Diphtheria and Australian Public Health: Bacteriology and its complex applications, c.1890-1930

Abstract

During the 1890s, the childhood infectious disease of diphtheria became closely identified with the emerging science of bacteriology and the new laboratory-based public health.' Along with the organisms causing typhoid fever and tuberculosis, the Klebs-Loeffler bacillus was one of the earliest to be clearly isolated (in 1883) and causally linked to disease. Compared with other illnesses, such as scarlet fever, diphtheria had a clear bacteriological presence and an apparently simple mode of action, and, despite ongoing debate over the laboratory data in the 1880s and 1890s, many physicians and public health officials saw possibilities for engineered intervention into its spread and progress. Particularly after the widely-publicized failure of tuberculin in the early 1890s, and the success of antitoxin therapy for diphtheria from 1894, the management of diphtheria came to stand for new bacteriological modes of infectious disease control and prevention. For example, in 1896 a contributor to the Journal of State Medicine wrote: "Preventive Medicine has become more and more lost in Bacteriology. To many a micro-organism is allsufficient; they would summarily dispose of Diphtheria in three simple steps-examine all mouths, find Klebs-Loeffier bacillus, isolate the subject".