Abstract
In 1950, the Biology Section of the New York Academy of Science (NYAS) held what it claimed to be the first conference on medical mycology in the United States.1 What prompted the event was not the announcement of the discovery of nystatin by Hazen and Brown, as their publication was still in press, but the growing profile of fungi and fungal infections across the nation. Fungi, not least because of interest in penicillin, were attracting the interest of biologists and biomedical researchers who, alongside screens for antibiotic activity, were adopting them as experimental models in studies of nutrition, physiology and immunology2 All the leading names of the field from the 1930s attended the meeting: Carroll Dodge, Norman Conant, Rhoda Benham and Lucille Georg, and there were new faces who had developed expertise during the war and in particular localities. Speakers drew attention to the increased incidence of systemic candidiasis, signalling a switch in the medical mycological gaze from external (exogenous) to internal (endogenous) disease. Although the incidence of endogenous, systemic fungal infections was very low, they had very high mortality and presented unusual cases that fascinated physicians. In addition, there was a new awareness of the toll of morbidity from endemic, exogenous disease, as with athlete’s foot and thrush, and with regionally specific, often sub-clinical infections, principally coccidioidomycosis, blastomycosis and histoplasmosis.
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Homei, A., Worboys, M. (2013). Endemic Mycoses and Allergies: Diseases of Social Change. In: Fungal Disease in Britain and the United States 1850–2000. Science, Technology and Medicine in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137377029_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137377029_5
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