From Miasma to Measles to Modern Medicine

For 65 years, measles had gracefully spared the Faroe Islands, a blessing that ended in March 1846. Then, a carpenter brought the highly contagious disease home from a visit abroad, and within weeks the epidemic took off and began chalking up deaths and threatening economic survival of the islands. The young medical graduate Peter L. Panum was sent from Copenhagen to help halt the epidemic. Deploying exceptional observational and deductive skills, Panum went on to establish that measles was caused by a contagium spreading from person to person and not, as most then still believed, by miasma. While groundbreaking, Panum’s reports about measles in the Faroe Islands were initially ignored or directly disparaged.Four years later, Panum was sent to deal with Denmark’s first cholera outbreak. He concluded that also this disease was caused by a contagium, and that the outbreak could be controlled with hygiene measures such as isolation of patients. Now he was dismissed from his post after colleagues accused him of violating quarantine rules. He ended up leaving Denmark for more than a decade and had great success abroad. He pursued physiology, studying with icons like Rudolf Virchow in Würzburg and Claude Bernard in Paris. At the age of 32, he became a Professor of Physiology at Kiel University, and eleven years later, just as the 1864 Danish-Prussian War broke out, he returned to Denmark and a professorship at the University of Copenhagen. He made many groundbreaking studies that ranged widely in scope, from the nature of sepsis to the mechanics of stereo vision. For modern infectious disease epidemiology Panum has long been considered a founding father because of his measles paper which was republished in English language in 1940. His keen observation in a “natural experiment” setting brought critical insights about measles and immunity in both epidemiology and germ theory. But because his remaining scientific work only existed in Danish language, it remains for the most part unrecognized outside Denmark. Panum became Denmark’s most important contributor to the modern breakthrough in 19th century medicine with his innovative and evidence-based scientific methods. Yet his prominence in Denmark gradually waned, so that even researchers and students at the University of Copenhagen's Panum Institute nowadays are blissfully unaware of the brilliant man who lend it his name. In this book we present a selection of Panum’s publications translated into English and thus available for the first time to an international readership. Our aim is to rescue Panum from the jaws of oblivion and allow you, the reader, to acquaint yourself with a truly exceptional person who – in addition to excelling in health science – also made momentous contributions to the society he lived in; in short, someone who ? more than 200 years after his birth?remains worthy of being remembered and honoured.