Everything about Shibasaburo Kitasato totally explained
was a
Japanese
physician and
bacteriologist. He is remembered as the co-discoverer of the infectious agent of
bubonic plague in
Hong Kong in 1894, almost simultaneously with
Alexandre Yersin.
Biography
Kitasato was born in Okuni village,
Higo Province, (present-day
Kumamoto prefecture,
Kyūshū). He was educated at Kumamoto Medical School and
Tokyo Imperial University.
He studied under Dr.
Robert Koch in
Germany from 1885 to 1891. In 1889, he was the first person to grow the
tetanus bacillus in pure
culture, and in 1890 cooperated with
Emil von Behring in developing a serum therapy for tetanus using this pure culture. He also worked on
antitoxins for
diphtheria and
anthrax. Kitasato and Behring demonstrated the value of antitoxin in preventing disease by producing a
passive immunity to tetanus in an animal that received graded injections of blood serum from another animal infected with the disease.
After returning to Japan in 1891 he founded the Institute for Study of Infectious Diseases with the assistance of
Fukuzawa Yukichi. One of his early assistants was
August von Wassermann. Kitasato demonstrated how dead cultures can be used in
vaccination. He also studied the mode of infection in
tuberculosis.
He traveled to
Hong Kong in 1894 at the request of the Japanese government during an outbreak of the
bubonic plague, and successfully identified the
bacterium causing the disease; his results were not as widely disseminated as Yersin's, however,Yersin was for many years given primary credit for the discovery, and the bacterium was named after him. Four years later, Kitasato and his student
Kiyoshi Shiga were able to isolate and describe the organism that caused
dysentery.
When the Institute for Infectious Diseases was incorporated into
Tokyo Imperial University in 1914, he resigned in protest and founded the
Kitasato Institute (the forerunner of
Kitasato University), which he headed for the rest of his life.
He also was the first dean of Medicine at
Keio University, first president of the
Japan Medical Association, and served on the
House of Peers. He was ennobled with the title of
danshaku (
baron) in the
kazoku peerage system in 1924.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Shibasaburo Kitasato'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://kitasato_shibasaburo.totallyexplained.com">Kitasato Shibasaburo Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
