A Brief Perspective on the Early History of

American Infectious Disease Epidemiology

The Harvard community has made this
article openly available. Please share how
this access benefits you. Your story matters

Citation Kass, Edward H. 1987. A brief perspective on the early history of

American infectious disease epidemiology. The Yale Journal of
Biology and Medicine 60(4): 341-348.

Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:10246806

Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH
repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions
applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http://
nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of-
use#LAA
THE YALE JOURNAL OF BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE 60 (1987), 341-348

A Brief Perspective on the Early History of American

Infectious Disease Epidemiology
EDWARD H. KASS, M.D., Ph.D.

Channing Laboratory, Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and

Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts
Received December 19, 1986
The early history of epidemiology is closely linked to the history of infectious diseases and can
be divided into three distinct periods. The earliest period, which can be traced to the writings of
Hippocrates in the third and fourth centuries B.C., was that of clinical description of diseases with
little investigation into their specific characteristics and etiologies. The second period, spanning
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, may be distinguished by the rejection of early
Hippocratic and Galenic doctrines and the more systematic description of morbid conditions. The
third period, which was marked by the discovery of specific microbial causes of disease, spurred
an extraordinary growth of knowledge and scientific exploration. This period will be the main
focus of the paper, as it had the greatest influence on the development of American infectious
disease epidemiology.

It is a pleasure to dedicate these few remarks to Alfred Evans, who has been
the quintessential academic: teacher, virologist, epidemiologist, author, phi-
losopher, and constructive critic. I am proud to number him among my
friends.
Epidemiology, emerging from the study of infectious disease, became a field for
scientific study out of empirical necessity. Accordingly, any sketch, however brief, of
the history of infectious disease epidemiology in the United States or elsewhere is
necessarily intertwined with the profound effect of infections on social organization,
culture, religion, and virtually every aspect of daily life. To attempt an overview of such
a broad canvas requires a treatise far beyond the desires of the organizers of this
symposium, or of the capabilities of this reviewer. Instead I shall sketch briefly a few
formative influences on the development of American epidemiology. I shall make no
attempt to review the dependence of American thought on advances being made in
France, Britain, and, later, in Germany, despite its importance.
The history of infectious diseases can be conveniently divided into three broad
phases [ 1 ]. The earliest phase, such as appears in the Hippocratic treatises, was that of
clinical description with relatively few specific preventive or therapeutic measures. The
second, occurring mainly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was the time
when the early Hippocratic and Galenic doctrines about fever and disease that had
dominated medical thought for centuries were being overthrown. The ancient doctrines
held that disease was a consequence of imbalance between natural forces within and
outside the body, and therapy was directed toward restoring this balance. Thus,
separating fevers and other diseases into distinct nosologic entities was a relatively
pointless exercise, except for broadly descriptive and prognostic purposes. Although a
341
Address reprint requests to: Edward H. Kass, M.D., Channing Laboratory, 180 Longwood Ave., Boston,
MA 02115
Copyright © 1987 by The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, Inc.
All rights of reporduction in any form reserved.
342 EDWARD H. KASS

few specific descriptions of disease can be extracted from the writings of Boerhaave
and Sydenham, it was not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the more
systematic descriptions of disease were presented.
In the same period, another major event was taking place that is still only dimly
understood. Increasing prosperity, better food and housing, and changing living
conditions brought the first major downward trends in overall mortality. These quite
revolutionary societal advances created the impression that medical care accounted for
the improving health, a view that few physicians wished to dispel, and that most
believed, in accordance with the concepts of therapy of the time.
The third phase, characterized by the logarithmic growth of knowledge and of
scientific exploration, was a period that received its greatest stimulus from the
discovery of specific microbial causes of disease by Pasteur and Koch, which blossomed
into the present era of scientific exploration of disease.
In the colonial and postcolonial periods, American medical science was mainly
derivative, and bright young Americans ventured to Britain, France, Holland, and
elsewhere on the European continent to seek advanced training. Empiricism was the
essential theme. The settlement of virgin territories, the requirements of establishing
an agricultural and commercial basis for continued existence, and the political turmoil
that accompanied these aspirations permitted little opportunity for scholarly reflection
or observation.
Most medicine in the colonies, as in Europe, was practiced by empirics, sometimes
with training as apothecaries, usually products of apprenticeships of varying length
and standards. Most practitioners of medicine had other occupations, such as that of
clergyman or bookseller. University training was rare, and most medical ideas were
imported. What did not need to be imported was the vision of new opportunity and the
philosophical view, made necessary by the thrust and the success of colonization, that
the environment was controllable. This view spread to disease as well as to the rigors of
daily production of food, acquisition of shelter, and other functions of daily life.
When Jenner's vaccine was brought to the young nation, its introduction was
accompanied by business acumen and uncertainty as to its value. Indeed the practical
hardheadedness of the political leaders of the time and their doubts about the safety
and efficacy of the vaccine led to a clinical trial. To tell this tale requires some
background about immunization against smallpox in the colonies and during the
decades after independence.
Inoculation for the control of smallpox was an early importation from England,
where its use had been expanding for years. Governor Winthrop, Zabdiel Boylston,
Cotton Mather, and many others led the stalwart band who were convinced that
inoculation was a useful procedure, despite the tragedies that sometimes followed its
use, tragedies that led to fierce opposition to the procedure.
After Jenner's discovery was announced, the first lymph from cowpox lesions was
obtained by Benjamin Waterhouse. Controversy concerning its value came from three
major sources: those who feared and opposed variolization, those who supported
variolization and were uncertain that cowpox would confer immunity to smallpox, and
those who objected to Waterhouse's method of commercial exploitation of Jenner's
material. The political leaders of the Boston community resolved the arguments by
performing one of the first controlled clinical trials in American history.
The scene in which this trial was conducted has been described by Blake [2].
Waterhouse, born a Quaker, but apparently not a practicing Friend, was in close
 AMERICAN INFECTIOUS DISEASE EPIDEMIOLOGY: EARLY HISTORY 343

communication with co-religioqist John Coakley Lettsom, the London physician who
followed in the footsteps of John Fothergill's reformist practices. Lettsom, in 1799, sent
Waterhouse a copy of Jenner's "Inquiry... ." The young, newly appointed first
Professor of Physic at Harvard University, published, on March 16, 1799, a summary
of Jenner's discovery in the Columbian Centinal, a Boston newspaper. Soon thereafter,
Waterhouse successfully vaccinated his son, and then members of his household.
Waterhouse was promptly overwhelmed by requests for the material, and he evolved a
method of dispensing it that brought a storm of controversy. He chose to share the
precious vaccine only with selected physicians who promised to return a fraction of
their profits from the use of the vaccine to the academic entrepreneur. Waterhouse
claimed that in this manner he could control the quality of the lymph that was being
used for vaccination; however, his testy personality, the accumulating monopolistic
profits, and the failure of some of the cowpox lymph to produce the lesions that
signified protection, caused the method to come into some disrepute.
Waterhouse's motivation for tight control was not entirely self-serving. Few
practitioners heeded his careful strictures about which lymph was proper to use and
which was not (for example, cloudy or malodorous lymph was not to be used), so
vaccination often failed to produce the local lesion that signified success, and
sometimes produced severe secondary infections. In one catastrophic incident in
Marblehead, Massachusetts, the cowpox material was mixed with smallpox exudate
and an epidemic followed, adding to the fear and uncertainty about the new
procedure.
Waterhouse did set up facilities for providing the poor with free vaccine, and he
advocated a system of Vaccine Institutions in Boston for dissemination of vaccination
free of charge, but he and his procedure had become controversial enough to cause the
idea to languish. In 1801, however, Waterhouse provided President Thomas Jefferson
with free vaccinia material despite Jefferson's stated misgivings about monopolies
being operated for profit.
As interest, apprehension, and skepticism grew, and smallpox was still a menace to
the community, Waterhouse pressed the Board of Health of Boston (the first in the
country, founded in 1779 and chaired by Paul Revere) to perform a critical experi-
ment. The Board sought the advice of prominent physicians and on May 31, 1802,
agreed to proceed with a controlled trial. The experiment began on August 16 with
twenty vaccinated volunteers. A temporary hospital was set up on the relatively
deserted Noddle's Island, now East Boston, and thirteen of these vaccinated young
men were housed there, along with two unprotected individuals. All fifteen were
housed in one room. All received fresh smallpox material that was obtained from a
practitioner of variolization in Falmouth, on Cape Cod. The two unvaccinated boys
became ill, and the thirteen previously vaccinated boys remained well. Then the entire
vaccinated group, this time including the remaining seven, were again inoculated with
infectious material and housed in the same room with the two boys who were
recovering from smallpox. No new cases appeared, and the experiment was declared a
success for vaccination. Thus was a skeptical medical and lay public convinced and
vaccination spread across the new nation.
In France, the Royal Academy of Medicine from its inception was charged with the
responsibility for conducting controlled trials of the effectiveness of medicines and
medical procedures, but the development of this mandate was frustrated by the
political revolution. Mathematicians in France and in England had begun to formulate
344 EDWARD H. KASS

statistical theories, however, and practical observers, such as P.C.A. Louis, had begun
systematic collections of clinical data [3,4].
Statistical maturation in Britain, spearheaded by Benjamin Gompertz and Thomas
Rowe Edmonds, applied and extended by the remarkable William Farr [5], made it
inevitable that Americans would follow. Even before these important events in Britain,
however, Dr. Edward A. Holyoke had begun to investigate the relation of death to diseases
that caused it. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, founded by John Adams to
demonstrate that Philadelphia was not the sole center of learning, had published "regular
and uniform Bills of Mortality from the several towns within the Commonwealth" in 1785.
Holyoke calculated longevity from data supplied by sixty-two towns in Massachusetts and
New Hampshire and showed that life expectancy at age 65 was almost 12.5 years-a
remarkable testimony to the relatively healthful colonial environment, with its lack of
crowding, reasonable food supply, and rare urban squalor [6]. Science was not a major
preoccupation of the new nation, however, despite the contributions from a small number
of gifted persons endowed with the intellect and the leisure to produce scientific
information. Most of what was known in science and medicine continued to flow from
Europe.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, enough information had accumulated in
the major American cities, and enough young medical practitioners had studied in
Europe, to be able to combine European teachings with their own perceptions, and
criticisms as well as embellishments on European practices were beginning to appear.
Particular concerns were the lack of humanitarianism in French hospitals and the lack
of evidence of therapeutic effectiveness in practice in general [7]. From a scientific
viewpoint, only Oliver Wendell Holmes's analysis of the contagiousness of puerperal
fever stands out, not only because of the careful marshalling of evidence, but also
because of his use of probability estimations that were reflective of the advanced
statistical thinking of the time [8].
The burst of knowledge that was ushered in by the first demonstrations of microbiologic
causes of disease had its counterparts in scientific research in the States, but only a few
contributions were of sufficient quality to have altered epidemiologic thought. Although
Austin Flint had written in compelling fashion in 1874 of the "Logical Proof of the
Contagiousness and non-Contagiousness of Diseases," the first discussion of bacteria in the
American literature was a review by L.A. Stimson, in the New York Medical Journal (in
which Flint's article had appeared a year earlier), with a briefer version in Popular Science
Monthly [9]. Two years later, in 1877, two articles in the Boston Medical and Surgical
Journal summarized Lister's epochal work on antiseptic surgery and gave details of its
successful application to a small number of patients in the Massachusetts General
Hospital [10,11]
Thomas J. Burrill was probably the first to introduce bacteriology into the university
curriculum. In 1880, Burrill published his observations on Micrococcus amylovorus as
the cause of pear blight, satisfying what later became the Henle-Koch postulates about
etiology. He had introduced bacteriological study into his course on botany at the
University of Illinois, probably a year or two before announcement of his discovery
[12]. Burrill became an example of extinction by promotion; he assumed increasing
administrative responsibility and ultimately the presidency of the University.
In medicine, William Henry Welch at Bellevue Medical College and T. Mitchell
Prudden at Columbia set up bacteriological laboratories in New York City, with
foundation help. By 1885, when Welch moved to Johns Hopkins, he could report that
 AMERICAN INFECTIOUS DISEASE EPIDEMIOLOGY: EARLY HISTORY 345

twenty-six medical graduates were working in his laboratory. Several original investi-
gations, including his own and those of George M. Sternberg, who had been permitted
by the Army and by Hopkins to work in Welch's laboratory, reached the standards of
similar research in Europe.
Daniel E. Salmon began his work in the Division of Animal Industry of the federal
government in 1879, was named chief of the renamed Bureau in 1884, and promptly
took on a promising young man from Albany, Theobald Smith. Smith had received a
state stipend to attend Cornell and had received his M.D. in 1884, supplementing his
scholarship as a church organist. At age 25, Smith was named director of the pathology
laboratory in the Bureau, where he remained for five years, and was professor of
bacteriology at the then Columbian (now George Washington) University in Washing-
ton, D.C. Salmon and Smith isolated the organism of hog cholera, now Salmonella
cholerae suis [13], following this work by the demonstration that the attenuated
bacteria conferred immunity to the disease, providing a major new principle in the
control of disease [14].
Thus did Theobald Smith begin a career marked by most important microbiologic
and epidemiologic discoveries. For all the adulation that he has received, it still seems
inadequate; he did not receive the Nobel prize when lesser discoveries were so
recognized. Smith came to Harvard in 1895 to be the first George Fabyan Professor of
Comparative Pathology and to direct the Antitoxin and Vaccine Laboratory of the
Massachusetts Board of Health. He remained there for twenty years until he moved to
the Rockefeller Institute, as Director of the Department of Animal Diseases in
Princeton, New Jersey.
In 1889, Smith published his first observations on cattle fever, and in 1893
published, with the veterinarian, F.L. Kilborne, his monumental work entitled
Investigations into the Nature, Causation and Prevention of Texas or Southern Cattle
Fever [15]. This devastating disease, which was producing serious economic effects on
the cattle industry, had been observed by keen cattlemen and scientists, and a few of
these observations were agreed upon. Clinically, the disease was characterized by high
fever, sometimes to 1090F., with severe anemia and hemoglobinuria. At autopsy there
was often severe disease of the liver as well. Etiology was unknown.
Smith argued that there were only three etiologic possibilities. First, the disease
might be a disease of the liver with destruction of the blood due to absorption of bile.
Second, the disease might be due to a germ in the intestinal tract that secreted a
ptomaine (this was the time when ptomaine poisoning seemed a reality) and the
ptomaine caused the destruction of the blood. Third, the disease might be due to an
organism that lived in the blood and destroyed the red cells. By 1886, he had, by
making imprints of the spleens of cattle dying of the disease, seen within or on the
erythrocytes "small round bodies perhaps 1,u in diameter.... It took four years of
slavery at the microscope, at autopsy, at watching ticks hatch from the egg..." to
solve the problem and to demonstrate the first arthropod-borne infection in medical
history. He had drawn on many earlier empirical observations in deciding the direction
of his research, and he spelled out the epidemiologic information that indicated the
directions he had selected for his intensive studies:
a. Southern cattle that bore the infection were generally free of the disease;
b. Infection was carried during the warm season-Southern cattle were harmless
during the winter;
346 EDWARD H. KASS

c. Transmission from Southern to Northern cattle was not direct, in that ground
over which Southern cattle had passed could, if Northern cattle grazed there even
weeks later, still transmit the disease;
d. Southern cattle, after a short time in the North, lost their ability to transmit
the disease;
e. Northern cattle with the disease did not transmit the disease to other Northern
cattle but Northern cattle brought South contracted the fever.
Salmon drew a map delineating the geographic distribution of the disease, which
occurred south of the thirty-seventh parallel, except along the eastern slope of the
Allegheny mountains where it crept up to a line between the thirty-eighth and
thirty-ninth parallels.
Smith, having observed the bodies in the red cell, and suspecting the tick as the
reasonable vector that would put together the epidemiologic patterns, enlisted the
collaboration of Kilborne, an expert on the tick, and they transmitted the disease by
putting recently hatched ticks on susceptible cattle. They described the disease
produced during their experiments, providing a comprehensive listing of the symptoms
and signs, laboratory findings, pathologic changes, and seasonal fluctuation of the
disease. Smith suggested that cover slips were the best way to look at the blood, and
included a diagram showing how cover slips could spread a small drop of blood on their
surfaces-a method that students, house officers, and hematologists have used without
realizing that it originated in the study of cattle fever before the twentieth century. The
dried blood films showed the organism in various stages within the red blood cells, and
the paper has beautiful and complete color plates as well as black-and-white drawings.
The suggested name of the organism, not yet cultivated, was Pyrosoma bigeminum,
now Babesia bigemina, because of its bipolar appearance and its association with the
fever. Smith related his findings to Lavaran's recent discovery of pigmented forms in
the red cells of malarial patients, implying that arthropods should be sought in the
latter disorder, but indicating that his organism differed in its appearance from the
malarial parasite by the absence of pigment, as well as in other morphological details.
The tick that carried the parasite, Boophilus bovis, later Ixodes bovis, and now
Boophilus annulatus, was studied during its entire life cycle. Its fertilization on the
cattle after feeding with blood, the manner in which the females dropped to the ground,
the wintering of the organism on the skin or in the ovum in the ground were all
described. A worldwide survey of the disease showed it to be present in Africa,
Romania, and other countries.
There was little left to be said after the paper was published, other than to admire a
presentation that is close to being unmatched in medical history for its completeness
and accuracy. The weaving together of epidemiologic observations to create the
hypotheses, of controlled trial to test these, of laboratory and clinical observation to
uncover etiology and methods of control, and extension of the findings to other diseases
such as malaria, was a scientific achievement as elegant as it is disciplined. Within the
decade, the transmission of malaria and yellow fever by mosquitos was proven.
Smith did not stop here, although this work guaranteed medical immortality for
him. He observed anaphylaxis in guinea pigs that had been given diphtheria antitoxin
followed later by a slightly larger dose of the same serum. He transmitted this
discovery to Paul Ehrlich in a letter, and some years later Ehrlich's student, Otto,
published a detailed analysis of what he called the Theobald Smith phenomenon, or
 AMERICAN INFECTIOUS DISEASE EPIDEMIOLOGY: EARLY HISTORY 347

anaphylaxis. Smith differentiated for the first time the human from bovine tubercle
bacilli, paving the way for the demonstration of bovine tuberculosis and its control, and
he also studied sarcosporideae, tracing the life cycle of these parasites from murine
host to murine host by direct feeding of infected muscle. Perhaps as much as any
accomplishment, since he was an unabashed and unapologetic utilitarian, he took pride
in having produced a high-quality diphtheria antitoxin for the Massachusetts popula-
tion, having increased production efficiently and economically, and in having supplied
the life-saving serum for 10 percent of its commercial cost.
The development of our knowledge of infectious disease in the United States and the
attendant growth of epidemiologic theory and practice demanded institutional and
governmental responses to the lessons that were accumulating. The first federal and
state hygienic laboratories in the U.S. were established in 1887, reflecting not only an
increasing awareness of the American scientific community but also the evolving
political attitude that the protection of the public health should be addressed through
governmental support. The first municipal laboratory was established in 1888 in
Providence, Rhode Island, and by 1914 all states except Wyoming and New Mexico
had public health laboratories. The first federal hygienic laboratory began operations
in one room of the Marine Hospital on Staten Island in 1887 under the direction of
Joseph James Kinyoun, and in 1901 Congress designated thirty-five thousand dollars
for this Hygienic Laboratory, providing the first federal mandate for the investigation
of "infectious and contagious diseases, and matters pertaining to the public health"
[16]. Over the next forty-three years, this one-room bacteriologic laboratory evolved
into the National Institutes of Health (NIH), formally established by Congress in
1930 [17]. Other organizational entities developed concurrently with NIH. For
example, the American Public Health Association, founded in 1873, had its laboratory
Section in 1901, with Theobald Smith as its chairman. Numerous related societies and
their journals followed.
The close interrelationship between clinical and public health practices, laboratory
investigations, and governmental actions is illustrated better in the case of infectious
diseases than with any other category of disease. This interrelationship provided
models for students of many chronic diseases.
Epidemiologic techniques, moving from their roots in infectious disease, have
become necessary for the most efficient and acceptable solutions to major problems in
chronic disease, health care, hospital management, and innumerable other problems.
Infectious disease epidemiology has resurfaced with the recognition of new hitherto
unobserved infectious diseases. Legionnaire's Disease, toxic shock syndrome, acquired
immunodeficiency syndrome, and many other illnesses have demonstrated the impor-
tance of basic, time-honored epidemiologic methods in the understanding of disease.
These methods, refined and sharpened as they inevitably will be, are certain to be
essential for further understanding the natural history of diseases, for the evaluation of
therapeutic and prophylactic measures, and therefore for the advancement of the
public health.
REFERENCES
1. Kass EH: A History of the Specialty of Infectious Diseases in the United States of America. In One
Hundred Years of Internal Medicine. Edited by R Maulitz, DL Hall. Philadelphia, University of
Pennsylvania, in press
348 EDWARD H. KASS

2. Blake JB: Benjamin Waterhouse and the Introduction of Vaccination: A Reappraisal. Philadelphia,
University of Pennsylvania, 1957, 95 pp
3. Cassedy JH: American Medicine and Statistical Thinking, 1800-1860. Cambridge, MA, Harvard
University Press, 1984, 306 pp
4. Cullen MJ: The Statistical Movement in Early Britain. Hassocks, Sussex, The Harvester Press Limited,
1975, 205 pp
5. Louis P: Research on the Effects of Bloodletting in Some Inflammatory Diseases and on the Influence of
Tartarized Antimony and Vesication in Pneumonitis. Translated by CG Putnam. Boston, Hilliard Gray
and Co, 1836, 171 pp
6. Hindle B: The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America 1735-1789. Chapel Hill, University of
North Carolina Press, 1956, pp 292, 298
7. Warner JH: The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in America,
1820-1885. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1986, 322 pp
8. Holmes OW: The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever. New Engl Quart Jour 1:503-530, 1843; see also
Med Classics 1:211-243, 1936
9. Stimson LA: Bacteria and their Influence upon the Origin and Development of Septic Complications of
Wounds. New Engl Quart Jour 22:113-115, 1875
10. White R: Personal Observations of Lister's Antiseptic Treatment, Boston Med Surg J 97:235-245,
1877
11. Howe OT, Morse HL: Surgical Cases of Dr. Warren. Cases of Injury to Hand from Explosion: Lister's
Dressing etc. Boston Med Surg J 97:371-373, 1877
12. Clark PF: Pioneer Microbiologists of America. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1961, 369 pp
13. Salmon DE, Smith T: The Bacterium of Swine-Plague. Amer Month Microscop J 7:204-205, 1886
14. Salmon DE, Smith T: On a New Method of Producing Immunity from Contagious Diseases. Proc Biol
Soc Washington 3:29-33, 1886
15. Smith T, Kilborne F: Investigations into the Nature, Causation, and Prevention of Southern Cattle
Fever. Bureau of Animal Industry, Eighth and Ninth Annual Reports, 1891 and 1892, U.S.
Government Printing Office; reprinted in Med Classics 1:379-596, 1937
16. Sundry Civil Appropriation Act, March 3, 1910, ch. 863.31 Stat L. 1137
17. Harden VA: Inventing the NIH. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, pp 9-17