Page Comparison - The Move to Washington (v.16 vs v.17)

Versions Compared

Key

This line was added.
This line was removed.
Formatting was changed.

...

Div

class	grid-row grid-gap

div

Dive

preface	desktop:


class	grid-col-9

The NIH traces its roots to 1887, when a one-room laboratory was created within the Marine Hospital Service (MHS), predecessor agency to In 1891, the Hygienic Laboratory, as it came to be called, was moved to Washington, D.C., near the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS). The MHS had been established in 1798 to provide for the medical care of merchant seamen. One clerk in the Treasury Department collected twenty cents per month from the wages of each seaman to cover costs at a series of contract hospitals. In the 1880s, the MHS had been charged by Congress with examining passengers on arriving ships for clinical signs of infectious diseases, especially for the dreaded diseases cholera and yellow fever, in order to prevent epidemics. During the 1870s and 1880s, moreover, scientists in Europe presented compelling evidence that microscopic organisms were the causes of several infectious diseases. In 1884, for example, Koch described a comma-shaped bacterium as the cause of cholera.. Capitol. For the next decade, Kinyoun remained the sole full-time staff member. He inaugurated a training program in bacteriology for MHS officers and conducted numerous tests of water purity and air pollution for the District of Columbia and the Congress. In 1901, the laboratory was belatedly recognized in law when Congress authorized $35,000 for construction of a new building in which the laboratory could investigate "infectious and contagious diseases and matters pertaining to the public health." Occupied in 1904, this building was located at 25th and E Streets, N. W., in Washington, D.C. The founding legislation for the NIH, therefore, resides in a routine supplemental appropriations act. Many other scientific agencies of the federal government were also created via "money bills." Congress was not convinced that such bureaucracies would prove demonstratively useful, so it chose to preserve the option of divesting the government of them simply by not renewing their funding.

Div

class	desktop:

Div

class	grid-col-3

The Hygienic Laboratory
The Hygienic Laboratory building at 25th and E Streets, N. W., Washington, D.C. Occupied 1904 - 1941

Officials of the MHS followed these developments with great interest. In 1887, they authorized Joseph J. Kinyoun, a young MHS physician trained in the new bacteriological methods, to set up a one-room laboratory in the Marine Hospital at Stapleton, Staten Island, New York. Kinyoun called this facility a "laboratory of hygiene" in imitation of German facilities and to indicate that the laboratory's purpose was to serve the public's health. Within a few months, Kinyoun had identified the cholera bacillus in suspicious cases and used his Zeiss microscope to demonstrate it to his colleagues as confirmation of their clinical diagnoses. "As the symptoms . . . were by no means well defined," he wrote, "the examinations were confirmatory evidence of the value of bacteria cultivation as a means of positive diagnosis."In 1902 two acts contributed significantly to the emergence of the Hygienic Laboratory as a center for research within the federal government. The first reorganized the MHS and renamed it the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service (PH-MHS), moving it toward its status as the chief U.S. public health agency. More importantly for the Hygienic Laboratory, the act launched a formal program of research by designating the pathological and bacteriological work as the Division of Pathology and Bacteriology and by creating three new components that represented the most fruitful areas for research at that time: the Divisions of Chemistry, Pharmacology, and Zoology. The importance of these new programs was underscored by the provision that the PH-MHS could hire scientist researchers with Ph.D.'s to head them. Up until this time, the professional staff had been limited to physicians.

Center

Button

link	Biologics
page	Biologics

Versions Compared

Old Version 16

New Version 17

Key

Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum