A decade before John Snow was investigating cholera in London, James Ormiston McWilliam was across the world studying yellow fever in Cape Verde. This approach of utilizing interviews would become an integral part of the field of epidemiology.
by Melissa Ramirez
Published onAug 04, 2023
Mapping An Epidemiology Origin Story
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ABSTRACT
A decade before John Snow was investigating cholera in London, James Ormiston McWilliam was across the world studying yellow fever in Cape Verde. McWilliam undertook a massive effort to interview all of the people on the island. His interviews were extraordinarily valuable and unique in that they were so extensive and were done without regard to race or social status. He conducted hundreds of interviews of mostly people of color - native, colonized and enslaved peoples. The first-hand accounts and observations of those working close to the illness proved fundamental to understanding disease transmission. This approach of utilizing interviews would become an integral part of the field of epidemiology.
Melissa Ramirez, Ph.D., is a microbiologist and an associate teaching professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. She has loved microbes ever since she read The Hot Zone in ninth grade. She grew up in Virginia and went to Virginia Tech for her undergraduate and graduate degrees. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, working on the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. She later worked at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO before joining the faculty at NC State.
Mapping An Epidemiology Origin Story (Melissa Ramirez)
This video was originally produced for an audience of entering first-year and transfer students at NC State University as a part of an interdisciplinary experience. It is available for noncommercial reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 4.0 License, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
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