York in 1702.

By June 1794 British landed about 4000 troops on Saint Domingue, and in that summer a yellow fever epidemic began. Two newly arrived British regiments suffered over 40 percent mortality in three months.

The first attempts at immunization against yellow fever were made by Carlos J Finlay, a Cuban physician who first proposed, in 1881, that the disease caused by an unidentified ‘germ’ was transmitted by mosquitoes.

Careful human experimentation first indicated that mosquitoes passed the ‘invisible’ agent one person to another.

In 1900, Walter Reed and his colleagues accomplished this by injecting the blood of yellow fever victims into healthy people. These investigations paved the way for the discovery of the yellow fever virus and its isolation from mosquitoes.

In the mid-1930s, Max Theiler and Hugo Smith from Rockefeller Institute in New York City developed a safe and effective yellow fever vaccine. He succeeded where many had failed before him.
History of yellow fever

History of Immunology

The discipline of immunology grew out of the observation that individuals who had recovered from certain infectious disease were there after protect from the disease.

The Latin worlds immunitas and immunis have their origin on the legal concept of an exemption. Initially in ancient Rome they disrobed the exemption of an individual from service or duty.

In 1885, Louis Pasteur administered the first vaccine to a human, a young body, who had bitten repeatedly by a rabid dog. Louis Pasteur is often describe as the father of immunology, but vaccination was practiced long before his lifetime at a time when nothing was known of the disease causing organism.

In 1890, German physician Emil Adolph von Behring discovered antibodies through his pioneering research on immunization against diphtheria and tetanus by injecting what he term ‘antitoxins’.

Emil von Behring and Paul Erlich may be considered as found fathers of the adapted immunity although their works were restricted to the humoral (antibody-mediated) immune response.

According to history a primitive form of smallpox vaccination was used in China from tenth century. It was also used in the thirteenth century in Egypt. During 1600s Turkey already practiced variolation, where people were inoculated by scratching the skin with smallpox taken from pustules of infected people.

In 430 BC Thucydides, the greatest historian of Peloponnesian wrote that only those who had recovered from the plaque could nurse the sick because they would nor contract the disease a second time. He referred the plaque of smallpox that swept Greece after the Peloponnesian War.

In 1798 English physician Edward Jenner has published his important memoir on the use of cowpox material to protect human beings from smallpox. However immunology became a true science only in the 19th century in the mind and the work of Louis Pasteur.
History of Immunology