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Features Departments Information |
 Stanford T. Shulman, MD, Head, Division of Infectious Diseases, collects stamps with medical themes. As a regular Feature of The Child's Doctor, Dr. Shulman provides some of his favorite stamps and a brief commentary on them. |
Remembering some of the heroes in STANFORD T. SHULMAN, MD aSpring 1998  DIPHTHERIA, AN almost-forgotten acute illness in the United States, still afflicts children in some developing countries. The multicolored Ethiopian stamp portrays an affected child, demonstrating the classic pharyngeal membrane. 
 Diphtheria was fully described in 1826 by Pierre-Fidele Bretonneau (1771 or 1778–1862) of Tours, who named the disease from the Greek word for leather, in recognition of the tough membrane characteristic of the illness. Shown on the French stamp, Bretonneau was the first physician to perform a tracheotomy. The red Cape Verde stamp shows a child with a tracheotomy as well as Emile Roux (1853–1933). Roux, with Alexandre Yersin at the Pasteur Institute in Paris (1888), demonstrated that the diphtheria organism produces a toxin. Yersin (1863–1943) is portrayed on the gray Swiss stamp. In 1890 Emil von Behring (1854–1917) and Shibasaburo Kitasato (1852–1931), shown together on the Transkei stamp, reported the development of diphtheria antitoxin and antitoxic immunity. For this work, von Behring received the first Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 1901 and subsequently developed the diphtheria toxoid vaccine, which is responsible for the rarity of diphtheria today in developed countries.   |