Pioneers in Infectious Diseases: from Hippocrates to the coronavirus

One particular infectious disease is now as the forefront of our lives. Even most schoolchildren know about "the virus" or coronavirus or Covid-19. It is a reminder that until the development of vaccines and the discovery of antibiotics and more recently some antiviral agents, infectious diseases were part and parcel of everyday life for generations. Illness and death from one infectious disease or another were always at hand and were greeted with dread and despair. How were these diseases and the organisms that caused them discovered and tackled? For this we have to thank our forebears who, over the last 200 years particularly, have tackled these problems, sometimes at great personal risk, and solved many of the mysteries. This book provides short biographies of over 130 of the key players. Not only does it give succinct summaries of the discoveries that they made, it gives wherever possible, details of their lives and families. Most of these investigators lived in the last 200 years. Some names like Pasteur and Fleming will be familiar whereas others such as Koch, Florey and Mullis deserve to be better known. The whole gamut of infectious agents that they pursued are considered including bacteria, viruses, fungi, protozoa, worms, ectoparasites and prions.