John Gill Bartlett (February 12, 1937 – January 19, 2021) was an American physician and medical researcher, specializing in infectious diseases.
In 1975, Bartlett left Los Angeles and accepted a position at Boston's Tufts-New England Medical Center,[1] where he was mentored by Sherwood Gorbach.
Furthermore, they were able to isolate Clostridioides difficile from the stool of these patients and show that intercaecal injection of the cultured bacteria recapitulated the disease in hamsters ...
Diagnostic tests and effective therapy for this disease were eventually developed based on John’s landmark study ...[2]In 1980, Bartlett left Boston and accepted a position as the director of Johns Hopkins Medical School's infectious diseases division[1] and was appointed to the Stanhope Bayne-Jones Professorship of Medicine.
[2] When Dr. Bartlett arrived in Baltimore, the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s Division of Infectious Diseases had three full-time staff members and a budget of $2,000,000, which grew during his tenure to become one of Hopkins’ largest divisions with 55 faculty members, a staff of 177, and a research budget of $40 million.
Bartlett played a key role in developing AIDS treatment regimens validated in clinical trials.
He and Donald Henderson were co-authors, along with numerous colleagues, of papers on possible biological weapons such as "smallpox, plague, tularemia, botulism, anthrax, and hemorrhagic fever viruses.
"[2] He is well known for his early discovery of Clostridium difficile as the cause of antibiotic-associated colitis, his insights and treatment of anaerobic abdominal and pulmonary infections, community-acquired pneumonia, bioterrorism, and emerging and reemerging infectious agents, from anthrax to Zika.