William Budd

William Budd

William Budd (born September 14, 1811 in North Tawton , Devon (England) , † January 9, 1880 in Clevedon (Somerset) , England) was a doctor and epidemiologist in Victorian England . He came to realize that infectious diseases are contagious by realizing that the “poisons” involved in infectious diseases multiply in the intestines of the sick, were present in their excretions and could be transmitted to healthy people through the consumption of contaminated water.

His own observations and in particular the work of John Snow on the transmission of cholera as well as reports of others on the transmission of typhus led him to this realization.

Origin and education

William Budd

William Budd came from an English medical family. In 1838 he completed his medical degree at the University of Edinburgh . Six of his nine brothers also went into medicine, including his brother George Budd .

William initially apprenticed to his father and then spent four years in Paris, where he came under the influence of Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis (1787–1872), the anatomical pathologist and clinical researcher (and father of evidence-based medicine). Louis had a particular interest in gastroenteritic disease, also known as putrid fever. He found that the Peyer's plaques of the small intestine showed signs of inflammation and ulceration, associated with dilation of the mesenteric lymph nodes. Budd was also impressed by the work of Bretonneau , a French country doctor, who had reported an outbreak of the disease at a military school in Tours. The students who had ulcerated Peyer's plaques in this outbreak died; the surviving students who were sent home transmitted the disease to their relatives. His experiences in France sparked an interest in Budd in the transmission of the disease. The illness was characterized by the sudden onset of fever, headache, and nausea, often accompanied by diarrhea or constipation. The salmonella as causative bacteria were finally identified in 1880, the year Budds.

job

In 1841, Budd moved to Bristol , where he opened a practice and became part of the city's health department. With his theory and after reading John Snow's essay on cholera in London (1849), he took measures to protect the water supply in Bristol from pollution. He is credited with reducing the number of deaths from epidemic cholera from 2000 (out of a population of 140,000) in 1849 to 29 cases in 1866.

Until the discoveries of Louis Pasteur, the predominant physicians and scientists did not recognize the role of microorganisms in infectious diseases.

His obituary appeared in the Lancet 1880; i: 148.

Selected works

• Malignant cholera: its mode of propagation and its prevention (1849) (Malignant cholera: the way it spreads and how it is prevented).
• "On intestinal fever" Lancet 1859; ii: 4-5, 28-30, 55-6, 80-2. ( On intestinal fever ).
• "On the fever at the Clergy Orphan Asylum" Lancet 1856; ii: 618. (About the fever in the church orphan asylum).
• "Memoranda on Asiatic cholera, its mode of spreading and its prevention" (1865), National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. (Memorandum on Asian cholera, how it spreads and how to prevent it).
• Cholera and disinfection: Asiatic cholera in Bristol in 1866 (1871), National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health (Cholera and disinfection: Asiatic cholera in Bristol in 1866).
• Typhoid Fever, Its Nature, Mode of Spreading, and Prevention , Retrieved March 7, 2010. (Typhoid, its nature, mode of spreading, and prevention).
• On the Causes of Fevers edited by: Dale C. Smith. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. (On the causes of febrile illness).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Asimov, Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology 2nd Revised edition
2. ^ ^{A b} R. Moorhead: William Budd and typhoid fever. In: Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. Volume 95, Number 11, November 2002, pp. 561-564, PMID 12411628 , PMC 1279260 (free full text).