Commemoration with a touch of botulism

   Environmental Histories is a tribute to the achievements and absurdities found in the histories of medicine and public health.  In 1938, artist Bernard Zakheim, a student of Diego Rivera painted a series of murals in Toland Hall at the Hooper Foundation depicting the history of medicine in California, with financial support from the New Deal's Works Progress Administration.  The particular mural on this website is Zakheim's tribute to California's modern medical achievements at Hooper.

    In the upper right hand corner is the George Williams Hooper foundation for medical research first commemorated on May 14, 1913. There are 5 conical flasks illustrated at its fore, these are utilized for the study of bacterial cultures as the foundation was until 1959 primarily a bacteriological institute.  Just below these is a researcher contemplating the presence of botulism in bottled and canned foods. Botulism rarely occurred in the United States until WWI when there was a boom in commercial and home canning.  However in 1919, California had an outbreak of botulism in canned olives threatening an embargo against the multimillion dollar canning industry.  The human death toll was rising as victims suffered from global muscle paralysis. Karl F Meyer, a bacteriologist trained in Switzerland was hired on as Associate Professor at the Hooper foundation in 1920 and was instrumental in determining conditions to heat sterilize clostridium botulinum spores.
    George Hoyt Whipple was well known for his studies of liver metabolism and the relationship of the liver to blood formation. His work, done in part at the Hooper Foundation, led to award of the Nobel Prize along with George Minot and William P. Murphy in 1934. The three investigators established that a substance in liver would cure pernicious anemia.  Today pernicious anemia is not fatal as Whipple et al discovered that vitamin B12 supplementation reverses this anemia.
     In 1921, Dr. Whipple left the Hooper Foundation to organize the new medical school of the University of Rochester, and his post as director was taken by Karl F. Meyer who held it for thirty-three years. Under his guidance the Hooper Foundation became recognized throughout the world as a pioneer center for research on diseases of animals transmissible to man. These accomplishments are denoted by the ungainly appearance of the emaciated man resting next to the sleeping dog.
    And so through these commemorative activities it is possible once again to review and revitalize these faits accomplis by placing these in context with what we know know about uncontrolled epidemics as now with H1N1 flu, SARS and multiple other human and animal vectors of disease, man is not distinct from the anopheles that readily transmits malaria.  Man is indeed part of a larger biosphere than previously thought.  And here begin a recounting of these histories.

References:
Hublitz, Erika. Beginnings of the George Williams Hooper Foundation of the University of California San Francisco. In AR 91-30, G. W. Hooper Foundation and Department of Epidemiology and International Health, Archives and Special Collections, UCSF Library and Center for Knowledge Management, San Francisco, CA. Meyer, Karl Friedrich. Coping with Catastrophy. Eighth Annual Service Award, The Forty-Niners, Shearton-Blackstone Hotel,