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Ricketts working in laboratory using microscope. No location or date given. Howard Taylor Ricketts (1871-1910) was an American bacteriologist and pathologist after whom the Rickettsiaceae family and the Rickettsiales are named. Ricketts undertook research at Northwestern University on blastomycosis. He later worked in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana and at the University of Chicago on Rocky Mountain spotted fever. While in Montana, Ricketts and his assistant discovered that the agent that carried the bacillus for the latter was a tick, the Rocky Mountain wood tick. Ricketts was devoted to his research and, on several occasions, injected himself with a pathogen to measure its effects. The pathogen causing Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Rickettsia rickettsii was named after him. n 1909, Ricketts became interested in a strand of typhus known as tabardillo, due to a major outbreak in Mexico City, and the apparent similarity of the disease to spotted fever. Days after isolating the organism that he believed caused typhus, he himself died of the disease. He was 39 years old.
