Albers-Schönberg disease
Gr. osteo = of the bone, petrō-, var. s. of petroûn = to turn to stone. Albers-Schönberg disease, or osteopetrosis, is characterised by increased radiological density of the skeleton. The…
Cancer
Gr. carcinos/carcinoma = crab. Defining Cancer Human beings and other animals have had cancer throughout recorded history. So it’s no surprise that from the dawn of history people have written…
Leptospira
Gr. leptos = slender, and speira = coil. Genus of bacteria consisting of single, finely coiled,motile, aerobic cells. In 1886, German physician Adolf Weil described a clinical syndrome characterized by splenomegaly, jaundice,…
Pneumocystis jirovecii
A genus of unicellular fungi, Pneumocystis was likely originally described by Carlos Chagas in 1909 in guinea pigs, although he confused it with a trypanosome and placed it in a…
Poliomyelitis
Gr. polios = gray, and myelos = marrow. An antique disease Poliomyelitis may have plagued humanity since antiquity. The funerary stele of the Egyptian priest Ruma (circa 1400 BCE) shows a…
Sparganosis
Gr. di = two, phyllon = leaf, and bothrion = pit and speira = coil and me-tra = uterus. Sparganon= "swaddling clothes". Sparganosis refers to tissue infection with the pleuro-cercoid larvae of the genera…
Streptomycin
Gr. strepto- = twisted, and mykes = fungus, and L. griseus = gray In the late 1930s, Selman Waksman, a soil microbiologist working at the New Jersey Agricultural Station of Rutgers University,…