The Vaccine Pioneer !

He was not a doctor but a zoologist.

And he was a Russian Jew who had trained in Odessa and developed his skills in Paris

at a time when the world of international bacteriology was factional

and prone to suspicion.

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In the spring of 1894, Waldemar Haffkine travelled to Calcutta

in the Indian province of Bengal in search of cholera.

Spring was cholera season in the city, and Haffkine was hopeful.

He had arrived in India the previous March armed with what he believed was a vaccine

for the disease but he struggled all year to make progress testing his creation !

From the moment of his arrival, Haffkine was met with scepticism and resistance

from some of the British medical establishment and the Indian public ~

Haffkine, who was 33 when he landed in India, also struggled with the practical side of testing his vaccine.

His first iteration required two injections, separated by a week,

and his team sometimes struggled to locate test subjects for the second prick

And despite the wide spread of cholera in India, finding it in sufficient concentration wasn't straightforward.

Haffkine inoculated about 23,000 people that year in northern India, according to his own records,

"but no cholera appeared in their midst to show whether the vaccine was of value or not".

Haffkine inoculating villagers in Calcutta in March 1894
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Cholera spread easily through villages like this one in Calcutta, pictured in the 1890s
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"What is remarkable is that after the initial resistance people began to queue in the slums in Calcutta

for Haffkine's cholera vaccine, they queued for the whole day,"

said Professor Pratik Chakrabarti, the Chair in History of Science

and Medicine at the University of Manchester.

Haffkine's work in the Calcutta slums placed him among a select group of scientists

who pioneered a profound and global shift in the way disease was understood and treated.

But unlike Edward Jenner before him and Jonas Salk after

Haffkine's name never really entered the public imagination

either in India or in Europe.

The Louis Pasteur Institute, Paris, where Haffkine developed his cholera vaccine in 1892
- then the world's leading centre of bacteriology research.

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