Third-year medical student’s book covers history of infectious diseases

Third-year medical student Jeanette Farrell, author of Invisible Enemies: Stories of Infectious Diseases (Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 1998, 229 pp), was observing disease at an age when most of us were into other things. As a 12-year-old girl in Kentucky, Farrell was operating the switchboard at a tuberculosis sanitarium founded by her father.

Out of seven children in the family, she says, four worked in the sanitarium. Her brothers were orderlies. “The common currency of our household was talking about medicine,” she said.

Farrell’s interest in the history of medicine may also have come from her father, who, she said, was a great storyteller. The book is dedicated to him.

There are other intimate experiences that influenced Farrell in the writing of the book, however. In a chapter on leprosy, she draws directly from personal experience.

Shortly after graduating from college, Farrell joined a leprosy relief agency in India, where she spent six months distributing medication and nursing elderly leprosy victims. The experience first opened her eyes to some of the social issues surrounding infectious diseases.

In India, Farrell observed people’s fear of leprosy, their biases and prejudice against it and the people with the disease. “It was fascinating to see how this disease that is finally treatable still elicits those responses,” she said.

Farrell’s book tells the stories of seven diseases that changed the course of history: smallpox, leprosy, plague, tuberculosis, malaria, cholera and AIDS. The book is richly illustrated with historical drawings and photos. Tracking down the copyrights and getting permission to use some of the images was in fact the most time-consuming task, she said. She began the work in May 1995.

“I loved all the research and enjoyed the writing. It’s a rich subject and you can just scratch the surface and come up with wonderful stories,” Farrell said.

The stories, for instance, of how John Snow traced London’s cholera outbreak to a single water pump and how Chinese first inoculated themselves against smallpox by snorting the scabs of infected patients.

Farrell’s book has received favorable reviews from the major reviewers for books for young people. School Library Journal called it an “excellent book” and “a riveting read” and said that some of the chapters are as exciting as any work of fiction. Also, it was chosen as a selection by the Junior Library Guild, a Book-of-the-Month club for school libraries.

Farrell said she’s tossing around ideas for a new book. As far as her career in medicine, she is very interested in infectious disease as well as primary care and is considering HIV/AIDS care as a specialty.

Farrell lives in Seattle with her husband, a researcher for Pathogenesis, and their 20-month-old daughter. ¶
Will Morton