- Person
- Simon Flexner
- Lived
- 1863–1946
- Field
- Pathology, medical research
- From
- American
The story
Epidemic cerebrospinal meningitis, an infection of the membranes around the brain and spinal cord by the meningococcus bacterium, was one of the most feared diseases of the early 1900s. It struck suddenly, often in children and young people, and most of those it infected died. There was no effective treatment.
Simon Flexner was the son of a Jewish immigrant peddler in Louisville, Kentucky, who had become one of America’s leading experts on infectious disease. In the 1890s, as a young pathologist at Johns Hopkins, he had investigated an outbreak of meningitis among miners. In 1901 he became the first director of the laboratories of the new Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, today the oldest biomedical research institute in the United States, which he led until 1935.
At the institute Flexner and his colleagues developed an antiserum against the meningococcus, a serum rich in antibodies taken from animals immunised against the bacteria. Its key feature was the way it was given: by injection directly into the space around the spinal cord, where the infection was, rather than into the bloodstream. The serum was first used on patients in 1906, and the Rockefeller Institute supplied it to doctors over a wide territory.
In 1913 Flexner published the results of 1,300 cases treated with the serum, gathered over several years, in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. He noted that the earlier the serum was injected, the better patients did, and that as doctors learned to give the injections in private practice as well as hospitals, results should improve further. Treatment reduced the death rate from about 75 per cent to about 25 per cent. It was one of the first effective treatments for a deadly bacterial infection, decades before antibiotics, and it remained in use until sulfa drugs and penicillin replaced it. Flexner’s laboratory also showed in 1909 that polio is caused by a virus, and the bacterium Shigella flexneri, a cause of dysentery he identified in the Philippines, bears his name.
Why it matters
Flexner’s antimeningitis serum saved many lives before antibiotics, and the research institute he built became a model for how modern medical discoveries are made.
About Simon Flexner
Louisville-born pathologist who built the Rockefeller Institute into a model for modern medical research and developed a serum that cut deaths from epidemic meningitis by about two-thirds.
Sources
- The results of the serum treatment in thirteen hundred cases of epidemic meningitis Journal of Experimental Medicine (PMC)
- Simon Flexner: infectious diseases pioneer Hektoen International
- Simon Flexner Wikipedia
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