Portraits from Our Medical History: Dr. Elhan Özlüarda (1927-2013)

From Our History of Vaccination and Contagious DiseasesDr. Elhan 2 (Özütürk) Özlüarda (Figure 1) is one of the scientists who left her mark on virology and vaccinology studies in Türkiye during the Republican period.She was born in İstanbul in 1927, as the third daughter of a captain from Van (Ekrem Özütürk), who was a teacher at the İstanbul Artillery School, and a housewife mother (Hayriye Özütürk), an immigrant from Macedonia, exactly 210 years after the famous letter of 3 Lady Mary Montagu, who was another important woman in the history of smallpox vaccination, in which she reported that the Turks used a vaccine to prevent smallpox which caused massive epidemics and deaths in England during her stay in Türkiye as the wife of the British Ambassador (1716-1718), and which would lead to the spread of this method in England, and 35 years after the establishment of the Telkihhane-i Şahane (Osmani) 4 , the first official smallpox vaccine production center of the Ottoman Empire, and just only one year before the establishment of the Refik Saydam Central Institute of Hygiene 5 , one of the most important science and vaccine production centers in the history of public health and preventive medicine in the Republic of Türkiye, where she would spend 22 years of her