Infectious diseases have always plagued mankind. For the longest time in history, they were the leading cause of death and could only be significantly contained by medical progress in the 20th century. The ubiquity of infectious diseases and their consequences profoundly impacted people; Accordingly, infectious diseases often became the subject of artistic works.
The section "Infectious Diseases: Past, Present and Future " presents striking examples and turning points in the history of infectious diseases. The influence of infections on (art) history is illustrated by connecting historical information with pieces of art, using the examples of plague, puerperal fever, influenza and tuberculosis.
Possible future scenarios are presented in the section "Emerging Infectious Diseases".
Eric Avery is an artist and a doctor. He worked for forty years at the interface of fine arts and medicine. His works mainly deal with human rights violations, death, and social reactions to illness, especially HIV and emerging infectious diseases. Selected works on the latter are shown in this exhibition.
The plague has accompanied humanity for at least 5000 years. The underlying pathogen, the bacterium Yersinia pestis, was only described in 1894 by Alexandre E. J. Yersin. The plague can present itself as bubonic plague, pneumonic plague, and plague sepsis. While the mortality rate from an untreated bubonic plague is about 60 %, pneumonic plague and plague sepsis are virtually always fatal if untreated.
Three pandemics, in the 6th, 14th and 19th century, together have cost the lives of well over 100 million people.
The plague has lost much of its former terror – yet it has not been defeated. Between 2010 and 2015, the WHO reported over 3000 cases of plague, of which about 18 % were fatal.
The childbed fever (puerperal sepsis) has been known since ancient times. Only at the end of the 19th century it became clear that the cause were infections by different bacterial pathogens.
Ignaz Semmelweis recognized the connection between puerperal sepsis and hygiene in the middle of the 19th century. He instructed personnel to wash their hands with chlorinated lime and recommended washing their hands after each individual examination of women to avoid further infection.
Whereas Semmelweis’ colleagues hardly paid attention to these findings, they are now standard knowledge.
Influenza (“flu”) is one of the most common respiratory diseases in humans. The viral infection is highly contagious and difficult to fight, because the virus constantly changes (mutates). The annual waves of influenza are caused by minor changes. Substantial changes in the viral genome can lead to pandemics, such as the “Spanish flu” of 1918/19. This deadliest of all known influenza pandemics spread across the world in three waves between spring 1918 and early 1919 and cost the lives of up to 50 million people.
Tuberculosis was a widespread disease in the 19th and early 20th centuries, primarily due to the enormous population growth in the cities and the associated poor hygienic conditions.
Improved living conditions and hygiene standards, progress in treatment and large-scale public measures to combat tuberculosis led to a steady decline in the number of tuberculosis cases up to the Second World War. Not least due to the introduction of antibiotic therapy, it seemed that tuberculosis had been defeated.
Today, however, about one third of the world’s population is infected with the tuberculosis pathogen. The increasing number of tuberculosis cases infected with antibiotic-resistant pathogens is particularly worrying at present.
