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Reports of the President's Homes Commission: Message From the President...Transmitting Reports...On Improvement of Existing Houses, and Elimination of ... Regulations, Together With Resolution
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Disinfection and Individual Prophylaxis Against Infectious Diseases (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from Disinfection and Individual Prophylaxis Agai...)
Excerpt from Disinfection and Individual Prophylaxis Against Infectious Diseases
It is but fair to say, also, that this popular usage is supported by good authority, and until quite recently has been the common ac ceptation of the term among physicians and chemists. Indeed, it is but a short time since the nose test was the only test of disinfection recognized by many intelligent persons.
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George Miller Sternberg was a United States Army physician who is considered the first U. S. bacteriologist, having written Manual of Bacteriology (1892). He served throughout the Cholera and Yellow Fever epidemics in the United States and was a member of the Yellow Fever Commission, and the National Board of Health.
Background
George was born on June 8, 1838 at Hartwick Seminary, Otsego County, New York, United States, where he spent most of his childhood. His father, Levi Sternberg, a Lutheran clergyman who later became principal of Hartwick Seminary, was descended from a German family from the Palatinate, which had settled in the Schoharie valley in the early years of the eighteenth century.
His mother, Margaret Levering (Miller) Sternberg, was the daughter of George B. Miller, also a Lutheran clergyman and professor of theology at the seminary, a Lutheran school. The eldest of a large family, George was early compelled to lighten his father's burden by gainful work
Education
His studies at Hartwick Seminary were interrupted by a year of employment in a bookstore in Cooperstown and by three years of teaching in rural schools. During his last years at Hartwick he taught mathematics, chemistry, and natural philosophy, and devoted his leisure hours to the study of anatomy and physiology under Dr. Horace Lathrop of Cooperstown.
After medical courses first in Buffalo and then at the College of Physicians and Surgeons (later part of Columbia University), where he received the Doctor of Medicine degree in the spring of 1860.
Career
Sternberg settled for medicine practice in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and remained there until the outbreak of the Civil War. He was appointed assistant surgeon, United States Army, on May 28, 1861, and on July 21 of the same year he was captured at Bull Run while serving with General George Sykes's division in the Army of the Potomac. Escaping, he joined his command in front of Washington, and later participated in the battles of Gaines's Mill and Malvern Hill (Peninsular campaign).
He contracted typhoid fever at Harrison's Landing and was sent north on a government transport. The remaider of his Civil War service he rendered mainly in military hospitals at Portsmouth Grove, Rhod Island, and at Cleveland, Ohio. He received brevet commissions of captain and major for faithful and meritorious service during the war. From the close of the Civil War until 1879 he served at various army posts, first in Kansas, then on the Atlantic seaboard, and later in the Pacific northwest.
In 1868-69 he took part in several expeditions against hostile Cheyennes along the upper Arkansas River in Indian Territory and western Kansas. During his service at Fort Barrancas, Florida, 1872-75, which was marked by frequent contact with yellow fever, he noted the efficacy of moving inhabitants out of an infected environment and successfully applied the method to the Barrancas garrison.
About this time he published two articles in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal ("An Inquiry into the Modus Operandi of the Yellow Fever Poison, " July 1875, and "A Study of the Natural History of Yellow Fever, " March 1877) which gave him a definite status as an authority upon yellow fever.
He was stricken with the disease himself in the summer of 1875, and recovered only after a critical illness and a long convalescence. Later, while serving at Fort Walla Walla, Washington, he participated in the Nez Perces campaign of 1877.
In these days he was utilizing the time not taken up by his military duties in the studies and experiments which were the foundation for his later work. He perfected an anenometer and in 1870 patented an automatic heat regulator which has had wide use.
In April 1879 he was ordered to Washington, District of Columbia, and detailed for duty with the Havana Yellow Fever Commission, his medical associates being Dr. Stanford Chaille of New Orleans and Dr. Juan Guiteras of Havana. In the distribution of work, Sternberg was given the problems relating to the nature and natural history of the cause of the disease, which involved microscopical examination of blood and tissues of yellow fever patients.
In these investigations he was one of the first to employ the newly discovered process of photomicrography, and he developed high efficiency in its use.
At the end of its year's work, however, the Commission came to the conclusion that the solution of the cause of the disease must wait upon further progress in the new science of bacteriology.
Sternberg was next sent to New Orleans to investigate the conflicting discoveries of the Plasmodium malariae by Alphonse Laveran and of the Bacillus malariae by Arnold Carl Klebs and Corrado Tommasi-Crudeli.
His report, made in 1881, stated that the so-called Bacillus malariae had no part in the causation of malaria.
In this same year, simultaneously with Louis Pasteur, he announced his discovery of the pneumococcus, now recognized as the pathogenic agent in pneumonia, though it remained for Karl Frankel to show its relationship to the disease.
In the United States he was the first to demonstrate the plasmodium of malaria (1885) and the bacilli of tuberculosis and typhoid fever (1886). His interest in bacteriology naturally led to an interest in disinfection, and with him and Koch scientific disinfection had its beginning.
In 1878, using putrefactive bacteria, he had begun to experiment on disinfectants. He continued his experiments in Washington and in the laboratories of the Johns Hopkins Hospital at Baltimore under the auspices of the American Public Health Association. His essay, Disinfection and Individual Prophylaxis against Infectious Diseases (1886), received the Lomb prize and was translated into several foreign languages.
During the Hamburg cholera epidemic of 1892 he was attached to the New York quarantine station as consultant upon disinfection as applied to ships and quarantine stations. Though the disease reached American shores, no case developed within the country. In the meantime he was ascending in military grade.
He was made captain in 1866, major in 1875, lieutenant-colonel in 1891, and on May 30, 1893, surgeon-general of the army with the rank of brigadier-general. His nine years' tenure of that office was marked by the establishment of the Army Medical School in 1893, the organization of the army nurse corps and the dental corps, the creation of the tuberculosis hospital at Fort Bayard and of many general hospitals during the Spanish-American War. His own early difficulties in acquiring the knowledge for which he thirsted led to a liberal-minded policy in the establishment of laboratories in the larger military hospitals where medical officers could engage in scientific research.
In 1898, led by similar motives, he established the Typhoid Fever Board made up of Majors Walter Reed, Victor Clarence Vaughan, and Edward O. Shakespeare, which introduced new points of view for the prevention of this disease, and in 1900 he established the Yellow Fever Commission, headed by Reed, which fixed the transmission of yellow fever upon a particular species of mosquito.
After his retirement from active duty in the army in 1902, he devoted his later years to social welfare activities in Washington, particularly to the sanitary improvement of habitations and to care of the tuberculous.
He died on November 3, 1915 at his home in Washington.
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Membership
He was an honorary member of: Epidemiological Society of London, the Royal Academy of Rome, the Academy of Medicine of Rio Janeiro, the American Academy of Medicine, and the French Society of Hygiene.
He was also a member (and one time president) of the American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, the Association of Military Surgeons of the United States, the Washington Biological Society, and the Philosophical Society of the District of Columbia.
Personality
He was a man of reverent piety and practical Christianity, modest and unassuming, gentle in manner and in speech, whose career was marked by devotion to duty and untiring industry.
He was short in stature, with a moderate stoutness in his later years. His portraits show how the smooth-faced youth of abundant dark hair changed to the middle-aged man of full beard, and finally to the retired officer with white mustache and fringe of white hair. Marked in them all are the high intelligent forehead and the keen speculative dark eyes.
Connections
He was married on October 19, 1865, to a daughter of Robert Russell of Cooperstown, New York, Louisa Russell, who died in 1867 from cholera at Fort Harker, Kansas. There were no children.
On September 1, 1869, he was married at Indianapolis, Indiana, to Martha L. Pattison, daughter of Thomas T. N. Pattison of that city.