By the end of 1887 and beginning of 1888 the new Fiftieth Congress witnessed the renewed introduction of a large number of bills on behalf of carriers, including one by Crain that would have amended section 3738 to include all other persons who are now or who may hereafter be employed in manual or clerical…
Sergei Winogradsky founded microbial ecology and he was a founding father of microbiology. In an unusually long scientific career, he: Discovered chemosynthesis– an entirely new mode of life, in which the energy to build organic molecules comes from chemical reactions rather than from sunlight in the more familiar photosynthesis. We now know there are a great many…
The disposal of garbage by the reduction method was first introduced in the United States at Buffalo, N. Y., in 1886. The plant installed at Buffalo was known as the Merz process and the disposal was made by placing the garbage in dryers so as to break down the material and drive off the moisture,…
F. Spawn introduced dehydration as a form of food preservation in 1886 when he developed his Climax Fruit Evaporator to process excess apples in southern Tasmania. It has since been acknowledged to have been the beginning of mechanical dehydration. The drying of potatoes and other vegetables on a semi –commercial scale was first done apparently by…
In 1886, Franz von Soxhlet suggested the pasteurization of milk for infant nutrition.[To that point, pasteurization had been used for wine after Louis Pasteur’s proposal in 1868, but was not popular among makers of fine wines, who “had always safeguarded their wines by maintaining cleanliness in their cellars and by carefully following strict methods of…
Reilly of the U. S. Army built the first garbage incinerator in the United States on Governor’s Island, N. Y. New York City’s first incinerator, the first in the nation, was erected on Governors Island in 1885, and over the next century, incinerators burned much of the city’s waste. By the 1960’s, the city was…
One of the early advocates of bacteriology was Percy Frankland (1858– 1946), who worked with his father at the School of Mines, where he was an assistant in the water laboratory. After learning of the plate culturing method at an exhibition in London, he visited Koch’s laboratory to master this new method. Frankland used the…
Robert Koch’s discovery of the tubercle bacillus in 1882 was a major event in the history of medicine, a turning point in our understanding and conquest of that deadly disease which had plagued mankind for millenia. After centuries of speculation as to the possible infectious nature of tuberculosis, Koch proved conclusively that the cause of…
In 1859, the first milk inspector was appointed in Boston. In 1864, Boston prohibited the use of milk from diseased cows. As early as 1848, European veterinarians suspected that bovine tuberculosis was transmissible. The first city to inspect dairies may have been Newark, New Jersey, in 1882, and regular bacteriology examination of milk was first…
The earliest concerns about air pollution in the United States arose in response to the smoke emitted by factories that accompanied industrialization. Chicago and Cincinnati enacted the nation’s first clean air laws in 1881. Chicago’s ordinance declared that the emissions of dense smoke from the smokestack of any boat or locomotive or from any chimney…
The Alkali Act was passed in Great Britain to regulate pollution connected with the production of superphosphates. The Alkali Act regime was overhauled and expanded in the Alkali & c. Works Regulation Act 1881, which, significantly, placed responsibility for the system into the hands of the local Government Board. This made the context in which this facet…
In 1881 at the International Medical Congress held in London, Hart, who was then President of the British Medical Association, gave an influential paper that sketched a decade’s worth of epidemiological research that linked typhoid fever, scarlet fever, and diphtheria to milk. He had a professional interest in giving the talk because he sought to…
In 1881 Robert Koch demonstrated a new technique at the International Medical Congress in London. Koch had recognized the difficulties of using broth media for isolation of pure cultures and had looked for solid media alternatives. He evaluated media such as coagulated egg albumen, starch paste and an aseptically cut slice of a potato (as…
New York State enacted first effective Food Control Laws in the United States.
Burdon-Sanderson in England in 1871 demonstrated the presence of bacteria in water; and Miquel at Paris in 1880 developed the first exact methods for enumerating them. In 1885, Percy Frankland used Koch’s procedures in a study of London water supplies and in 1887 Plagge and Proskauer reported on the bacterial purification effected by the filters…
The first glass bottle packaging for milk was used in the 1870s. The first company to do so may have been the New York Dairy Company in 1877. The Express Dairy Companyin England began glass bottle production in 1880. In 1884, Hervey Thatcher, an American inventor from New York, invented a glass milk bottle, called ‘Thatcher’s Common…
In the 19th century, Cuba and other tropical areas were plagued with several diseases that typically struck in large outbreaks. One of the worst tropical diseases was yellow fever. If a canal was to be built between the two oceans, somebody had to figure out how to stop yellow fever from spreading, and that meant first understanding…
On March 3, 1879, a National Board of Health (NBH) was created by an Act of the 45th U.S. Congress titled “An Act to Prevent the Introduction of Infectious or Contagious Disease into the United States and to establish a National Board of Health.” The NBH as designated comprised 11 members: seven appointed by the President,…
Sir Patrick Manson is considered by many to be the father of tropical medicine. He was the first person to demonstrate, in 1878, that a parasite that causes human disease could infect a mosquito—in this case, the filarial worm that causes elephantiasis. He was also physician to the Seamen’s Hospital Society, the Medical Advisor to…