Richard P. Strong

Richard Pearson Strong (1872–1948) 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, in which he also critically infected 24 unknowing victims with cholera which resulted in 13 of their deaths,and his department eventually became incorporated into the Harvard School of Public Health, founded in 1922. From 1926-1927 he led the Harvard Medical African Expedition and authored the book The African Republic of Liberia and the Belgian Congo: Based on the Observations Made and Material Collected during the Harvard African Expedition, 1926-1927 in a partnership with other Expedition members and Harvard officials.

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

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.

• Richard P. Strong Papers, 1911-2004 (inclusive), 1911-1945 (bulk). GA 82. Harvard Medical Library, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston, Mass.