Ernest Hanbury Hankin worked under Louis Pasteur in Paris
and under Robert Koch in Berlin.
He studied malaria and cholera in India
and challenged the persistent view that miasmas cause disease.
He did more than anyone before him to call for sanitation,
saying that boiling water could protect against cholera.
Water of the Ganges
For centuries the people of India fervently believed
the waters of the Ganges were sacred and incorruptible.
Hankin noted that waters of the Ganges and Yamuna
included an anti-bacterial agent against vibrio cholerae.
Hankin’s paper on this was among the first
observations of what were later called bacteriophages.
Speaking the obvious
Others before Hankin had tried to make clear, the obvious;
but it takes more than trying to penetrate traditional belief.
It takes more than trying to spell relief. The last I checked,
no one was listening. They were thinking about the game,
or the sound of rain dripping off the eaves reminded them
of a place they had left behind, where they couldn’t return.
If it’s possible, nobody wants to be told again the obvious;
if it’s impossible, maybe then they will pay a little attention.
In a moving scene in the second film of Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, Aparajito,
the ten-year-old Apu is sent to the banks of Ganges for holy water that his mother
trickles into his father’s mouth as he is dying.
In a moving scene in the second film of Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, Aparajito, the ten-year-old Apu is sent to the banks of Ganges for holy water that his mother trickles into his father’s mouth as he is dying.
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