Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Leonard Desmond de Launay

2003; BMJ; Volume: 327; Issue: 7423 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1136/bmj.327.7423.1112-c

0959-8138

P. de Launay,

Primary Care and Health Outcomes

General practitioner who showed that shingles was caused by reactivation of the chickenpox virus Edgar Hope Simpson was one of the outstanding general practitioner researchers of the 20th century.In addition to working full time in family practice he charted precisely the pattern of the common diseases that he saw clinically.In 1940 his wife gave him Wensleydale general practitioner William Pickles' then new book Epidemiology in Country Practice.Hope-Simpson modelled his approach on this, and he exchanged visits with Pickles.Eventually he surpassed even Pickles' work.The bulk of his interest was in infectious diseases.He was self taught and without any formal epidemiological or research training, but he learnt fast.He established a small epidemiological research unit around his practice in 1946 and chaired a Medical Research Council committee.He started to write papers, particularly on chickenpox and herpes zoster, in the 1940s and 1950s, which were published in the Lancet and the BMJ, and he produced a series of publications of which many professors would be proud.Chickenpox and shingles were known to be related, but how?Experts at the time were suggesting that two different viruses existed.Hope-Simpson increasingly believed there was only one, but how to prove it?In the end, he took his small team of research colleagues to the Island of Yell in the Shetlands in 1953 and literally followed up every known case in a much closed community.He was empowered by local islanders' memories for occurrences and dates.By 1962, new microbiological techniques enabled him to prove his point.Only a great intellect could have conceived this possibility-that, remarkably, a virus could commonly lie dormant in the human body, for years, indeed decades, and then reappear in another form.Only an