Commentary: William Budd-a less well known human ecologist?

Abstract

According to the late Tim Murrell, general practitioners have four main tasks—to manage undifferentiated illness, to manage long-term and continuing illness in the community, to offer a health prevention service and to offer an advocacy service to the patient. For the thinking practitioner he added a fifth task—to study the interaction of human beings with themselves and with living organisms within their shared environments. This he called the task of human ecology. 1 Two noteworthy general practitioners who could be regarded as human ecologists about the time of cholera epidemics in Britain were William Budd and the famous John Snow. William Budd (Figure 1) was an English country practitioner whose observations on typhoid fever had far-reaching public health consequences. Born in 1811 into a medical family in North Tawton, Devon, he subsequently spent part of his medical apprenticeship on Parisian wards with the critical observer Pierre Louis. Here Budd became acquainted with cases of typhoid fever 2,3 and also met Bretonneau who, feeling that cholera was a contagious disease, fought vigorously against the actions of the majority of his colleagues who admitted cholera patients to normal wards. 4