Continual Raving: A History of Meningitis and the People Who Conquered It

Contents: Preface. Chapter 1 Meningitis-what is it? Chapter 2 The flu and Richard Pfeiffer Chapter 3 On immunity Chapter 4 Finding the capsule Chapter 5 The most famous graph in microbiology Chapter 6 Early treatment-immune serum from a horse Chapter 7 Antibiotic treatment-much better than nothing Chapter 8 Microbes and genetics Chapter 9 When antibiotics fail Chapter 10 Keeping DNA out, letting it in Chapter 11 Hitch a sugar to a protein Chapter 12 A scientist and a scientist walk into a bar Epilogue Searching for Richard Pfeiffer. Glossary.

Continual Raving tells the combined stories of how scientists across the 19th and 20th centuries defeated meningitis -- not through flawless scientific research, but often through a series of serendipitous events, misplaced assumptions, and flawed conclusions. The result is a story of not just a vanquished disease, but how scientific accomplishment sometimes occurs where it's least expected.

Although symptoms of meningitis were recorded as early as Hippocrates and the ancient Greeks, our understanding of the disease's origins and mechanisms remained obscure for most of human history. That changed in 1892, when German physician Richard Pfeiffer observed and isolated bacteria ultimately shown to cause meningitis in children -- and concluded that those bacteria cause influenza. Haemophilus influenzae, as thee meningitis-causing bacteria have been erroneously named ever since, continued their strange journey to discovery in the decades that followed.