Traditional Medicine Doctor Kim Gwangjin's Battle against Jaundice during the Japanese Colonial Period.

This study aims to examine how traditional medicine doctors of the Japanese colonial period in Korea treated patients and their own diseases with traditional medicine and Western medicine by analyzing Clinical Cases and A Diary of Jaundice Treatment of Kim Gwangjin (1885-1940). Through this inquiry, this study aims to reveal that the Japanese colonial period was a time when the traditional medicine and the Western medicine coexisted, and that this period cannot be simply defined as a dualism between "Western medicine, Japanese colonial government" versus "traditional medicine, governed public." Kim Gwangjin's main method of medical treatment was traditional medicine. Clinical Cases include over 60 treatment cases, and they illustrate that he was a typical doctor at the time using traditional medical knowledge. In addition, Kim wrote A Diary of Jaundice Treatment from January 1939 to July 1940, a month before his death. The disease that led to his death was jaundice. He examined the changes in his abdomen every day, and recorded the changes in edema in upper extremities and testicles, urine and feces. While the treatment that Kim used in the early stages of jaundice were herbal medicines, he was not confined to the boundaries of the traditional medicine as he studied Western medicine to obtain a license of traditional medicine doctor from Japanese colonial government. He took a urine test to confirm whether his illness was jaundice or kidney disease and had X-ray imaging to check for pleurisy at a Western medical hospital in Daegu. Furthermore, he received a procedure to artificially drain bile, took a medicine to excrete bile into the feces, and had injection to treat neuralgia. Mostly, it was diarrhea that bothered Kim, who had been suffering from jaundice. Preventing diarrhea led to edema, and removing edema led to diarrhea again. He managed his symptoms by stopping the herbal medicine treatments and going on a raw food diet. Around this time, Kim relied the most on Ejisan. Ejisan was a type of new medicine mixed with traditional medicine and Western medicine that had the effect of treating edema and digestive disorders. Kim personally manufactured and took the drug until a month before his death, praising it as a necessary drug to treat jaundice. Kim was a traditional medical doctor during the Japanese colonial period. He also had the conventional wisdom that Western medicine was excellent in treating surgical diseases but not effective in internal medicine. However, he used both traditional medicine and Western medicine to treat symptoms of jaundice that have not been treated well and created a new medicine called Ejisan, which combined the two types of medicines. For him, Western medicine was a new medicine that improved the wrong aspects of traditional medicine or the old medicine, but there was still a realm of traditional medicine that Western medicine could not intervene. Furthermore, he published a new theory of traditional medicine called the Principle of Up and Down, which incorporates some Western medical knowledge. The Japanese colonial government required traditional medicine doctors to study Western medicine, and traditional medicine doctors had to learn Western medicine in order to survive. In the meantime, traditional medicine doctors such as Kim have brought about new changes by integrating the two medical treatments in the clinical field. The Japanese colonial government planned the demise of traditional medicine by forcing traditional medicine doctors to study the Western medicine, but the unexpected achievement brought about by traditional medicine doctors, who survived longer than the Japanese Empire and the colonial government, was an attempt to integrate Eastern and Western medicine.

Leptospirosis in French Historical Medical Literature: Weil's Disease or Kelsch's Disease?

Early names for leptospirosis often indicate occupational or environmental exposure. Leptospirosis is hard to identify in the tropical setting because of co-circulating diseases. This is not the case in the temperate setting, such as Europe, where the few historical differential diagnoses were malaria, typhoid, and viral hepatitis. Leptospirosis presumably caused community epidemics in Europe before 1900 and military epidemiologists carefully documented outbreaks in "constrained settings." Achille Kelsch (1841-1911) synthesized available military data and epidemiological perspectives to define "epidemic jaundice" as a nosological continuum, caused by an infectious agent found in muds and water. He viewed Weil's disease as being only one form of that now well-identified disease continuum. The causative pathogen and epidemiological determinants were identified years later. The role of soils and muds as intermediate reservoirs, as suggested by Kelsch, deserves further investigation.

19th-century and early 20th-century jaundice outbreaks, the USA.

Historical enquiry into diseases with morbidity or mortality predilections for particular demographic groups can permit clarification of their emergence, endemicity, and epidemicity. During community-wide outbreaks of hepatitis A in the pre-vaccine era, clinical attack rates were higher among juveniles rather than adults. In community-wide hepatitis E outbreaks, past and present, mortality rates have been most pronounced among pregnant women. Examination for these characteristic predilections in reports of jaundice outbreaks in the USA traces the emergence of hepatitis A and also of hepatitis E to the closing three decades of the 19th century. Thereafter, outbreaks of hepatitis A burgeoned, whereas those of hepatitis E abated. There were, in addition, community-wide outbreaks that bore features of neither hepatitis A nor E; they occurred before the 1870s. The American Civil War antedated that period. If hepatitis A had yet to establish endemicity, then it would not underlie the jaundice epidemic that was widespread during the war. Such an assessment may be revised, however, with the discovery of more extant outbreak reports.

Rosemary Biggs MD FRCP (1912-2001) and Katharine Dormandy MD FRCP (1926-78): from laboratory to treatment and care of people with haemophilia.

In 1977 the Haemophilia Society presented the first RG Macfarlane Award to Katharine Dormandy for her outstanding contribution towards the social and physical wellbeing of people with haemophilia and related disorders. In 1978 Rosemary Biggs was the second recipient of the Award given for similarly outstanding personal contributions. Dr Biggs worked under Dr RG Macfarlane at Oxford and in 1952 devised a laboratory test that identified two forms of haemophilia. Macfarlane realized the potential for replacement therapy which subsequently transformed the lives of haemophiliacs in the UK. Dr Biggs was director of the Oxford Haemophilia Centre (1967-77) and instrumental in documenting the increase in incidence of jaundice with the import of concentrates for infusion. Katharine Dormandy, Consultant Haematologist at the Royal Free Hospital in London, set up one of the country's foremost haemophilia centres, pioneered home treatment for haemophilic children and with Rosemary Biggs was involved in the social and educational welfare of affected families.

Mortality and morbidity among military personnel and civilians during the 1930s and World War II from transmission of hepatitis during yellow fever vaccination: systematic review.

During World War II, nearly all US and Allied troops received yellow fever vaccine. Until May 1942, it was both grown and suspended in human serum. In April 1942, major epidemics of hepatitis occurred in US and Allied troops who had received yellow fever vaccine. A rapid and thorough investigation by the US surgeon general followed, and a directive was issued discontinuing the use of human serum in vaccine production. The large number of cases of hepatitis caused by the administration of this vaccine could have been avoided. Had authorities undertaken a thorough review of the literature, they would have discovered published reports, as early as 1885, of postvaccination epidemics of hepatitis in both men and horses. It would take 4 additional decades of experiments and epidemiological research before viruses of hepatitis A, B, C, D, and E were identified, their modes of transmission understood, and their genomes sequenced.

Fatal outbreaks of jaundice in pregnancy and the epidemic history of hepatitis E.

Space-time clustering of people who fall acutely ill with jaundice, then slip into coma and death, is an alarming phenomenon, more markedly so when the victims are mostly or exclusively pregnant. Documentation of the peculiar, fatal predisposition of pregnant women during outbreaks of jaundice identifies hepatitis E and enables construction of its epidemic history. Between the last decade of the 18th century and the early decades of the 20th century, hepatitis E-like outbreaks were reported mainly from Western Europe and several of its colonies. During the latter half of the 20th century, reports of these epidemics, including those that became serologically confirmed as hepatitis E, emanated from, first, the eastern and southern Mediterranean littoral and, thereafter, Southern and Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and the rest of Africa. The dispersal has been accompanied by a trend towards more frequent and larger-scale occurrences. Epidemic and endemic hepatitis E still beset people inhabiting Asia and Africa, especially pregnant women and their fetuses and infants. Their relief necessitates not only accelerated access to potable water and sanitation but also vaccination against hepatitis E.

Jaundice in the Hippocratic Corpus.

The Hippocratic physicians were among the first who described jaundice (icterus). The Hippocratic Corpus has numerous appearances of the condition, where its etiology, description, prognosis, and treatment are provided. The connection made between the liver and jaundice was remarkable, bearing in mind that the Hippocratic physicians had not performed dissections and that their medical views were based on observation. The Hippocratic doctors described five kinds of jaundice. The etiology was, as in most cases of diseases mentioned in the Hippocratic Corpus, "humoral" imbalance. The diagnosis and prognosis were based on the color of the skin, the urine, the feces, and several other factors, such as the season of the year during which the disease first appeared or the coexisting diseases. The treatment, finally, consisted of herbal medications, baths, diet, and blood-letting, depending on the type of jaundice in question. Finally, an attempt is made to correlate modern diseases with the Hippocratic types of jaundice.

Michael Underwood, MD (1737-1820): physician-accoucheur of London.

Underwood was the first physician-accoucheur to be appointed to the Royal College of Physicians in London. The same year, 1784, he published a textbook which did much to establish paediatrics as an emerging discipline in its own right. The book contains several original descriptions of childhood diseases.