BackStory

BACKSTORY FROM THE COLLECTIONS AT HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL

FROM THE BANKS of the Charles River to the Amazon Basin, HMS explorers have long plumbed the depths of medical knowledge in service to global health.

S. Burt Wolbach, Class of 1903, left London for The Gambia and Senegal in 1911, embarking on an expedition to research diagnostic methods for human trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness, and to determine the incidence of the disease in the territory. This trip had its hardships. Wolbach wrote in a letter to H. C. Ernst, a professor of bacteriology at HMS, that the “dust … is very trying, and it rises and gets into everything. It is like setting up a laboratory in the middle of a dusty Boston street.”

An expedition in 1924 to the upper Amazon, led by Alexander Hamilton Rice, Class of 1904, to research tropical diseases counted among its party George Cheever Shattuck, Class of 1905 and an assistant professor of tropical medicine at HMS. They traveled by canoe and contended with malaria, infected insect bites, and machete wounds. Later, Shattuck was also a co-leader on one of the Harvard African Expeditions that conducted a biological and medical survey of Liberia and the Belgian Congo. —Susan Karcz

PICTURES FROM AN EXPEDITION:

African helmet mask, (clockwise from right) attributed to the Bobo culture of the Burkina Faso region and described as having a characteristic artifact of onchocerciasis (river blind- ness): a prominent subcutaneous swelling on the facial plane, from a collection donated by Eli and Carolyn Newberger. Eli Newberger is an HMS assistant professor of pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Burkina Faso in the 1960s. Viscero- tome, an instrument used to take histological samples from cadavers, donated by Thomas P. Monath ’66. Pre-Columbian clay sculptures from a collection donated by Louis E. Wolf- son, a Boston physician.

Viscerotome courtesy of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine’s Center for the History of Medicine. All other objects courtesy of the Harvard Medical Library.