Background
Hans Zinsser was born in November 1878 in New York, United States, into the family of German immigrants August and Marie Theresia (Schmidt) Zinsser.
physician author bacteriologist poet
Hans Zinsser was born in November 1878 in New York, United States, into the family of German immigrants August and Marie Theresia (Schmidt) Zinsser.
Hans attended Timothy Dwight School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Then he received his undergraduate degree from Columbia University in 1899 and completed both a master's degree and a doctorate in medicine there in 1903.
It was only after his tutelage under biologists Edmund Beecher Wilson and Bashford Dean during his junior year at Columbia that Zinsser realized that the life sciences would be his career. He went on to Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1899, deciding to devote his career to the application of his interest in biology to real human problems. He interned at Roosevelt Hospital, and then began to practice medicine. He left that vocation after a short while, however, when Columbia offered him a post as instructor in bacteriology.
Zinsser taught bacteriology for a short time at Columbia and teamed with Philip Hanson Hiss Jr., with whom in 1910 he coauthored "A Textbook of Bacteriology", which has become a standard microbiology text. Simultaneously, he served as assistant pathologist at New York’s St. Luke’s Hospital. The same year that "A Textbook of Bacteriology" was released, Zinsser moved his wife and first child, Gretel, to Palo Alto, California, to accept a position as associate professor of bacteriology and immunology at Stanford University. There he set up a bacteriology laboratory with the most minimal of equipment in some space borrowed from the anatomy department. In 1913 Zinsser returned to Columbia University, where he concentrated his research in the field of immunology.
As a professor of bacteriology and immunology at Columbia, Zinsser experienced a decade that was both exciting and dismaying. In 1915, in the midst of World War I, Zinsser served first as a member of the Red Cross Typhus Commission and later as an officer in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. Arriving in Serbia in 1915, Zinsser had his first field contact with an epidemic of typhus — a disease that is caused by the family of bacteria known as rickettsia, and is characterized by stupors, delirium, high fevers, severe headaches, and dark rashes. Approximately one hundred and fifty thousand cases of typhus existed at the Belgrade front, with a fatality rate of about sixty to seventy percent. During their experiences in the Eastern Front, the scientists in the commission began to gain a rudimentary understanding of the bacteriology and pathology of the disease.
In 1918 Zinsser left the U.S. Army Medical Corps as a lieutenant colonel and continued his professorial duties at Columbia, where he specialized in immunology. In particular, Zinsser focused on discovering a way to immunize patients against the chronic and contagious disease syphilis. Though he did not succeed in his quest to discover a successful method of immunization, he did contribute to the existing knowledge of spirochete, a type of bacteria that causes syphilis and relapsing fevers. In addition, Zinsser continued to study typhus, since he had became an expert on military sanitation, especially with regards to typhus, during his service in the war. He wrote articles and books on the subject in the course of his career, and during his lifetime took a number of trips to distant lands to study epidemic typhus or cholera — a diarrheal disease caused by bacteria. Among his expeditions were excursions to the Soviet Union in 1923, to Mexico in 1931, and to China in 1938, where he lectured at the Peiping, Beijing, Medical College.
His Columbia years came to an end in 1923 when, at the age of forty-five, he was offered a teaching position at Harvard University Medical School. Within two years he was named the Charles Wilder Professor of Bacteriology. Zinsser remained in Boston for the remainder of his life.
By 1930 Zinsser had decided to concentrate his studies on typhus fever research, and began a lengthy friendship with Charles J.H. Nicolle, the Nobel Prize-winning French physician and bacteriologist who discovered that typhus is transmitted by body lice. During the 1930s Zinsser was able, either alone or with a variety of co-workers, to aid in the understanding of the cause of the several forms of typhus, including Brill’s disease, named for American physician Nathan Edwin Brill, who investigated the malady. In addition, Zinsser worked on a vaccine against typhus and assisted in conceiving of a way to prepare the vaccine commercially, thus making the treatment available to large numbers of people. These endeavors have guaranteed him a place in the history of bacteriology and medicine. Zinsser died of leukemia in his native New York City on September 4, 1940.
In 1905, Hans married Ruby Handforth Kunz, eldest daughter of the mineralogist, George Frederick Kunz, and they had two children, Hans Handforth and Gretel Zinsser, and they all lived in Boston.