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A Short History of the National Institutes of Health
The NIH traces its roots to 1887, when a one-room laboratory was created
within the Marine Hospital Service (MHS), predecessor agency to the U.S.
Public Health Service (PHS). The MHS had been established in 1798 to provide
for the medical care of merchant seamen. One clerk in the Treasury Department
collected twenty cents per month from the wages of each seaman to cover
costs at a series of contract hospitals. In the 1880s, the MHS had been
charged by Congress with examining passengers on arriving ships for clinical
signs of infectious diseases, especially for the dreaded diseases cholera
and yellow fever, in order to prevent epidemics. During the 1870s and
1880s, moreover, scientists in Europe presented compelling evidence that
microscopic organisms were the causes of several infectious diseases.
In 1884, for example, Koch described a comma-shaped bacterium as the cause
of cholera.
Officials of the MHS followed these developments with great interest.
In 1887, they authorized Joseph J. Kinyoun, a young MHS physician trained
in the new bacteriological methods, to set up a one-room laboratory in
the Marine Hospital at Stapleton, Staten Island, New York. Kinyoun called
this facility a "laboratory of hygiene" in imitation of German
facilities and to indicate that the laboratory's purpose was to serve
the public's health. Within a few months, Kinyoun had identified the cholera
bacillus in suspicious cases and used his Zeiss microscope to demonstrate
it to his colleagues as confirmation of their clinical diagnoses. "As
the symptoms . . . were by no means well defined," he wrote, "the
examinations were confirmatory evidence of the value of bacteria cultivation
as a means of positive diagnosis." For another photo of Dr. Kinyoun,
see the NIH Almanac
Back To Top | Photography
Credits
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NIH Poster |
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Dr. Joseph J Kinyoun, founder of the Hygienic Laboratory.
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A representation of the cholera epidemic of the
nineteenth century. |
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Photograph of Dr. Joseph J. Kinyoun |
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