The
History of Medicine
Max
Theiler
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The
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A: Max Theiler Max Theiler was born in Pretoria on 30 January 1899. His father was a Swiss veterinary scientist called Sir Arnold Theiler who had married Emma Jegge. Max was one of 4 children and he went to school in Pretoria and Basle in Switzerland. After finishing school Max returned to South Africa and studied at Rhodes University College in Grahamstown and the University of Cape Town Medical School from 1916 to 1918. He went to London to study at the London School of Tropical medicine and St. Thomas’ Hospital and became a qualified doctor in 1922. He married Lillian Graham in 1928 and they had a daughter. Max was very talented and immediately after finishing his degree he went to Boston in the United States of America to work at the Department of Tropical Medicine at the Harvard Medical School. He started as an assistant and later became an instructor to other scientists working with him. He stayed at Harvard for nearly 9 years, but left in 1930 to join the Rockefeller Foundation International Health Division. He became the Director of Laboratories of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Division of Medicine and Public Health in New York in 1951. During his time at Harvard Max started working with Yellow Fever. He had been interested in the disease since his studies in London and by 1927 he and his fellow scientists had proven that it was not caused by a bacteria, but by a virus. He also proved that mice could be used in experiments instead of rhesus monkeys, which made the process a lot cheaper. The Rockefeller Foundation was also focussing on Yellow Fever when he started working there. Here he and his team developed a safe, standardised vaccine called 17D that could be mass produced and given to millions of people all over the world. In 1951 Max Theiler was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his development of 17D. He also contributed to two books called Viral and Rickettsial Infections of Man in 1948 and Yellow Fever in 1951. He won several awards in his lifetime. In 1939 he was awarded the Chalmer’s Medal of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in London, in 1945 the Flattery Medal at Harvard and in 1949 the Lasker Award of the Lasker Foundation. Max Theiler died in 1972. Outcomes: The learner is able to use information from sources to answer questions about Max Theiler, and to uses common words relating to the passing of time.
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