You do not want to miss it—the story of H influenzae meningitis

The author makes a grand detour to other outbreaks (plague and smallpox) to explain the discovery of the significance of the agglutination reaction and devotes a chapter to the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of restriction enzymes also using H influenzae as a model. Despite showing images of patients afflicted by “epidemic meningitis”, the author provides little information about the physicians who struggled to make the diagnosis and adequately describe the entity. Major, more recent clinical contributions by several clinicians are marginally described. [...]Gilsdorf goes out on a limb when she retrospectively attributes Helen Keller's blindness and hearing loss to meningococcal or H influenzae meningitis, which would also make Keller a rare survivor of meningitis when she became sick at the age of 19 months.