Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Continual Raving: A History of Meningitis and the People Who Conquered It

Continual Raving: A History of Meningitis and the People Who Conquered It

Gilsdorf, Janet R.

Hardcover

Gifts & Stationery GeneralMedical Reference

ISBN10: 0190677317
ISBN13: 9780190677312
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Nov 12 2019
Pages: 264
Weight: 1.15
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.40 Depth: 9.30
Language: English
Not all scientific discoveries are genius.

Continual Raving tells the combined stories of how scientists across the 19th and 20th centuries defeated meningitis -- not through flawless scientific research, but often through a series of serendipitous events, misplaced assumptions, and flawed conclusions. The result is a story of not just a vanquished disease, but how scientific accomplishment sometimes occurs where it's least expected.

Although symptoms of meningitis were recorded as early as Hippocrates and the ancient Greeks, our understanding of the disease's origins and mechanisms remained obscure for most of human history. That changed in 1892, when German physician Richard Pfeiffer observed and isolated bacteria ultimately shown to cause meningitis in children -- and concluded that those bacteria cause influenza. Haemophilus influenzae, as thee meningitis-causing bacteria have been erroneously named ever since, continued their strange journey to discovery in the decades that followed.

Continual Raving traces the disease's strange encounters with science, including:

- Heinrich Quincke, the German internist who first used a needle to draw spinal fluid from between a patient's back bones

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