WHO WAS WALDEMAR HUFFKINE? BACTERIOLOGISTS, INDIANS INTERESTED IN MEDICAL HISTORY AND JEWS AND SOME PHILATELISTS REMEMBER HIM

 The very first time I heard the name WALDEMAR HUFFKINE was when I was offered a STAMP which showed his face and his proper role (but largely forgotten) in the history of Vaccination: he does rank with Pasteur and Lister, but his work was done in INDIA and anti-semitism among the British ranks in India may have destroyed his reputation and career.

Someone ought to write a book about the history of so many excellent and eccentric jews who ended up in INDIA.. there have been jewish individuals associated with Vasco Da Gama as well as some Moghul emperors. This was at the time when the local indigenous jews were marginalized. The Jews of Cochin were revitalized after 1600, by then da Gama had come and gone and the Portuguese empire was about to fall. 

Coming back to Haffkine, he was denied a professorship in Odessa where he had graduated in Biology at the end of the 19th Century and found his way to Pasteur Institute in Paris where he worked as a Librarian and indulged in Bacteriology in his spare time

At Pasteur Institute, above, Haffkine developed a Cholera vaccine in 1892 and subsequently was employed by the British India Civil Service in Calcutta where he inoculated thousands of people and conducted initial studies on Vaccination epidemiology.

He also developed a vaccine against Plague which had killed over one million people in India of that time, more than one hundred years ago. 

His name and reputation had to be rescued by reputed British scientists after he was accused by the British civil servants in India (anti semitism was suspected).

He spent his last years in Paris and Lausanne. He always remained a faithful Jew and in his retirement promoted jewish organizations. He died in Lausanne in 1930, aged 70

I have more than one reason to remember Dr Haffkine

Someone gave me a stamp when I was a boy 

I became interested in the Jewish communities of India 

I became interested in Humanitarian medicine and he certainly was one.

Between 1897 and 1925, 26 million doses of Haffkine's anti-plague vaccine were sent out from Bombay. Tests of the vaccine's efficacy showed between a 50% and 85% reduction in mortality. But "no figure" could be put on the number of lives he saved, Hawgood said. "The numbers are just enormous."

Haffkine died in Lausanne in 1930, aged 70. A short obituary notice circulated by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency noted that his plague vaccine had been "adopted throughout India" and his lab had "issued many thousands of doses to various tropical countries". The notice also quoted Lord Lister, the great British bacteriologist and pioneer of antiseptic surgery, who called Haffkine, simply, "the saviour of mankind".   (thanks to the BBC news )