Category: Diseases & Pathogens, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Maryland
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History of Medicine INTRODUCTION Tropical medicine began in the nineteenth century when doctors diagnosed infectious diseases in soldiers and colonists who had lived in tropical areas. In 1877, English scientist Sir Patrick Manson proved that mosquitoes spread elephantiasis to humans and he later theorized that the same was true with malaria. This was an enormous step in tropical medicine and the understanding of tropical diseases, leading to advances in prevention methods. The field of tropical medicine consists of the study, treatment, and prevention of tropical diseases. Tropical diseases can be defined as those that are mainly of parasitic origin and are common in tropical or subtropical areas.
The Threat Throughout the last three thousand years, smallpox has shadowed civilization. A viral infection, the disease spread along trade routes, emerging first in Africa, Asia and Europe and reaching the Americas in the sixteenth century. Because smallpox requires a human host to survive it tended to smolder in densely populated areas, erupting in a full-blown epidemic every ten years or so. Wherever it appeared, the legacy of smallpox was death, blindness, sterility and scarring. While some medical practitioners claimed to cure smallpox, most medical traditions focused on prevention.
History of Medicine Epidemic cholera is an acute, painful, and often fatal disease which ravaged nearly the entire world during several severe outbreaks over the course of the 19th century. It is a diarrheal disease which can cause death by dehydration to an untreated patient in a matter of hours and is extremely contagious in communities without adequate, modern sanitation, as most of the world was in 1817 when it first left India. News of its spread and impending approach often sent panic into entire nations, and health professionals were largely at a loss as to how to treat or prevent it until modern epidemiological and laboratory techniques were developed later in the century.
History of Medicine Introduction Malaria was historically a major threat to the health of the Chinese people. In 1950, over 30 million Chinese people suffered from malaria and one percent of them died. The Chinese government launched national campaigns against malaria in the early 1950s. Programs of malaria control were integrated in the general rural development of land reclamation, irrigation construction, and improvement of sanitary conditions for both humans and livestock. While timely treatment of malaria is essential, the anti-malaria campaigns strongly emphasized preventive methods, as "prevention first" was the health policy in the 1950s-1980s.
History of Medicine The tragedy of the AIDS epidemic brought about an outpouring of items, intended to educate the public about the disease and its consequences. Starting in the early 1980s—AIDS was first identified in 1981—the initial response to the disease generated ephemeral public health materials, such as buttons, posters, cards, comic books, and even lunch boxes. Since AIDS was both incurable and invariably fatal, these messages of prevention were the only effective steps that public health officials could take. Produced by government health departments as well as private organizations, these ephemeral objects became an important medium for messages of awareness, prevention, compassion, and responsibility.
History of Medicine Introduction 引言 Tuberculosis was one of the major epidemic diseases in 20th-century China, along with smallpox, malaria, cholera, schistosomiasis, and other epidemics. Organized efforts to fight the disease began in 1933 when the National Anti-Tuberculosis Association of China was established. From 1950 through 1980, the Chinese government launched anti-tuberculosis campaigns as part of the national public health movement. The Anti-TB Association and the Red Cross played important roles in the health education campaigns. Health posters became an important tool to disseminate health knowledge and methods of prevention and treatment. The campaigns, along with the universal free healthcare, led to a significant decline of tuberculosis.
History of Medicine About a hundred years ago, public health took a visual turn. In an era of devastating epidemic and endemic infectious disease, health professionals began to organize coordinated campaigns that sought to mobilize public action through eye-catching wall posters, illustrated pamphlets, motion pictures, and glass slide projections. Impressed by the images of mass media that increasingly saturated the world around them, health campaigners were inspired to present new figures of contagion, and recycle old ones, using modernist aesthetics, graphic manipulations, humor, dramatic lighting, painterly abstraction, distortions of perspective, and other visual strategies.
