For anyone who suffered the mumps as a child, today is a day to think about Ernest William Goodpasture, M.D. Goodpasture, an American immunologist born on this date in 1886, is credited with isolating the mumps virus. He also developed the technique of using live chicken egg embryos to cultivate vaccines - making it possible to mass-produce vaccines such as influenza, typhus, yellow fever and smallpox. The doctor's name lives on in the name of a rare disorder - Goodpasture's syndrome - that he discovered during the influenza pandemic of 1918.

Copyright InteliHealth, Inc., 2011. All rights reserved.