Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. History of a Twentieth-Century Disease

Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF) is a systemic infection, now known to be caused by Rickettsia rickettsii, that was not recognized until early in this century. The description of the disease, etiology, transmission, and treatment were all discovered over a 50-year period. It is probable that earlier sporadic cases were encountered but were not recognized as a distinctive disease. RMSF in considered a "disease of nature," as the reservoir of the germ and its transmission normally occur outside human society, and man is an accidental host. As the author of this book points out, malaria and bubonic plague are two other such diseases of nature. RMSF is primarily limited to the United States. Today RMSF is most highly endemic in the southeastern U.S. with less occurrence in the Rocky Mountain states. The disease gets its name because epidemics described in prospectors and early settlers in the first years of this century were clearly focused in Montana, Idaho, Nevada, and Wyoming. There were sporadic reports of foci of the disease in various northwestern states in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but there was no single name for the disease and there was no known cause or suspicion of an animal vector. In a hyperendemic focus in the Bitterroot Valley in Montana, the U.S. Public Health Service, in collaboration with the Montana State Board of Health, set up a research station. Montana later built the Spotted Fever Laboratory in Hamilton to produce the Spencer-Parker vaccine from ground-up ticks. In 1932, by an act of Congress, this laboratory became the Rocky Mountain Laboratories of the NIH; the laboratory became the focus of RMSF research and control, and its scientists have also produced significant research in other areas of rickettsiology and arthropod-transmitted diseases. This volume is primarily a historical study, and sufficient medical science is included for any reader to follow the issues that spurred on the various medical researchers who have been prominent in the field. The author, who is historian for the National Institutes of Health, demonstrates scrupulous scholarship by providing information on the personal backgrounds of all of the scientists and presenting the essential economic history that is pertinent to understanding the physical development of the areas endemic for RMSF. Ms. Harden provides extensive footnotes and notes on sources of information (a total of 93 pages) and uses much primary source material from various universities, collections of personal notes, …