On July 18, 1892, Vladimir Khavkin injected himself with a vaccine against cholera, and he developed immunity

It was an act that later saved the lives of tens of millions of people. Having learned about the results of the experiment of a young scientist, the discoverer of the tubercle bacillus Robert Koch said: “This is too good to be true.”

On July 18, 1892, 32-year-old Vladimir Khavkin injected himself with a vaccine of his own manufacture against cholera, and he developed immunity.

Mass immunization with use of vaccines began in the world from that moment on. This practice remains the most effective way to combat mass diseases today.

Despite the outbreak of cholera in the south of Ukraine in 1892, the Russian Empire refused to use the Khavkin’s vaccine. He was a member of the Narodnaya Volya organization, and the tsarist government did not want to accept help from the hands of the dissenter, as they would put it now. 300,000 people died of cholera in 3 months then, and the name of Khavkin was safely forgotten. In his homeland. In Europe though, they could not come to their senses from the discovery of a born in Odessa student of Ilya Mechnikov for a long time.

The British Empire, in whose Indian possessions cholera epidemics occurred every three years, and the victims were in the millions, was the first to accept Khavkin’s discovery.

Five years later, he would invent a vaccine against another disease, which throughout the history of mankind has been a symbol of the worst that could happen. In January 1897, Khavkin injected himself with a vaccine against plague, fell ill in a mild form, and remained alive.

In India, Khavkin defeated both cholera and plague. He worked there for 18 years, becoming no less revered than Mahatma Gandhi. He was also called Mahatma (“great soul” in Sanskrit). In Bombay, an Institute of Bacteriology named after Mahatma Khavkin was established, in which more than 440 million doses of the plague vaccine were produced.

The humanity has almost forgotten about the plague and cholera since then. Khavkin from Odessa presented people with weapons to fight the enemies that killed more people than all the world wars.