From Miasma to Measles to Modern Medicine: Peter Ludvig Panum and the Paradigm Shift in 19th-century Science. (Scientia Danica · Series B · Biologica)

For 65 years, measles had gracefully spared the Faroe Islands, a blessing that ended in March 1846.Then, a carpenter brought the highly contagious disease home from a visit abroad, and within weeks the epidemic took off and began chalking up deaths and threatening economic survival of the islands.The young medical graduate Peter L. Panum was sent from Copenhagen to help halt the epidemic.Deploying exceptional observational and deductive skills, Panum went on to establish that measles was caused by a contagium spreading from person to person and not, as most then still believed, by miasma.While groundbreaking, Panum’s reports about measles in the Faroe Islands were initially ignored or directly disparaged.Four years later, Panum was sent to deal with Denmark’s first cholera outbreak.He concluded that also this disease was caused by a contagium, and that the outbreak could be controlled with hygiene measures such as isolation of patients.Now he was dismissed from his post after colleague