The person at the center of it isn’t famous like John Snow, but a distant cousin of mine, a bacteriologist named Paul Shekwana. He was one of the first public health scientists from the Middle East, from present-day Iraq, to work in America. He was a “bacteriologist” back in 1904, which is—I’m pretty sure—what we would call a microbiologist, epidemiologist, or infectious disease expert today.
