History of Discovery
The first case of Loa loa infection was noted in the Caribbean (Santo Domingo) in 1770. A French surgeon named Mongin tried but failed to remove a worm passing across a woman's eye. A few years later, in 1778, the surgeon François Guyot noted worms in the eyes of West African slaves on a French ship to America; he successfully removed a worm from one man's eye.
The identification of microfilaria was made in 1890 by the ophthalmologist Stephen McKenzie. Localized angioedema, a common clinical presentation of loiasis, was observed in 1895 in the coastal Nigerian town of Calabar—hence the name, "Calabar" swellings. This observation was made by a Scottish ophthalmologist named Douglas Argyll-Robertson, but the association between Loa loa and Calabar swellings was not realized until 1910 (by Dr. Patrick Manson). The determination of vector—Chrysops spp.—was made in 1912 by the British parasitologist Robert Thomson Leiper.
Read more about this topic: Loa Loa Filariasis
Famous quotes containing the words history of, history and/or discovery:
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“I saw the Arab map.
It resembled a mare shuffling on,
dragging its history like saddlebags,
nearing its tomb and the pitch of hell.”
—Adonis [Ali Ahmed Said] (b. 1930)
“He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application. It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)