Nathan Edwin Brill

Nathan Edwin Brill attended the New York University College, receiving his medical doctorate there in 1880. He was an intern at the Bellevue Hospital from 1879 to 1881. In 1882 he was appointed physician at the Mount Sinai Hospital, becoming professor at the College of Physicians and surgeons. He distinguished himself in particular as an outstanding diagnostician.

Brill translated Georg Klemperer’s (1865-1946) book Clinical Diagnosis in 1898 and discovered a previously unrecognised form of typhus which is called recurrent typhus - Brill-Zinsser’s disease - in immigrants from Eastern Europe without body lice. The disease seems to be a recurrence of a latent infection following a primary lice/tick-born typhus. Clinically it resembles mild typhus, but may also occur after the first infection.

• G. Klemperer:
  Grundriss der klinischen Diagnostik.
  Berlin, 1890; 26th edition, 1931.