I’m a sucker for history. There’s lots of cliches about it, but I find the stories of how we got today’s food safety world fascinating.

Back in the early days of Food Safety Talk, Don and I talked about some of the history of food safety and food microbiology. A lot of our material came from text that good friend and margarita connoisseur Carl Custer pulled together as well as IAFPs 100 year anniversary document.

EID has a regular feature on the history of disease word origins and this month’s topic is Listeria.

Listeria [lis-teʹre-ə]

A genus of small, gram-positive, rods, Listeria was first isolated by Murray in 1924 as Bacterium monocytogenes. In 1927, Pirie proposed the genus Listerella in honor of British surgeon Sir Joseph Lister (1827–1912), an early advocate of antiseptic surgery. It was not until 1939 that Pirie realized that this genus had already been taken by a slime mold (also named in honor of Lister, by Jahn in 1906). In 1940, he proposed the alternative name Listeria. The mouthwash Listerine was also named after Lister, in 1979 (1879, thanks for the clarification commenters -ben) by Lawrence and Bosch, when in was marketed as a surgical antiseptic.

References

Hof H. History and epidemiology of listeriosis. FEMS Immunol Med Microbiol. 2003;35:199–202. 

Pirie JH. Listeria: change of name for a genus bacteria. Nature. 1940;145:264.