21 research outputs found
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Tuberculous Scrofula: Belfast Experience
The Belfast blitzes of 1941 are blamed in our family for the scrofula of my younger brother and sister and myself. Guinea pigs and rabbits at Musgrave Park proved that each of us had bovine derived TB infection caused by failure to pasteurize milk when tuberculin-tested milk was not available. The clinical head of Harvard Medical School’s anti-tuberculosis effort contacted his boss, Professor Maxwell Finland, who ascertained from Selman A. Waksman that his antibiotic streptothricin was bacteriostatic against TB but too toxic for humans. Finland, born 1902, knew Waksman (born 1888) well, each having emigrated from the Czarist-ruled Ukraine. Waksman , in 1942, had hopes for an analog to streptothricin he intended to name streptomycin: an antibiotic from Actinomyces griseus which had been culture-isolated in 1916 for his M.Sc. thesis. Streptomycin was still 6-9 months away from animal testing. The same Actinomyces species was also able to produce actinomycin C and D which was later supplied to Professor Sidney Farber of Harvard to start successful human cancer chemotherapy
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FDR and American Military Deployment: “My” Armed Forces and their Health
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Asbestos and shipbuilding: fatal consequences
The severe bombing of Belfast in 1941 had far-reaching consequences. Harland and Wolff was crippled. The British Merchant Ship Building Mission to the USA was being constrained by the UK treasury. On being told of the Belfast destruction, the British Mission and the United States Maritime Commission were emboldened. The result was 2,710 Liberty Ships launched to a British design. The necessary asbestos use associated with this and other shipbuilding, after a quarter century or more latency, is a genesis of malignancy killing thousands. Reversal of studies on asbestos limitation of fire propagation was crucial to Allied strategic planning of mass-fires which resulted in the slaughter of one to two million civilians. Boston and Belfast institutions made seminal discoveries about asbestos use and its sequelae
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Blood and War
In 1894 Ulsterman and pathologist Almroth Wright described the citation of blood. Twenty-one years later it was introduced into wartime and clinical practice. Harvard Medical School had a large part in providing Colonel Andrew Fullerton, later Professor of Surgery, Queen's Belfast, with the intellectual and practical help for the Allies to deploy blood on the post-Somme Western Front and in Salonika. The key investigators and clinicians were Americans and Canadians who with Fullerton and Wright instructed the Allies. The key enablers were two Harvard-trained surgeons surnamed Robertson—Oswald H. (“Robby”) and L. Bruce (no relation). Physician Roger I. Lee of Harvard, surgeon George W Crile of Cleveland, Peyton Rous of the Rockefeller Institute and Richard Lewisohn of Mount Sinai Hospital, both located in the Upper East Side of New York City, played key roles. By Armistice in 1918, indirect citrated nutrient-enhanced blood transfusion was widely used by the Allies. Geoffrey Keynes was taught the techniques of blood transfusion by Dr. Benjamin Harrison Alton of Harvard at a Casualty Clearing Station near Albert at the time of the Battle of Passchendaele. Professor “Robby” Robertson, DSO, Sir Geoffrey Keynes and Sir Thomas Houston established blood banking