From lighthouse to hothouse: hospital hygiene, antibiotics and the evolution of infectious disease, 1950–1990

History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences - Tập 40 - Trang 1-25 - 2017
Christoph Gradmann1
1Section for Medical Anthropology and History, Institute of Health and Society, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

Tóm tắt

Upon entering clinical medicine in the 1940s, antibiotic therapy seemed to complete a transformation of hospitals that originated in the late nineteenth century. Former death sinks had become harbingers of therapeutic progress. Yet this triumph was short-lived. The arrival of pathologies caused by resistant bacteria, and of nosocomial infections whose spread was helped by antibiotic therapies, seemed to be intimately related to modern anti-infective therapy. The place where such problems culminated were hospitals, which increasingly appeared as dangerous environments where attempts to combat infectious diseases had instead created hothouses of disease evolution. This paper will focus on one aspect of that history. It caused clinical medicine and hospital hygiene in particular to pay attention to a dimension of infectious disease it had previously paid little attention to thus far: The evolution of infectious disease—previously a matter of mostly theoretical interest—came to be useful in explaining many phenomena observed. This did not turn hospital hygienists into geneticists, though it did give them an awareness that the evolution of infectious disease in a broad sense was something that did matter to them. The paper advances its argument by looking at three phases: The growing awareness of the hospital as a dangerous environment in the 1950s, comprehensive attempts at improving antibiotic therapy and hospital hygiene that followed from the 1960s and lastly the framing of such challenges as risk factors from the 1970s. In conclusion, I will argue that hospital hygiene, being inspired in particular by epidemiology and risk factor analysis, discussed its own specific version of disease emergence and therefore contributed to the 1980s debates around such topics. Being loosely connected to more specialized studies, it consisted of a re-interpretation of infectious disease centred around the temporality of such phenomena as they were encountered in day-to-day dealings of clinical wards.

Tài liệu tham khảo

Amsterdamska, O. (1987). Medical and biological constraints: Early research on variation in biology. Social Studies of Science, 17, 657–687.

Anon. (1966). Infectious drug resistance. New England Journal of Medicine, 275, 277.

Aronowitz, R. A. (2015). Risky medicine: Our quest to cure fear and uncertainty. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Ayliffe, G. A. J., & English, M. P. (2003). Hospital Infection from miasmas to MRSA. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Barber, M., Dutton, A. A. C., Beard, M. A., Elmes, P. C., & Williams, R. (1960). Reversal of antibiotic resistance in hospital staphylococcal infection. British Medical Journal, 5165, 11–17.

Bouton, C. (2016). The critical theory of history: Rethinking the philosophy of history of Koselleck’s work. History and Theory, 55(2), 163–184.

Brachman, P. S. (1981). Nosocomial infection control: An overview. Reviews of Infectious Diseases, 3(4), 640–648.

Britt, M., Schleupner, C. J., & Matsumiya, S. (1978). Severity of underlying disease as a predictor in nosocomial infection: Utility in the control of nosocomialInfection. Journal of the American Medical Association, 239, 1047–1051.

Brock, T. D. (1990). The emergence of bacterial genetics. Cold Spring Harbour: Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory Press.

Bud, R. (1993). The uses of life. A history of biotechnology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bud, R. (2007). Penicillin: Triumph and tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Burnet, F. M., & White, D. O. (1972). Natural history of infectious disease (4th ed.). London: Cambridge University Press.

Bynum, W. F. (1994). Science and the practice of medicine in the nineteeth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Casadevall, A., & Pirofski, L.-A. (2003). The damage-response framework of microbial pathogenesis. Nature Reviews/Microbiology, 1, 17–24.

Chavigny, K. H., & Fischer, J. (1984). Competing risk factors associated with nosocomial infection in two university hospitals. Journal of Hospital Infection, 5(suppl A), 57–62.

Colebrook, L. (1955). Infection acquired in hospital. The Lancet, 266, 885–891.

Colebrook, L., & Kenny, M. (1936). Treatment of human pueperal infections, and of experimental infections in mice, with prontosil. The Lancet, 227(5884), 1279–1281.

Condrau, F., & Kirk, R. (2011). Negotiating hospital infections: The debate between ecological balance and eradication strategies in British hospitals, 1947–1969. Dynamis, 31, 385–405.

Daly, J. (2005). Evidence-based medicine and the search for a science of clinical care. New York: Milbank Memorial Fund.

Daschner, F. (1989). Cost-effectiveness in hospital infection control—Lessons for the 1990s. Journal of Hospital Infection, 13(4), 325–336.

Dixon, R. E. (1991). Historical perspective: The løandmark conference in 1980. The American Journal of Medicine, 91(suppl 3b), 6–7.

Dixon, R. E. (2011). Control of health-care-associated infections, 1961–2011. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 60(suppl), 58–63.

Dubos, R. J. (1958). The evolution of infectious diseases in the course of history. Canadian Medical Association Journal, 79(6), 445–451.

Dubos, R. (1959). Mirage of health: Utopias, progress, and biological change. London: Allen & Unwin.

Eickhoff, T. C. (1991). Historical perspective: The landmark conference in 1970. The American Journal of Medicine, 91(suppl 3b), 3–5.

Ewald, P. W. (1994). Evolution of infectious disease. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Falkow, S. (1975). Infectious multiple drug resistance. London: Pion.

Falkow, S. (2006). The ecology of pathogenesis. In Forum on Microbial Threats, Board on Global Health (Ed.), Ending the war metaphor: The changing agenda for unraveling the host-microbe relationship. Workshop summary (pp. 102–115). Washington, DC: National Academies Press.

Freeman, J., & McGowan, J. (1978). Risk factors for nosocomial infection. The Journal of Infectious Diseases, 138(6), 811–819.

Gardner, A. M. N., Stamp, M., Bowgen, J. A., & Moore, B. (1962). The infection control sister: A new member of the control of infection team in general hospitals. The Lancet, 280(7258), 710–711.

Goldmann, D. A., & Maki, D. G. (1973). Infection control in total parenteral nutrition. Journal of the American Medical Association, 223(12), 1360–1364.

Gradmann, C. (2009). Laboratory disease: Robert Koch’s medical bacteriology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Gradmann, C. (2013). Sensitive matters: The World Health Organisation and antibiotics resistance testing, 1945–1975. Social History of Medicine, 26, 555–574.

Gradmann, C. (2016). Re-inventing infectious disease: Antibiotic resistance and drug development at the Bayer company 1945–1980. Medical History, 59, 155–180.

Gradmann, C. (2017). Medical bacteriology: Microbes and disease, 1870–2000. In M. Jackson (Ed.), The Routledge history of disease (pp. 378–401). London: Routledge.

Greenwood, D. (2008). Antimicrobial drugs. Chronicle of a twentieth century triumph. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Grmek, M. D. (1993). Le concept de maladie émergente. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 15(3), 281–296.

Grote, M. (2008). Hybridizing bacteria, crossing methods, cross-checking arguments: The transition from episomes to plasmids (1961–1969). History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 30, 407–430.

Haley, R. W., Culver, D. H., White, J. W., Morgan, W. M., Emori, T. G., Munn, V. P., et al. (1985). The efficacy of infection surveillance and control programs in preventing nosocomial infections in US hospitals. American Journal of Epidemiology, 121(2), 182–205.

Hejazi, A., & Falkiner, F. R. (1997). Serratia marcescens. Journal of Medical Microbiology, 46, 903–912.

Hillier, K. (2006). Babies and bacteria: Phage typing, bacteriologists, and the birth of infection control. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 80, 733–761.

Hospital Infections Program, C. (1991). Nosocomial infection rates for interhospital comparison: Limitations and possible solutions. Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, 12(10), 609–621.

Hughes, J. M. (1987). Nosocomial infection control in the United States. Infection Control, 8(11), 450–453.

King, N. B. (2004). The scale politics of emerging diseases. Osiris, 19, 62–76.

Kirby, W. M. M., Douglas, M. D., Corpron, M. D., & Tanner, D. C. (1956). Urinary tract infections caused by antibiotic-resistant coliform bacteria. The Journal of the Anerican Medical Association, 162(1), 1–4.

Koselleck, R. (1979). ‘Erfahrungsraum’ und ‘Erwartungshorizont’—zwei historische Kategorien. In R. Koselleck (Ed.), Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (pp. 349–375). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Koshland, D. E. (1992). The microbial wars. Science, 257, 1021.

Lederberg, J. (1988). Pandemic as a natural evolutionary phenomenon. Social Research, 55(3), 343–359.

Lederberg, J. (1997). Infectious disease as an evolutionary paradigm. Emerging Infectious Diseases, 3(4), 417–423.

Lederberg, J., Shope, R. E., & Oaks, S. C. (Eds.). (1992). Emerging infections. Microbial threats to health in the United States. Washington, DC: National Academic Press.

Lesch, J. E. (2007). The first miracle drugs: How the sulfa drugs transformed medicine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Levy, S. B. (1992). The antibiotic paradox. How miracle drugs are destroying the miracle. New York, London: Plenum Press.

Loudon, I. (1987). Puerperal fever, the streptococcus, and the sulphonamides, 1911–1945. British Medical Journal, 295, 485–490.

Loudon, I. (2000). The tragedy of childbed fever. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lowbury, E. J. L. (1955). Cross-infection of wounds with antibiotic-resistant organisms. British Medical Journal, 1(4920), 985–990.

Macfarlane Burnet, F. (1953, 1940). The natural history of infectious disease. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Maki, D. G., Alvarado, C. J., Hassemer, C. A., & Zilz, M. A. (1982). Relation of the inanimate hospital environment to endemic hospital infection. New England Journal of Medicine, 307, 1562–1566.

Marks, H. M. (1997). The progress of experiment. Science and therapeutic reform in the United States, 1900–1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mazumdar, P. M. H. (1995). Species and specificity: An interpretation of the history of immunology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McDermott, W. (1956). The problem of staphylococcal infections. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 65, 58–66.

McGowan, J. E. (1991). Abrupt changes in antibiotic resistance. Journal of Hospital Infection, 18, 202–210.

McKenna, M. (2010). Suberbug: The fFatal Menace of MRSA. New York: Free Press.

Mendelsohn, A. (2002). ‘Like all that lives’: Biology, medicine and bacteria in the age of Pasteur and Koch. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 24, 3–36.

Méthot, P.-O. (2016). Bacterial transformation and the origins of epidemics in the Interwar period: The epidemiological significance of Fred Griffith’s ‘tranforming experiment’. Journal of the History of Biology, 49, 1–48.

Méthot, P.-O., & Alizon, S. (2014). What is a pathogen? Towards a process view of host–parasite interaction. Virulence, 5(8), 775–785.

Méthot, P.-O., & Fantini, B. (2014). Medicine and ecology: Historical and critical perspectives on the concept of “Emerging Disease”. International Archive of the History of Science, 64, 213–230.

Moberg, C. L. (1999). René Dubos: A harbinger of microbial resistance to antibiotics. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 42, 559–580.

Morrens, D. M., & Fauci, A. S. (2012). Emerging infectious diseases in 2012: 20 years after the Institute of Medicine report. mBio, 3(6), 1–4.

Podolsky, S. H. (2010). Antibiotics and the social history of the controlled clinical trrial. Journal for the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 65, 327–367.

Podolsky, S. H. (2015). The antibiotic era: Reform, resistance, and the pursuit of rational therapeutics. Baltimore: JHUP.

Podolsky, S. H., Bud, R., Gradmann, C., Hobaek, B., Kirchhelle, C., Mitvedt, T., et al. (2015). History teaches us that confronting antibiotic resistance requires stronger global collective Aation. [Vitenskapelig artikkel]. Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 43(3), 27–32.

Rogers, D. E. (1959). The changing pattern of life-threatening microbial disease. The New England Journal of Medicine, 261(14), 677–683.

Rogers, D. E. 68, Leading medical educator, dies. (1994, 12.6.). The New York Times.

Rothstein, W. G. (2003). Public health and the risk factor: A history of an uneven medical revolution. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press.

Schaffner, W. (1984). Priorities in infection control: The impact of new technology. Journal of Hospital Infection, 5(Supplement A), 1–5.

Schlich, T. (2012). Asepsis and bacteriology: A realignment of surgery and laboratory science. Medical History, 56(3), 308–334.

Schlich, T. (2013). Negotiating technologies in surgery: The controversy about surgical gloves in the 1890s. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 87(2), 170–197.

Schlich, T., & Tröhler, U. (Eds.). (2006). The risks of medical innovation: risk perception and assessment in historical context. London, NY: Routledge.

Snowden, F. M. (2008). Emerging and reemerging diseases: A historical perspective. Immunological Reviews, 225(1), 9–26.

Spink, W. W. (1955). Clinical problems relating to the management of infections with antibiotics. Journal of the American Medical Association, 152(7), 585–590.

Suter, P., & Vincent, J. L. (Eds.). (1993). Milestones in hospital infections. Thorpe, Egham: Medical Action Communication Ltd.

Tansey, E. M. (Ed.). (2000). Post penicillin antibiotics: From acceptance to resistance. A witness seminar, held at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London, 12 May 1998 (Wellcome witnesses to twentienth century medicine). London.

Thoburn, R., Fekety, R. F., Leighton, E. C., & Melvin, V. B. (1968). Infections acquired by hospitalized patients. Archives of Internal Medicine, 121, 1–10.

Tibayrenc, M. (2001). The golden age of genetics and the dark age of infectious diseases. Infection, Genetics and Evolution, 1, 1–2.

Timmermann, C. (2012). Appropriating risk factors: The reception of an American approach to chronic disease in the two German States, 1950–1990. Social History of Medicine, 25(1), 157–174.

Timmermanns, S., & Berg, M. (2003). The gold standard: The challenge of evidence-based medicine and the standardization in health care. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Wall, R. (2013). Bacteria in Britain, 1880–1939. London: Pickering & Chatto.

Washer, P., & Joffe, H. (2006). The ‘hopital superbug’: Social representations of MRSA. Social Science and Medicine, 63, 2141–2152.

Weindling, P. (1992). Scientific elites and laboratory organisation in fin de siècle Paris and Berlin The Pasteur Institute and Robert Koch’s Institute for Infectious Diseases compared. In A. Cunningham & P. Williams (Eds.), The laboratory revolution in medicine (pp. 170–188). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Weir, L., & Mykhalovskiy, E. (2010). Global public health vigilance: Creating a world on alert. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis.

Wenzel, R. P. (1987). Prevention and control of nosocomial infections. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins.

Wenzel, R. P. (2005). Stalking microbes. A relentless pursuit of infection control. Bloomington/Indiana: Authorhouse.

Wenzel, R. P. (2009). Thirty years later. Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, 31(1), 1–3.

Wenzel, R. P., Brewer, T., & Butzler, J. P. (2002). Infection control in the hospital. Boston: International Society for Infectious Diseases.

Wise, R. I., Ossman, E. A., & Littlefiled, D. R. (1989). Personal reflections on nosocomial staphylococcal infections and the development of hospital surveillance. Reviews of Infectious Diseases, 11(6), 1005–1019.

Wright, S. (1994). Molecular politics: Developing American and British regulatory policy for genetic engineering, 1972–1982. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Zinsser, H. (1935). Rats, lice and history: Being a study in biography, which, after 12 preliminary chapters indispensable for the preparation of the lay reader, deals with the life history of Thyphus fever. London: Routledge.

Thông tin
Thông tin xuất bản

History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences

Tập 40

1-25

Thông tin tác giả