Richard P. Strong

Richard Pearson Strong was a tropical medicine professor at Harvard, who did significant work in plague, cholera, bacillary dysentery and other diseases. He was the first professor of tropical medicine at Harvard, and his department eventually became incorporated into the Harvard School of Public Health, founded in 1922.

He was born in 1872, earned his medical degree at Johns Hopkins University and died in Boston on July 4, 1948.^[1]

Plague disaster

In 1906, when Strong was head of the Philippine Biological Laboratory, he oversaw a study in which 24 prisoners were injected, without their consent, with a cholera serum which was contaminated with bubonic plague, resulting in 13 deaths.^[2]

Sources

1. "Obituary - Richard P. Strong C.B. M.D." (PDF), British Medical Journal 2 (4584), November 13, 1948: 880–881, doi:10.1136/bmj.2.4584.880, PMC 2092039
2. E. Chernin (1989). "Richard Pearson Strong and the iatrogenic plague disaster in Bilibid Prison, Manila, 1906.". Reviews of Infectious Diseases.

• Harvard Public Health Alumni Bulletin, November 1948, p 43-44.
• Deaths. JAMA 1948; 138 (4)