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evening sitdown
Your evening longread: The vaccine pioneer the world forgot
We bring you an interesting longread each evening to take your mind off the news.
EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.
And now, every weeknight, we bring you an evening longread to enjoy which will help you to escape the news cycle.
We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.
Never heard of Waldemar Haffkine? Here’s his story. (To note – some of the colonial details in this are very much of their time.)
(BBC, approx 14 mins reading time)
He had arrived in India the previous March armed with what he believed was a vaccine for the disease, but he struggled all year to make progress testing his creation. From the moment of his arrival, Haffkine was met with scepticism and resistance from some of the British medical establishment and the Indian public. He was not a doctor but a zoologist. And he was a Russian Jew who had trained in Odessa and developed his skills in Paris, at a time when the world of international bacteriology was factional and prone to suspicion.
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