The Early Years
Smallpox. Cholera. Typhoid. Tuberculosis. At the turn of the 20th century, death frequently arrived in these guises. For infants and children, though, no infection was feared more than diphtheria, whose microbial toxin coursed through young bodies, ultimately strangling its victims. In New York City alone in the 1890s, there were some 1,000 deaths a year from the disease.
As the germ theory of disease emerged from Europe and took hold in the U.S., the first science-based remedies for infectious diseases were made possible. Among the earliest successes was antitoxin for the treatment of diphtheria. In 1901, the very year that the first Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology was awarded to the German microbiologist Emil Behring for his discoveries that led to the development of diphtheria antitoxin, New York State established a laboratory to produce and distribute the remedy. The Antitoxin Laboratory is the forerunner of today's Wadsworth Center laboratories.
"The laboratory performs a three-fold purpose in saving lives, preventing disease, and in the education of the profession and public toward a prompt and more efficient prevention and a better treatment of these diseases [diphtheria and tetanus]."
Daniel Lewis, M.D.
Commissioner of Health, 1901-1904
The Early Years...
- Introduction
- Antitoxin Laboratory - Yates Street, Albany, New York
- Manufacturing of the diphtheria antitoxin
- Examining the products for sterility and potency
- Production pipeline ended in the laboratory's shipping room
- Single site for all laboratory activities
- Recruiting personnel to staff the expanded laboratory
- New York City's Quarantine Station
- Wish for a farm was granted in May, 1913
- Media production facility
- Dr. Augustus B. Wadsworth and staff