Lesson 18
The Plague that Bears his Name: The bubonic plague killed millions before the bacteria that caused it, Yersinia pestis, was identified by Alexandre Yersin.
The Plague that Bears his Name: The bubonic plague killed millions before the bacteria that caused it, Yersinia pestis, was identified by Alexandre Yersin.
This story is about Alexandre Emile Jean Yersin (1863-1943), a Frenchman, born in Switzerland, who traveled the world, serving as a ships doctor and then a scientist and pathbreaking researcher in Asia. But his story begins in a horse and buggy European world where humans mostly just accept whatever nature brings, which includes disease. It ends with airplanes, bombs and a vaccine that he will discover.
A physician, Yersin founds hospitals in Vietnam and works to makes the world he inhabits better. He also makes a world-changing discovery. Yersin has a passion for microscopes, which are the high tech of his time. Microscopes are leading life’s explorers into the newly discovered world of bacteriology. Yersin will see amazing things through his lenses and then—this is big—he will figure out what he is seeing, when no one else has. This story begins in 1885 when Alexandre Yersin, who is 22, moves to Paris to study medicine at the Hotel Dieu, a hospital near the Cathedral of Notre Dame. It is a golden age for France’s iconic city where artists, musicians, and a parade of others, seem to be having a whole lot of fun being creative. Painters like Van Gogh, Monet, Cezanne, and Renoir are part of the scene. As for writers: Ernest Hemingway comes from the United States. So, too, do Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Paris has a superstar scientist named Louis Pasteur who is helping energize the creativity as people understand that Nature’s world is not static: that change is possible. In 1885, in Paris, a scientific achievement of Pasteur’s will change worldwide ideas on what medicine and scientific research can do. When people describe a happening and say, “the world is never the same again,” well, sometimes they are right. Pasteur shows that if you boil milk you can kill any germs it may hold. That process, which saves lives, is called “pasteurization.” Pasteur’s lab becomes (and still is) a world center for scientific research. Pasteur decides to see if he can find a way to cure rabies. It’s a disease, caught from animals that not only kills, but does so in a horribly painful way. In 1885 Pasteur injects a vaccine he has developed into a boy who has rabies. Does Pasteur really know what he is doing? It seems he does. The boy recovers and the world of scientific medicine will never be quite the same. Pasteur’s work has shown that microbes, living entities too small to be seen without a lens, can be key players in infectious disease, and they can be killers. No wonder that Alexandre Yersin, living in Paris during this amazingly creative time, will spend much of the rest of his life studying microbes. When he gets a job at the Pasteur Institute he is among the young doctors working to discover disease agents. He couldn’t be at a better place, say his friends, but Yersin has been infected by a bug that science can’t control: an adventurer’s bug that sends him off to explore, first as an onboard doctor for a maritime shipping company. By 1894, his travels take him to Hong Kong, where he makes a momentous discovery. An outbreak of the plague has taken hold of the territory, and Yersin begins to investigate. While he is there, he figures out that a very tiny, rod shaped bacteria known as a bacillus, which he can only see with his lens, is responsible for the bubonic plague that has killed millions. His name becomes part of the scientific name for the bacteria that causes the plague—Yersinia pestis. (A Japanese physician named Kitasato Shibasaburo also played a role in unlocking the plague; the various contributions of the two men have been debated over the years.) Yersin later settles in Southeast Asia during a period when parts of the region are under French control. In the 1500’s, French church missionaries arrived in the region of Asia that will eventually be known as Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. They stayed even though they were not always welcome. In 1858, France’s leader, Napoleon III, sent French troops and began a formal occupation. The French call the land Indochine (Indo-China in English). Alexandre Yersin falls in love with the place. He sets up a lab and gets to work. He is also said to be the first person in Hanoi to own a car. While the French occupation, like much of European colonialism, brought much bloodshed and exploitation, Yersin becomes a local hero. Today, if you visit Saigon, you can walk down Yersin Street and know who it is named for. What many of the pedestrians on that street don’t know is that Alexandre Yersin, along with a few scientific thinkers, studied very tiny creatures that can only be seen through a microscope and realized that they can be carriers of disease. He also remained a doctor, but didn’t charge his patients. "I am very happy to treat those who come to me asking for advice, but I wouldn't like to make medicine my profession,” he once said. “I could never ask a patient to pay me for treatment. I consider medicine a calling, like priesthood." |
Plague is a disease that affects humans and other mammals. It is caused by the bacterium, Yersinia pestis. Humans usually get plague after being bitten by a flea that is carrying the plague bacterium or by handling an animal infected with plague, like a rat.
Read more in this link about Kitasato Shibasaburo, who also identified the virus that causes bubonic plague. His, too, is a story that needs telling. See if you can do it.
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