Historedia
Episode 3 of 6

First Case Discovery

When
May 8, 1894
Where
Government Civil Hospital
Part of
Bubonic plague outbreak in Hong Kong, 1894

Scottish doctor James Alfred Lowson discovered the first plague case in Hong Kong on May 8, 1894.

Scottish doctor James Alfred Lowson, acting superintendent of the Government Civil Hospital, discovered the first case on May 8, 1894. A contemporary account describes the first case as a hospital clerk who had just returned from Canton; the passages do not confirm these refer to the same case.

Sources

  1. 1894 Hong Kong plague Wikipedia, revision of 2026-07-09
  2. Third plague pandemic Wikipedia, revision of 2026-10-10

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.