Quick Facts
Biography
William Budd (14 September 1811 – 9 January 1880) was an English physician and epidemiologist known for recognizing that infectious diseases were contagious. He recognized that the "poisons" involved in infectious diseases multiplied in the intestines of the sick, were present in their excretions, and could then be transmitted to the healthy through their consumption of contaminated water.
He particularly understood this about the transmission of cholera (as he learned from the work of the physician John Snow) and typhoid fever.
Early life and education
William Budd was born in 1811 to an English physician and his wife. He graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1838. Six of his nine brothers also went into medicine.
Career
In 1841 Budd moved to Bristol, where he started a practice and became part of the city's health department. Using his theory and reading John Snow's essay about cholera in London (1849), he took measures to protect the Bristol's water supply. He is credited with decreasing the incidence of deaths from epidemics of cholera from 2000 (out of a population of 140,000) in 1849 to 29 in 1866.
The medical and scientific communities did not identify the role of microorganisms in infectious disease until the work of Louis Pasteur.
His obituary is found in the Lancet 1880;i: 148.
Part of William Budd's archive is held at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
Selected works
- Malignant cholera: its mode of propagation and its prevention (1849)
- "On intestinal fever," Lancet 1859;ii: 4–5, 28–30, 55–6, 80–2.
- "On the fever at the Clergy Orphan Asylum," Lancet 1856; ii: 618.
- "Memoranda on Asiatic cholera, its mode of spreading and its prevention" (1865), National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health
- Cholera and disinfection : Asiatic cholera in Bristol in 1866 (1871), National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health
- Typhoid Fever, Its Nature, Mode of Spreading, and Prevention, Retrieved 7 March 2010.
- On the Causes of Fevers, edited by: Dale C. Smith. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.