92 Facts About Hideyo Noguchi

Hideyo Noguchi, known as Seisaku Noguchi, was a prominent Japanese bacteriologist at the Rockefeller Institute known for his work on syphilis, serology, immunology, and contributing to the long term understanding of neurosyphilis.

Hideyo Noguchi produced one of the first serums to treat North American rattlesnake bites alongside Thorvald Madsen at the Statens Serum Institute.

Hideyo Noguchi wrote one of the foundational texts on the topic of venoms in his monograph, Snake Venoms: An Investigation of Venomous Snakes with Special Reference to the Phenomena of Their Venoms.

Later in his career, Hideyo Noguchi developed the first serum to give partial immunity to Rocky mountain spotted fever, a notoriously lethal disease before treatment was discovered.

Hideyo Noguchi's died from yellow fever during an expedition to Africa in search for the cause of the same disease.

Hideyo Noguchi mistaking it as a bacteria confusing it for a different tropical disease.

Hideyo Noguchi was one of the first scientists to gain international acclaim for his scientific contributions from Japan, being nominated several times for a Nobel prize in medicine between 1913 and 1927.

Hideyo Noguchi was two years old when he was left with his deaf grandmother who had poor eyesight alongside his four year old sister, Inu, while his mother worked in the rice fields.

Hideyo Noguchi's thumb was drawn down to his wrist and had become attached to it.

In 1893, sixteen year old Hideyo Noguchi apprenticed with the same clinic as the doctor who had performed his surgery.

Hideyo Noguchi was not able to get into the Imperial University because of his peasant class.

Hideyo Noguchi worked at the port of Yokohama as a quarantine officer, earning 35 yen a month.

In 1898, Noguchi changed his first name to Hideyo after reading a novel by Japanese author Tsubouchi Shoyo about a college student whose character had the same name as him.

Hideyo Noguchi experienced discrimination as employers were concerned his hand deformity would discourage patients.

In 1899, Hideyo Noguchi met Simon Flexner during his internship as his translator, being one of a few people who spoke English and Japanese at the Kitasato Institute.

Hideyo Noguchi decided that was that and bought a ticket on the America Maru.

Hideyo Noguchi hosted a party to celebrate, spending most of his money before leaving.

In spite of their brief encounter, Hideyo Noguchi requested a position but he said the university had no funds.

On January 4,1901, Hideyo Noguchi started his research position, earning eight dollars a month, coming straight out of Flexner's pocket.

Dr Mitchell spoke during the presentation but Hideyo Noguchi handled the specimens.

Hideyo Noguchi was accepted and became an official researcher and received funding from both the Carnegie Institute and National Academy of Science.

Subsequently, Hideyo Noguchi received an invitation to research at the Statens Serum Institute in Copenhagen.

Hideyo Noguchi wrote several papers with fellow bacteriologist, Thorvald Madsen.

Hideyo Noguchi brought a hundred grams of dried rattlesnake venom to Copenhagen and with Madsen produced one of the first antiserums to treat North American rattlesnake bites in 1903.

Hideyo Noguchi was the first to propose the mass production of antivenom in the USA, but not having been realized until Afranio do Amaral from the Butantan Institute and his research contributed to the development of the first North American rattlesnake antivenom in 1927.

Between 1905 and 1908, Hideyo Noguchi produced 28 papers and reports on his work with snake venoms and the routine observations of immunologic relationships, as well as tetanus.

In 1909, Hideyo Noguchi released a comprehensive monograph on snake venom, Snake Venoms: An Investigation of Venomous Snakes with Special Reference to the Phenomena of Their Venoms.

Hideyo Noguchi was introduced to another medical student Norio Araki, who was roommates with Hideyo Noguchi for three years.

In 1906, Hideyo Noguchi was the first person in the United States to confirm the spirochete sixty days after its discovery.

Between 1906 to 1915, Hideyo Noguchi made some of his most long lasting discoveries and scientific contributions to syphilis.

Hideyo Noguchi spent about two weeks at our laboratory and helped us materially by making many of the tests.

In 1910, Hideyo Noguchi published his manuscript, Serum Diagnosis of Syphilis, his most popular publication, assisting doctors and physicians in the diagnosis and treatment of syphilis.

In 1934, Hans Zinsser, a personal friend of Hideyo Noguchi, reluctantly said it had not been successful.

Hideyo Noguchi began collecting samples from spinal cords and brains of patients that died from tabes dorsalis or of paresis to determine its relationship to syphilis.

In 1912, Hideyo Noguchi had collected a total of 200 brains and 12 spinal cords samples from post-mortem patients.

Moore, a psychiatrist at Wards Island, Hideyo Noguchi discovered the presence of Treponema pallidum in the spinal cord of a patient with tabes dorsalis and paresis.

Hideyo Noguchi's discovery proved the homogeneity of a mental and physical disease through demonstrating that an organic agent could cause psychosis.

Hideyo Noguchi allowed for these patients to be diagnosed with syphilis.

Hideyo Noguchi proved that general paresis and tabes dorsalis are late stages of tertiary syphilis of the brain and spinal cords.

Hideyo Noguchi had discovered the delayed effects that could appear ten to twenty years after infection on the nervous system.

Dr Hideyo Noguchi's name is remembered in the binomial attached to another spirochete, Leptospira noguchii.

Hideyo Noguchi's record for numbers of published papers in a single year was an unheard of nineteen submitted to journals.

Hideyo Noguchi published over 200 paper and gave lecture tours throughout Europe during his career.

Hideyo Noguchi did not label his test tubes, he insisted he had it memorized.

Hideyo Noguchi washed his mouth out with alcohol but he felt he could have contracted jaundice.

Early in his career, Hideyo Noguchi's found it difficult for him to accept help as he wanted to ensure he received proper credit for his discoveries.

Hideyo Noguchi secretly married Mary Loretta Dardis on April 10,1912, whom he met for a single time after he returned from Copenhagen.

Hideyo Noguchi would turn the kitchen into a laboratory, leaving bacterial specimens in the refrigerator, have microscopes holding germ cultures on the dinner table, and put test tubes in the oven.

Hideyo Noguchi was close friends with his neighbor, Ichiro Hori, a Japanese painter and photographer.

Hideyo Noguchi said to give it to his family in Inawashiro.

Hideyo Noguchi sent an unsubtle telegram to Hoshi and asked for enough money to return home.

Hoshi was generous and immediately sent him enough to return to Japan Hideyo Noguchi bought a ticket and sailed to visit her and accept the Imperial Prize on September 5,1915.

Hideyo Noguchi greeted his mentors Chiwaki and Kobayashi at the Imperial Hotel.

When Hideyo Noguchi greeted his mother, he showed her a photograph of Mary and she approved.

Hideyo Noguchi spent another ten whole days with his mother, but returned to the United States, and this would be the last time he would be back in Japan.

Hideyo Noguchi was diagnosed with typhoid fever, a severe case with perforation of his digestive tract.

Hideyo Noguchi's fever worsened and Mary and those around him thought he might die.

Hideyo Noguchi made a slow recovery, Noguchi and Mary after seeing an advertisement in a newspaper took a four hour train ride to the Catskills.

Hideyo Noguchi felt it reminded him of his hometown in Fukushima.

Hideyo Noguchi decided to purchase approximately two hectares and build a house in Shandaken, becoming one of the largest landowners in the hamlet.

Hideyo Noguchi bought it with the money he had leftover for his treatment.

Hideyo Noguchi built his home alongside the Esopus river where he would fish and paint and spend most of his summers in 1918,1922, and 1925 to 1927.

Hideyo Noguchi was gifted oil paints from Ichiro Hori and he started painting in Shandaken.

Hideyo Noguchi's paintings hang in the Hideyo Noguchi Memorial Museum.

Hideyo Noguchi might have been one of the first non hand colored photographs of a Japanese person.

Hideyo Noguchi sent this in a letter, dated August 8,1914, to his childhood mentor, Sakae Kobayashi.

Hideyo Noguchi was fluent in Japanese and English, but spoke German, Dutch, French, Mandarin, Danish and Spanish.

In 1911 and 1912 at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City, Hideyo Noguchi was working on a syphilis skin test, which could provide an additional diagnostic procedure to complement the Wassermann test in the detection of syphilis.

Rockefeller Institute business manager Jerome D Greene wrote a letter to the Anti-Vivisection Society, which had pointed out that Noguchi had tested it on himself and his fellow researchers before administering it.

Hideyo Noguchi's explanation was considered a demonstration of the care that doctors were taking in research.

Hideyo Noguchi felt compelled to make more discoveries and pressure from his boss Simon Flexner and home country to bring respect and honor to his fellow Japanese.

Hideyo Noguchi began to tackle Rocky mountain spotted fever, similar to another disease Tsutsugamushi present in Japan, where deaths were common among rice planters and farmers.

In June of 1918, Hideyo Noguchi became chief investigator on a commission of the International Health Board traveled throughout Central America and South America to conduct research to develop a vaccine for yellow fever.

In 1923, Hideyo Noguchi had attempted creating passive and active immunity for Rocky mountain spotted fever.

Hideyo Noguchi made a breakthrough when he produced the first antiserum for the disease to render partial immunity.

Hideyo Noguchi sometimes lost his temper and scolding his assistants, but outside of the laboratory, Hideyo Noguchi was a different and more open person.

Hideyo Noguchi decided to focus on yellow fever, which some of his colleagues died researching because of his experience with syphilis and spirochetes.

Hideyo Noguchi thought the disease could have been a spirochete after traveling to Merida, Mexico and seeing patients demonstrate symptoms of Weil's disease, but similar to yellow fever.

Hideyo Noguchi identified it as Leptospira icterohemorrhagiae and mistakingly declaring it the causative agent of yellow fever.

Hideyo Noguchi worked much of the next ten years to prove his theory that it was from spir bacteria.

Hideyo Noguchi even thought he developed a vaccine against it, unknowingly for Weil's disease.

Hideyo Noguchi began preparing to travel to Accra, Gold Coast to study yellow fever and get closer to specimens.

Hideyo Noguchi believed himself immune to yellow fever because of his own vaccine.

In May 1928, having been unable to find evidence for his theories, Hideyo Noguchi was set to return to New York after spending six months in Africa, but became sick.

Hideyo Noguchi brought newfound attention to obscure and tropical diseases, such as trachoma, affecting a large part of developing countries in Africa, often ignored by western scientists.

Hideyo Noguchi was applauded for his discovery in South America and had a 2.1 km street in Guayaquil, Ecuador named after him.

Hideyo Noguchi's finding that Noguchia granulosis causes trachoma was questioned within a year of his death.

Hideyo Noguchi received honorary degrees from a number of universities.

Hideyo Noguchi was self-effacing in his public life, and he often referred to himself as "Funny Hideyo Noguchi" as noted in Times Magazine.

Hideyo Noguchi's remains were returned to the United States and buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City.

Dr Hideyo Noguchi's portrait has been printed on Japanese 1000-yen banknotes since 2004.

In 1899, Dr Hideyo Noguchi worked at the Yokohama Port Quarantine Office as an assistant quarantine doctor.