n
i
MICROBE HUNTERS
by
PAUL de KRUIF
“The gods are frankly human, sharing in
the weaknesses of mankind, yet not un-
touched with a halo of divine Romance.”
E. H. BLAKENEY.
BLUE RIBBON BOOKS
NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, IQ26, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PRINTED BY THE CORNWALL PRESS., INC.
CORNWALL, N. Y.
TO
RHEA
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAG*
I LEEUWENHOEK: First of the Microbe Hunters . 3
II SPALLANZANI: Microbes Must Have Parents! . 25
III PASTEUR: Microbes Are a Menace! . . . . 57
IV KOCH: The Death Fighter 105
V PASTEUR: And the Mad Dog 145
VI ROUX AND BEHRING: Massacre the Guinea-Pigs . 184
VII METCHNIKOFF: The Nice Phagocytes ... 207
VIII THEOBALD SMITH: Ticks and Texas Fever . . 234
IX BRUCE: Trail of the Tsetse 252
X ROSS VS. GRASSI: Malaria 278
XI WALTER REED: In the Interest of Science — and for
Humanity! 31 1
XII PAUL EHRLICH: The Magic Bullet .... 334
INDEX . . . . 359
CHAPTER I
LEEUWENHOEK
FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS
I
Two hundred and fifty years ago an obscure man named
Leeuwenhoek looked for the first time into a mysterious new
world peopled with a thousand different kinds of tiny beings,,
some ferocious and deadly, others friendly and useful, many
of them more important to mankind than any continent or
archipelago.
Leeuwenhoek, unsung and scarce remembered, is now almost
as unknown as his strange little animals and plants were at the
time he discovered them. This is the story of Leeuwenhoek,
the first of the microbe hunters. It is the tale of the bold and
persistent and curious explorers and fighters of death who came
after him. It is the plain history of their tireless peerings into
this new fantastic world. They have tried to chart it, these
microbe hunters and death fighters. So trying they have
groped and fumbled and made mistakes and roused vain hopes.
Some of them who were too bold have died — done to death by
the immensely small assassins they were studying — and these
have passed to an obscure small glory.
To-day it is respectable to be a man of science. Those who
go by the name of scientist form an important element of the
population, their laboratories are in every city, their achieve-
ments are on the front pages of the newspapers, often before
they are fully achieved. Almost any young university student
can go in for research and by and by become a comfortable
science professor at a tidy little salary in a cozy college. But
. LEEUWENHOEK
4
take yourself back to Leeuwenhoek’s day, two hundred and
fifty years ago, and imagine yourself just through high school,
getting ready to choose a career, wanting to know
You have lately recovered from an attack of mumps , you
ask your father what is the cause of mumps and he tells you
a mumpish evil spirit has got into you. His theory may not
impress you much, but you decide to make believe you believe
him and not to wonder any more about what is mumps — be-
cause if you publicly don’t believe him you are in for a beating
and may even be turned out of the house. Your father is
Authority.
That was the world three hundred years ago, when Leeuwen- <
hoek was born. It had hardly begun to shake itself free from
superstitions, it was barely beginning to blush for its ignorance.
It was a world where science (which only means trying to find
truth by careful observation and clear thinking) was just
learning to toddle on vague and wobbly legs. It was a world
where Servetus was burned to death for daring to cut up and
examine the body of a dead man, where Galileo was shut up for
life for daring to prove that the earth moved around the sun.
Antony Leeuwenhoek was born in 1632 amid the blue wind-
mills and low streets and high canals of Delft, in Holland. His
family were burghers of an intensely respectable kind and I
say intensely respectable because they were basket-makers and
brewers, and brewers are respectable and highly honored in
Holland. Leeuwenhoek’s father died early and his mother
sent him to school to learn to be a government official, but he
left school at sixteen to be an apprentice in a dry-goods store
in Amsterdam. That was his university. Think of a present-
day scientist getting his training for experiment among bolts of
gingham, listening to the tinkle of the bell on the cash drawer,
being polite to an eternal succession of Dutch housewives who
shopped with a penny-pinching dreadful exhaustiveness — but
that was Leeuwenhoek’s university, for six years!
At the age of twenty-one he left the dry-goods store, went
back to Delft, married, set up a dry-goods store of his own
FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS 5
there. For twenty years after that very little is known about
him, except that he had two wives (in succession) and several
children most of whom died, but there is no doubt that during
this time he was appointed janitor of the city hall of Delft, and
that he developed a most idiotic love for grinding lenses. He
had heard that if you very carefully ground very little lenses
out of clear glass, you would see things look much bigger than
they appeared to the naked eye. . . . Little is known about
him from twenty to forty, but there is no doubt that he passed
in those days for an ignorant man. The only language he knew
was Dutch — that was an obscure language despised by the cul-
tured world as a tongue of fishermen and shop-keepers and
diggers of ditches. Educated men talked Latin in those days,
but Leeuwenhoek could not so much as read it and his only
literature was the Dutch Bible. Just the same, you will see
that his ignorance was a great help to him, for, cut off from all
of the learned nonsense of his time, he had to trust to his own
eyes, his own thoughts, his own judgment. And that was easy
for him because there never was a more mulish man than this
Antony Leeuwenhoek!
It would be great fun to look through a lens and see things
bigger than your naked eye showed them to youl But buy
lenses? Not Leeuwenhoek! There never was a more sus-
picious man. Buy lenses? He would make them himself!
During these twenty years of his obscurity he went to spec-
tacle-makers and got the rudiments of lens-grinding. He
visited alchemists and apothecaries and put his nose into their
secret ways of getting metals from ores, he began fumblingly
to learn the craft of the gold- and silversmiths. He was a most
pernickety man and was not satisfied with grinding lenses as
good as those of the best lens-grinder in Holland, they had to
be better than the best, and then he still fussed over them for
long hours. Next he mounted these lenses in little oblongs of
copper or silver or gold, which he had extracted himself, over
hot fires, among strange smells and fumes. To-day searchers
pay seventy-five dollars for a fine shining microscope, turn the
6
LEEUWENHOEK
screws, peer through it, make discoveries — without knowing
anything about how it is built. But Leeuwenhoek —
Of course his neighbors thought he was a bit cracked but
Leeuwenhoek went on burning and blistering his hands. Work-
ing forgetful of his family and regardless of his friends, he
bent solitary to subtle tasks in still nights. The good neighbors
sniggered, while that man found a way to make a tiny lens, less
than one-eighth of an inch across, so symmetrical, so perfect,
that it showed little things to him with a fantastic clear enor-
mousness. Yes, he was a very uncultured man, but he alone
of all men in Holland knew how to make those lenses, and he
said of those neighbors: “We must forgive them, seeing that
they know no better.”
Now this self-satisfied dry-goods dealer began to turn his
lenses onto everything he could get hold of. He looked
through them at the muscle fibers of a whale and the scales of
his own skin. He went to the butcher shop and begged or
bought ox-eyes and was amazed at how prettily the crystalline
lens of the eye of the ox is put together. He peered for hours
at the build of the hairs of a sheep, of a beaver, of an elk, that
were transformed from their fineness into great rough logs
under his bit of glass. He delicately dissected the head of a
fly; he stuck its brain on the fine needle of his microscope —
how he admired the clear details of the marvelous big brain of
that fly! He examined the cross-sections of the wood of a
dozen different trees and squinted at the seeds of plants. He
grunted “Impossible!” when he first spied the outlandish large
perfection of the sting of a flea and the legs of a louse. That
man Leeuwenhoek was like a puppy who sniffs — with a totally
impolite disregard of discrimination — at every object of the
world around him!
n
There never was a less sure man than Leeuwenhoek. He
looked at this bee’s sting or that louse’s leg again and again
FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS 7
and again. He left his specimens sticking on the point of his
strange microscope for months — in order to look at other
things he made more microscopes till he had hundreds of them!
— then he came back to those first specimens to correct his first
mistakes. He never set down a word about anything he peeped
at, he never made a drawing until hundreds of peeps showed
him that, under given conditions, he would always see exactly
the same thing. And then he was not sure! He said:
“People who look for the first time through a microscope
say now I see this and then I see that — and even a skilled ob-
server can be fooled. On these observations I have spent more
time than many will believe, but I have done them with joy,
and I have taken no notice of those who have said why take
so much trouble and what good is it? — but I do not write for
such people but only for the philosophical!” He worked for
twenty years that way, without an audience.
But at this time, in the middle of the seventeenth century,
great things were astir in the world. Here and there in France
and England and Italy rare men were thumbing their noses at
almost everything that passed for knowledge. “We will no
longer take Aristotle’s say-so, nor the Pope’s say-so,” said these
rebels. “We will trust only the perpetually repeated observa-
tions of our own eyes and the careful weighings of our scales;
we will listen to the answers experiments give us and no other
answers!” So in England a few of these revolutionists started
a society called The Invisible College, it had to be invisible be-
cause that man Cromwell might have hung them for plotters
and heretics if he had heard of the strange questions they were
trying to settle. What experiments those solemn searchers
made! Put a spider in a circle made of the powder of a uni-
corn’s horn and that spider can’t crawl out — so said the wis-
dom of that day. But these Invisible Collegians? One of
them brought what was supposed to be powdered unicorn’s
horn and another came carrying a little spider in a bottle. The
college crowded around under the light of high candles. Si-
8 LEEUWENHOEK
lence, then the hushed experiment, and here is their report of
it;
“A circle was made with the powder of unicorn’s horn and a
spider set in the middle of it, but it immediately ran out.”
Crude, you exclaim. Of course! But remember that one of
the members of this college was Robert Boyle, founder of the
science of chemistry, and another was Isaac Newton. Such
was the Invisible College, and presently, when Charles II came
to the throne, it rose from its depths as a sort of blind-pig
scientific society to the dignity of the name of the Royal So-
ciety of England. And they were Antony Leeuwenhoek’s first
audience! There was one man in Delft who did not laugh at
Antony Leeuwenhoek, and that was Regnier de Graaf, whom
the Lords and Gentlemen of the Royal Society had made a cor-
responding member because he had written them of interesting
things he had found in the human ovary. Already Leeuwen-
hoek was rather surly and suspected everybody, but he let de
Graaf peep through those magic eyes of his, those little lenses
whose equal did not exist in Europe or England or the whole
world for that matter. What de Graaf saw through those
microscopes made him ashamed of his own fame and he hur-
ried to write to the Royal Society:
“Get Antony Leeuwenhoek to write you telling of his dis-
coveries.”
And Leeuwenhoek answered the request of the Royal So-
ciety with all the confidence of an ignorant man who fails to
realize the profound wisdom of the philosophers he addresses.
It was a long letter, it rambled over every subject under the
sun, it was written with a comical artlessness in the conversa-
tional Dutch that was the only language he knew. The title of
that letter was: “A Specimen of some Observations made by a
Microscope contrived by Mr. Leeuwenhoek, concerning Mould
upon the Skin, Flesh, etc.; the Sting of a Bee, etc.” The Royal
Society was amazed, the sophisticated and learned gentlemen
were amused — but principally the Royal Society was astounded
by the marvelous things Leeuwenhoek told them he could see
FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS 9
through his new lenses. The Secretary of the Royal Society
thanked Leeuwenhoek and. told him he hoped his first com-
munication would be followed by others. It was, by hundreds
of others over a period of fifty years. They were talkative let-
ters full of salty remarks about his ignorant neighbors, of ex-
posures of charlatans and of skilled explodings of superstitions,
of chatter about his personal health — but sandwiched between
paragraphs and pages of this homely stuff, in almost every let-
ter, those Lords and Gentlemen of the Royal Society had the
honor of reading immortal and gloriously accurate descriptions
of the discoveries made by the magic eye of that janitor and
shopkeeper. What discoveries!
When you look back at them, many of the fundamental dis-
coveries of science seem so simple, too absurdly simple. How
was it men groped and fumbled for so many thousands of years
without seeing things that lay right under their noses? So
with microbes. Now all the world has seen them cavorting on
movie screens, many people of little learning have peeped at
them swimming about under lenses of microscopes, the green-
est medical student is able to show you the germs of I don’t
know how many diseases — what was so hard about seeing
microbes for the first time?
But let us drop our sneers to remember that when Leeuwen-
hoek was born there were no microscopes but only crude hand-
lenses that would hardly make a ten-cent piece look as large as
a quarter. Through these — without his incessant grinding of
his own marvelous lenses — that Dutchman might have looked
till he grew old without discovering any creature smaller than a
cheese-mite. You have read that he made better and better
lenses with the fanatical persistence of a lunatic; that he ex-
amined everything, the most intimate things and the most
shocking things, with the silly curiosity of a puppy. Yes, and
all this squinting at bee-stings and mustache hairs and what-
not were needful to prepare him for that sudden day when he
looked through his toy of a gold-mounted lens at a fraction of
a small drop of clear rain water to discover —
IO LEEUWENHOEK
What he saw that day starts this history. Leeuwenhoek was
a maniac observer, and who but such a strange man would have
thought to turn his lens on clear, pure water, just come down
from the sky? What could there be in water but just — water?
You can imagine his daughter Maria — she was nineteen and
she took such care of her slightly insane father! — watching him
take a little tube of glass, heat it red-hot in a flame, draw it out
to the thinness of a hair. . . . Maria was devoted to her father
— let any of those stupid neighbors dare to snigger at him! —
but what in the world was he up to now, with that hair-fine
glass pipe?
You can see her watch that absent-minded wide-eyed man
break the tube into little pieces, go out into the garden to bend
over an earthen pot kept there to measure the fall of the rain.
He bends over that pot. He goes back into his study. He
sticks the little glass pipe onto the needle of his micro-
scope. . . .
What can that dear silly father be up to?
He squints through his lens. He mutters guttural words
under his breath. . . .
Then suddenly the excited voice of Leeuwenhoek: “Come
here! Hurry! There are little animals in this rain water. . . .
They swim! They play around! They are a thousand times
smaller than any creatures we can see with our eyes alone
Look! See what I have discovered!”
Leeuwenhoek’s day of days had come. Alexander had gone
to India and discovered huge elephants that no Greek had ever
seen before — but those elephants were as commonplace to
Hindus as horses were to Alexander. Caesar had gone to Eng-
land and come upon savages that opened his eyes with wonder
— but these Britons were as ordinary to each other as Roman
centurions were to Caesar. Balboa? What were his proud
feelings as he looked for the first time at the Pacific? Just the
same that Ocean was as ordinary to a Central American Indian
as the Mediterranean was to Balboa. But Leeuwenhoek? This
FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS
n
janitor of Delft had stolen upon and peeped into a fantastic
sub-visible world of little things, creatures that had lived, had
bred, had battled, had died, completely hidden from and un-
known to all men from the beginning of time. Beasts these
were of a kind that ravaged and annihilated whole races of men
ten million times larger than they were themselves. Beings
these were, more terrible than fire-spitting dragons or hydra-
headed monsters. They were silent assassins that murdered
babes in warm cradles and kings in sheltered places. It was
this invisible, insignificant, but implacable — and sometimes
friendly — world that Leeuwenhoek had looked into for the first
time of all men of all countries.
This was Leeuwenhoek’s day of days. . . .
m
That man was so unashamed of his admirations and his sur-
prises at a nature full of startling events and impossible things.
How I wish I could take myself back, could bring you back, to
that innocent time when men were just beginning to disbelieve
in miracles and only starting to find still more miraculous facts.
How marvelous it would be to step into that simple Dutch-
man’s shoes, to be inside his brain and body, to feel his ex-
citement — it is almost nausea! — at his first peep at those ca-
vorting “wretched beasties.”
That was what he called them, and, as I have told you, this
Leeuwenhoek was an unsure man. Those animals were too
tremendously small to be true, they were too strange to be
true. So he looked again, till his hands were cramped with
holding his microscope and his eyes full of that smarting water
that comes from too-long looking. But he was right! Here
they were again, not one kind of little creature, but here was
another, larger than the first, “moving about very nimbly be-
cause they were furnished with divers incredibly thin feet.”
Wait! Here is a third kind — and a fourth, so tiny I can’t
12
LEEUWENHOEK
make out his shape. But he is alive! He goes about, dashing
over great distances in this world of his water-drop in the little
tube. . . . What nimble creatures!
“They stop, they stand still as ’twere upon a point, and then
turn themselves round with that swiftness, as we see a top turn
round, the circumference they make being no bigger than that
of a fine grain of sand.” So wrote Leeuwenhoek.
For all this seemingly impractical sniffing about, Leeuwen-
hoek was a hard-headed man. He hardly ever spun theories,
he was a fiend for measuring things. Only how could you make
a measuring stick for anything so small as these little beasts?
He wrinkled his low forehead: “How large really is this last
and smallest of the little beasts?” He poked about in the cob-
webbed corners of his memory among the thousand other things
he had studied with you can’t imagine what thoroughness; he
made calculations: “This last kind of animal is a thousand
times smaller than the eye of a large louse!” That was an
accurate man. For we know now that the eye of one full-
grown louse is no larger nor smaller than the eyes of ten thou-
sand of his brother and sister lice.
But where did these outlandish little inhabitants of the rain-
water come from? Had they come down from the sky? Had
they crawled invisibly over the side of the pot from the ground?
Or had they been created out of nothing by a God full of
whims? Leeuwenhoek believed in God as piously as any Seven-
teenth Century Dutchman. He always referred to God as the
Maker of the Great All. He not only believed in God but he
admired him intensely — what a Being to know how to fashion
bees’ wings so prettily ! But then Leeuwenhoek was a material*
ist too. His good sense told him that life comes from life. His
simple belief told him that God had invented all living things
in six days, and, having set the machinery going, sat back to
reward good observers and punish guessers and bluffers. He
stopped speculating about improbable gentle rains of little
animals from heaven. Certainly God couldn’t brew those ani-
mals in the rain water pot out of nothing! But wait , . .
13
FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS
Maybe? Well, there was only one way to find out where they
came from. “I will experiment 1 ” he muttered.
He washed out a wine glass very clean, he dried it, he held
it under the spout of his eaves-trough, he took a wee drop in
one of his hair-fine tubes. Under his lens it went. . . . Yes!
They were there, a few of those beasts, swimming about. . . .
“They are present even in very fresh rain water 1” But then,
that really proved nothing, they might live in the eaves-trough
and be washed down by the water. . . .
Then he took a big porcelain dish, “glazed blue within,” he
washed it clean, out into the rain he went with it and put it
on top of a big box so that the falling raindrops would splash
no mud into the dish. The first water he threw out to clean
it still more thoroughly. Then intently he collected the next
bit in one of his slender pipes, into his study he went with
it. ...
“I have proved it! This water has not a single little creature
in it! They do not come down from the sky!”
But he kept that water; hour after hour, day after day he
squinted at it — and on the fourth day he saw those wee beasts
beginning to appear in the water along with bits of dust and
little flecks of thread and lint. That was a man from Missouri!
Imagine a world of men who would submit all of their cock-
sure judgments to the ordeal of the common-sense experiments
of a Leeuwenhoek 1
Did he write to the Royal Society to tell them of this en-
tirely unsuspected world of life he had discovered? Not yet!
He was a slow man. He turned his lens onto all kinds of
water, water kept in the close air of his study, water in a pot
kept on the high roof of his house, water from the not-too-
clean canals of Delft and water from the deep cold well in his
garden. Everywhere he found those beasts. He gaped at
their enormous littleness, he found many thousands of them
did not equal a grain of sand in bigness, he compared them to
a cheese-mite and they were to this filthy little creature as a
bee is to a horse. He was never tired with watching them
14
LEEUWENHOEK
“swim about among one another gently like a swarm of mos-
quitoes in the air. . .
Of course this man was a groper. He was a groper and a
stumbler as all men are gropers, devoid of prescience, and
stumblers, finding what they never set out to find. His new
beasties were marvelous but they were not enough for him, he
was always poking into everything, trying to see more closely,
trying to find reasons. Why is the sharp taste of pepper?
That was what he asked himself one day, and he guessed:
“There must be little points on the particles of pepper and
these points jab the tongue when you eat pepper. . .
But are there such little points?
He fussed with dry pepper. He sneezed. He sweat, but
he couldn’t get the grains of pepper small enough to put under
his lens. So, to soften it, he put it to soak for several weeks
in water. Then with fine needles he pried the almost invisible
specks of the pepper apart, and sucked them up in a little drop
of water into one of his hair-fine glass tubes. He looked—
Here was something to make even this determined man
scatter-brained. He forgot about possible small sharp points
on the pepper. With the interest of an intent little boy he
watched the antics of “an incredible number of little animals,
of various sorts, which move very prettily, which tumble about
and sidewise, this way and that!”
So it was Leeuwenhoek stumbled on a magnificent way to
grow his new little animals.
And now to write all this to the great men off there in Lon-
don! Artlessly he described his own astonishment to them.
Long page after page in a superbly neat handwriting with little
common words he told them that you could put a million of
these little animals into a coarse grain of sand and that one
drop of his pepper-water, where they grew and multiplied so
well, held more than two-million seven-hundred-thousand of
them. . . .
This letter was translated into English. It was read before
FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS 15
the learned skeptics — who no longer believed in the magic
virtues of unicorn’s horns — and it bowled the learned body
over I What! The Dutchman said he had discovered beasts
so small that you could put as many of them into one little
drop of water as there were people in his native country?
Nonsense! The cheese mite was absolutely and without doubt
the smallest creature God had created.
But a few of the members did not scoff. This Leeuwenhoek
was a confoundedly accurate man: everything he had ever
written to them they had found to be true. ... So a letter
went back to the scientific janitor, begging him to write them
in detail the way he had made his microscope, and his method
of observing.
That upset Leeuwenhoek. It didn’t matter that these stupid
oafs of Delft laughed at him — but the Royal Society? He
had thought they were philosophers! Should he write them
details, or should he from now on keep everything he did to
himself? “Great God,” you can imagine him muttering,
“these ways I have of uncovering mysterious things, how I
have worked and sweat to learn to do them, what jeering from
how many fools haven’t I endured to perfect my microscopes
and my ways of looking! . . .”
But creators must have audiences. He knew that these
doubters of the Royal Society should have sweat just as hard
to disprove the existence of his little animals as he himself had
toiled to discover them. He was hurt, but — creators must have
an audience. So he replied to them in a long letter assuring
them he never told anything too big. He explained his cal-
culations (and modern microbe hunters with all of their ap-
paratus make only slightly more accurate ones! ) he wrote these
calculations out, divisions, multiplications, additions, until his
letter looked like a child’s exercise in arithmetic. He finished
by saying that many people of Delft had seen — with applause!
— these strange new animals under his lens. He would send
them affidavits from prominent citizens of Delft — two men of
LEEUWENHOEK
16
God, one notary public, and eight other persons worthy to be
believed. But he wouldn’t tell them how be made his micro-
scopes.
That was a suspicious manl He held his little machines up
for people to look through, but let them so much as touch the
microscope to help themselves to see better and he might or-
der them out of his house. . . . He was like a child anxious
and proud to show a large red apple to his playmates but loth
to let them touch it for fear they might take a bite out of it.
So the Royal Society commissioned Robert Hooke and Ne-
hemiah Grew to build the very best microscopes, and brew
pepper water from the finest quality of black pepper. And, on
the 15th of November, 1677, Hooke came carrying his micro-
scope to the meeting — agog — for Antony Leeuwenhoek had
not lied. Here they were, those enchanted beasts! The mem-
bers rose from their seats and crowded round the microscope.
They peered, they exclaimed: this man must be a wizard ob-
server! That was a proud day for Leeuwenhoek. And a little
later the Royal Society made him a Fellow, sending him a
gorgeous diploma of membership in a silver case with the coat
of arms of the society on the cover. “I will serve you faith-
fully during the rest of my life,” he wrote them. And he was
as good as his word, for he mailed them those conversational
mixtures of gossip and science till he died at the age of ninety.
But send them a microscope? Very sorry, but that was im-
possible to do, while he lived. The Royal Society went so far
as to dispatch Doctor Molyneux to make a report on this
janitor-discoverer of the invisible. Molyneux offered Leeu-
wenhoek a fine price for one of his microscopes — surely he
could spare one? — for there were hundreds of them in cabinets
that lined his study. But no 1 Was there anything the gentle-
man of the Royal Society would like to see? Here were some
most curious little unborn oysters in a bottle, here were divers
very nimble little animals, and that Dutchman held up his
lenses for the Englishman to peep through, watching all the
while out of the comer of his eye to see that the undoubtedly
FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS
17
most honest visitor didn’t touch anything — or filch any-
thing. . . .
“But your instruments are marvelous I s ’ cried Molyneux.
“A thousand times more clear they show things than any lens
we have in England!”
“How I wish, Sir,” said Leeuwenhoek, “that I could show
you my best lens, with my special way of observing, but I
keep that only for myself and do not show it to any one — not
even to my own family.”
iv
Those little animals were everywhere! He told the Royal
Society of finding swarms of those sub-visible beings in his
mouth — of all places: “Although I am now fifty years old,”
he wrote, “I have uncommonly well-preserved teeth, because
it is my custom every morning to rub my teeth very hard with
salt, and after cleaning my large teeth with a quill, to rub
them vigorously with a cloth. . . .” But there still were little
bits of white stuff between his teeth, when he looked at them
with a magnifying mirror. . . .
What was this white stuff made of?
From his teeth he scraped a bit of this stuff, mixed it with
pure rain water, stuck it in a little tube on to the needle of his
microscope, closed the door of his study —
What was this that rose
from the gray dimness of
his lens into clear distinct-
ness as he brought the tube
into the focus? Here was
an unbelievably tiny crea-
ture, leaping about in the
water of the tube “like the
fish called a pike.” There
was a second kind that swam forward a little way, then whirled
about suddenly, then tumbled over itself in pretty somer-
18 LEEUWENHOEK
saults. There were some beings that moved sluggishly and
looked like wee bent sticks, nothing more, but that Dutchman
squinted at them till his eyes were red-rimmed — and they
moved, they were alive, no doubt of it! There was a me-
nagerie in his mouth! There were creatures shaped like flex-
ible rods that went to and fro with the stately carriage of
bishops in procession, there were spirals that whirled through
the water like violently animated corkscrews. . . .
Everybody he could get hold of — as well as himself — was an
experimental animal for that curious man. Tired from his
long peering at the little beasts in his own mouth, he went for
a walk under the tall trees that dropped their yellow leaves on
the brown mirrors of the canals; it was hard work, this play of
his, he must rest! But he met an old man, a most interesting
old man: “I was talking to this old man,” wrote Leeuwen-
hoek to the Royal Society, “an old man who led a very sober
life, who never used brandy nor tobacco and very seldom wine,
and my eye chanced to fall on his teeth which were badly
grown over and that made me ask him when he had last
cleaned his mouth. I got for answer that he had never cleaned
his teeth in his whole life. . . .”
Away went all thought of his aching eyes. What a zoo of
wee animals must be in this old fellow’s mouth. He dragged
the dirty but virtuous victim of his curiosity into his study —
of course there were millions of wee beasties in that mouth,
but what he wanted particularly to tell the Royal Society was
this: that this old man’s mouth was host to a new kind of
creature, that slid along among the others, bending its body
in graceful bows like a snake — the water in the narrow tube
seemed to be alive with those little fellows!
You may wonder that Leeuwenhoek nowhere in any of those
hundreds of letters makes any mention of the harm these
mysterious new little animals might do to men. He had come
upon them in drinking water, spied upon them in the mouth;
as the years went by he discovered them in the intestines of
frogs and horses, and even in his own discharges; in swarms
FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS
19
he found them on those rare occasions when, as he says, “he
was troubled with a looseness.” But not for a moment did he
guess that his trouble was caused by those little beasts, and
from his unimaginativeness and his carefulness not to jump
to conclusions modern microbe hunters — if they only had time
to study his writings — could learn a great deal. For, during
the last fifty years, literally thousands of microbes have been
described as the authors of hundreds of diseases, when, in the
majority of cases those germs have only been chance residents
in the body at the time it became diseased. Leeuwenhoek was
cautious about calling anything the cause of anything else. He
had a sound instinct about the infinite complicatedness of
everything — that told him the danger of trying to pick out one
cause from the tangled maze of causes which control life. . . .
The years went by. He tended his little dry-goods store, he
saw to it the city hall of Delft was properly swept out, he grew
more and more crusty and suspicious, he looked longer and
longer hours through his hundreds of microscopes, he made
a hundred amazing discoveries. In the tail of a little fish stuck
head first into a glass tube he saw for the first time of all men
the capillary blood vessels through which blood goes from the
arteries to the veins — so he completed the Englishman Har-
vey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood. The most
sacred and improper and romantic things in life were only
material for the probing, tireless eyes of his lenses. Leeuwen-
hoek discovered the human sperm, and the cold-blooded sci-
ence of his searching would have been shocking, if he had not
been such a completely innocent man! The years went by
and all Europe knew about him. Peter the Great of Russia
came to pay his respects to him, and the Queen of England
journeyed to Delft only to look at the wonders to be seen
through the lenses of his microscopes. He exploded countless
superstitions for the Royal Society, and aside from Isaac New-
ton and Robert Boyle he was the most famous of their mem-
bers. But did these honors turn his head? They couldn’t
turn his head because he had from the first a sufficiently high
20
LEEUWENHOEK
opinion of himself 1 His arrogance was limitless — but it was
equaled by his humility when he thought of that misty un-
known that he knew surrounded himself and all men. He
admired the Dutch God but his real god was truth:
“My determination is not to remain stubbornly with my
ideas but I’ll leave them and go over to others as soon as I am
shown plausible reasons which I can grasp. This is the more
true since I have no other purpose than to place truth before
my eyes so far as it is in my power to embrace it; and to use
the little talent I have received to draw the world away from its
old heathenish superstitions and to go over to the truth and to
stick to it.”
He was an amazingly healthy man, and at the age of eighty
his hand hardly trembled as he held up his microscope for
visitors to peep at his little animals or to exclaim at the un-
born oysters. But he was fond of drinking in the evenings —
as what Dutchman is not? — and his only ill seems to have
been a certain seediness in the morning after such wassail. He
detested physicians — how could they know about the ills of
the body when they didn’t know one thousandth of what he
did about the build of the body? So Leeuwenhoek had his
own theories — and sufficiently foolish they were — about the
cause of this seediness. He knew that his blood was full of
little globules — he had been the first of all men to see them.
He knew those globules had to go through very tiny capillaries
to get from his arteries to his veins — hadn’t he been the man
to discover those wee vessels in a fish tail? Well, after those
hilarious nights of his, his blood got too thick to run properly
from the arteries to the veins I So he would thin it! So he
wrote to the Royal Society:
“When I have supped too heavily of an evening, I drink in
the morning a large number of cups of coffee, and that as hot
as I can drink it, so that the sweat breaks out on me, and if by
so doing I can’t restore my body, a whole apothecary’s shop
couldn’t do much, and that is the only thing I have done for
years when I have felt a fever.”
FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS 21
That hot coffee drinking led him to another curious fact
about the little animals. Everything he did led him to pry
up some new fact of nature, for he lived wrapped in those tiny
dramas that went on under his lenses just as a child listens
open-mouthed with saucer eyes to the myths of Mother
Goose. ... He never tired of reading the same story of na-
ture, there were always new angles to be found in it, the pages
of his book of nature were thumbed and dog-eared by his in-
satiable interest. Years after his discovery of the microbes
in his mouth one morning in the midst of his sweating from
his vast curative coffee drinkings he looked once more at the
stuff between his teeth —
What was this? There was not a single little animal to be
found. Or there were no living animals rather, for he thought
he could make out the bodies of myriads of dead ones — and
maybe one or two that moved feebly, as if they were sick.
“Blessed Saints!” he growled: “I hope some great Lord of the
Royal Society doesn’t try to find those creatures in his mouth,
and fail, and then deny my observations. . . .”
But look here! He had been drinking coffee, so hot it had
blistered his lips, almost. He had looked for the little animals
in the white stuff from between his front teeth. It was just
after the coffee he had looked there — Well?
With the help of a magnifying mirror he went at his back
teeth. Presto! “With great surprise I saw an incredibly
large number of little animals, and in such an unbelievable
quantity of the aforementioned stuff, that it is not to be con-
ceived of by those who have not seen it with their own eyes.”
Then he made delicate experiment in tubes, heating the water
with its tiny population to a temperature a little warmer than
that of a hot bath. In a moment the creatures stopped their
agile runnings to and fro. He cooled the water. They did
not come back to life — so! It was that hot coffee that had
killed the beasties in his front teeth!
With what delight he watched them once more! But he
was bothered, he was troubled, for he couldn’t make out the
22
LEEUWENHOEK
heads or tails of any of his little animals. After wiggling for-
ward in one direction they stopped, they reversed themselves
and swam backward just as swiftly without having turned
around. But they must have heads and tails! They must
have livers and brains and blood vessels as well! His thoughts
floated back to his work of forty years before, when he had
found that under his powerful lenses fleas and cheese mites,
so crude and simple to the naked eye, had become as compli-
cated and as perfect as human beings. But try as he would,
with the best lenses he had, and those little animals in his
mouth were just plain sticks of spheres or corkscrews. So
he contented himself by calculating, for the Royal So-
ciety, what the diameter of the invisible blood vessels of his
microbes must be — but mind you, he never for a moment
hinted that he had seen such blood vessels; it only amused him
to stagger his patrons by speculations of their unthinkable
smallness.
If Antony Leeuwenhoek failed to see the germs that cause
human disease, if he had too little imagination to predict the
role of assassin for his wretched creatures, he did show thal
sub-visible beasts could devour and kill living beings much
larger than they were themselves. He was fussing with mus-
sels, shellfish that he dredged up out of the canals of Delft.
He found thousands of them unborn inside their mothers. He
tried to make these young ones develop outside their mothers
in a glass of canal water. “I wonder,” he muttered, “why our
canals are not choked with mussels, when the mothers have
each one so many young ones inside them!” Day after day
he poked about in his glass of water with its slimy mass of
embryos, he turned his lens on to them to see if they were grow-
ing— but wbat was this? Astounded be watched the fishy stuff
disappear from between their shells — it was being gobbled up
by thousands of tiny microbes that were attacking the mussels
greedily. ...
“Life lives on life— it is cruel, but it is God’s will,” he pon-
dered. “And it is for our good, of course, because if there
FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS
23
weren’t little animals to eat up the young mussels, our canals
would be choked by those shellfish, for each mother has more
than a thousand young ones at a time! ” So Antony Leeuwen-
hoek accepted everything and praised everything, and in this
he was a child of his time, for in his century searchers had not
yet, like Pasteur who came after them, begun to challenge
God, to shake their fists at the meaningless cruelties of nature
toward mankind, her children. . . .
He passed eighty, and his teeth came loose as they had to
even in his strong body; he didn’t complain at the inexorable
arrival of the winter of his life, but he jerked out that old
tooth and turned his lens onto the little creatures he found
within that hollow root — why shouldn’t he study them once
more? There might be some little detail he had missed those
hundred other times! Friends came to him at eighty-five and
told him to take it easy and leave his studies. He wrinkled his
brow and opened wide his still bright eyes: “The fruits that
ripen in autumn last the longest!” he told them — he called
eighty-five the autumn of his life!
Leeuwenhoek was a showman. He was very pleased to
hear the ohs and ahs of people — they must be philosophical
people and lovers of science, mind you! — whom he let peep
into his sub-visible world or to whom he wrote his disjointed
marvelous letters of description. But he was no teacher.
“I’ve never taught one,” he wrote to the famous philosopher
Leibniz, “because if I taught one, I’d have to teach others. . . .
I would give myself over to a slavery, whereas I want to stay
a free man.”
“But the art of grinding fine lenses and making observa-
tions of these new creatures will disappear from the earth, if
you don’t teach young men,” answered Leibniz.
“The professors and students of the University of Leyden
were long ago dazzled by my discoveries, they hired three lens
grinders to come to teach the students, but what came of it?”
wrote that independent Dutchman.
“Nothing, so far as I can judge, for almost all of the courses
24
LEEUWENHOEK
they teach there are for the purpose of getting money through
knowledge or for gaining the respect of the world by showing
people how learned you are, and these things have nothing to
do with discovering the things that are buried from our eyes.
I am convinced that of a thousand people not one is capable of
carrying out such studies, because endless time is needed and
much money is spilled and because a man has always to be
busy with his thoughts if anything is to be accomplished. . . .”
That was the first of the microbe hunters. In 1723, when
he was ninety-one years old and on his deathbed, he sent for
his friend Hoogvliet. He could not lift his hand. His once
glowing eyes were rheumy and their lids were beginning to
stick fast with the cement of death. He mumbled:
“Hoogvliet, my friend, be so good as to have those two
letters on the table translated into Latin. . . . Send them to
London to the Royal Society. . . .”
So he kept his promise made fifty years before, and Hoog-
vliet wrote, along with those last letters: “I send you, learned
sirs, this last gift of my dying friend, hoping that his final
word will be agreeable to you.”
So he passed, this first of the microbe hunters. You will
read of Spallanzani, who was much more brilliant, of Pasteur
who had a thousand times his imagination, of Robert Koch
who did much more immediate apparent good in lifting the
torments that microbes bring to men — these and all the others
have much more fame to-day. But not one of them has been
so completely honest, so appallingly accurate as this Dutch
janitor, and all of them could take lessons from his splendid
common sense.
CHAPTER II
SPALLANZANI
MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS l
I
“Leeuwenhoek is dead, it is too bad, it is a loss that cannot
be made good. Who now will carry on the study of the little
animals?” asked the learned men of the Royal Society in Eng-
land, asked Reaumur and the brilliant Academy in Paris.
Their question did not wait long for an answer, for the janitor
of Delft had hardly closed his eyes in 1723 for the long sleep
that he had earned so well, when another microbe hunter was
born, in 1729 a thousand miles away in Scandiano in northern
Italy. This follower of Leeuwenhoek was Lazzaro Spallan-
zani, a strange boy who lisped verses while he fashioned mud-
pies; who forgot mudpies to do fumbling childish and cruel
experiments with beetles and bugs and flies and worms. In-
stead of pestering his parents with questions, he examined
living things in nature, by pulling legs and wings off them, by
trying to stick them back on again. He must find out how
things worked; he didn’t care so very much what they looked
like.
Like Leeuwenhoek, the young Italian had to fight to be-
come a microbe hunter against the wishes of his family. His
father was a lawyer and did his best to get Lazzaro interested
in long sheets of legal foolscap — but the youngster sneaked
away and skipped flat, stones over the surface of the water, and
wondered why the stones skipped and didn’t sink.
In the evenings he was made to sit down before dull lessons,
but when his father’s back was turned he looked out of the
25
26
SPALLANZANI
window at the stars that gleamed in the velvet black Italian
sky, and next morning lectured about them to his playmates
until they called him “The Astrologer.”
On holidays he pushed his burly body through the woods
near Scandiano, and came wide-eyed upon foaming natural
fountains. These made him stop his romping, and caused him
to go home sunk in unboyish thought. What caused these
fountains? His folks and the priest had told him they had
sprung in olden times from the tears of sad, deserted, beautiful
girls who were lost in the woods. . . .
Lazzaro was a dutiful son — and a politician of a son — so he
didn’t argue with his father or the priest. But to himself he
said “bunk” to their explanation, and made up his mind to find
out, some day, the real why and wherefore of fountains.
Young Spallanzani was just as determined as Leeuwenhoek
had been to find out the hidden things of nature, but he set
about getting to be a scientist in an entirely different way. He
pondered: “My father insists that I study law, does he?” He
kept up the pretense of being interested in legal documents —
but in every spare moment he boned away at mathematics
and Greek and French and Logic — and during his vacations
watched skipping stones and fountains, and dreamed about
understanding the violent fireworks of volcanoes. Then craft-
ily he went to the noted scientist, Vallisnieri, and told this
great man what he knew. “But you were born for a scientist,”
said Vallisnieri, “you waste time foolishly, studying lawbooks.”
“Ah, master, but my father insists.”
Indignantly Vallisnieri went to Spallanzani senior and
scolded him for throwing away Lazzaro’s talents on the merely
useful study of law. “Your boy,” he said, “is going to be a
searcher, he will honor Scandiano, and make it famous — he is
like Galileo!”
And the shrewd young Spallanzani went to the University at
Reggio, with his father’s blessing, to take up the career of
scientist.
At this time it was much more respectable and safe to be a
MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS!
27
scientist than it had been when Leeuwenhoek began his first
grinding of lenses. The Grand Inquisition was beginning to
pull in its horns. It preferred jerking out the tongues of ob-
scure alleged criminals and burning the bodies of unknown
heretics, to persecuting Servetuses and Galileos. The Invisible
College no longer met in cellars or darkened rooms, and learned
societies all over were now given the generous support of
parliaments and kings. It was not only beginning to be per-
mitted to question superstitions, it was becoming fashionable
to do it. The thrill and dignity of real research into nature
began to elbow its way into secluded studies of philosophers.
Voltaire retired for years into the wilds of rural France to
master the great discoveries of Newton, and then to popularize
them in his country. Science even penetrated into brilliant
and witty and immoral drawing-rooms, and society leaders like
Madame de Pompadour bent their heads over the forbidden
Encyclopedia — to try to understand the art and science of the
making of rouge and silk stockings.
Along with this excited interest in everything from the me-
chanics of the stars to the caperings of little animals, the
people of Spallanzani’s glittering century began to show an
open contempt for religion and dogmas, even the most sacred
ones. A hundred years before men had risked their skins to
laugh at the preposterous and impossible animals that Aris-
totle had gravely put into his books on biology. But now, they
could openly snicker at the mention of his name and whisper:
“Because he’s Aristotle it implies that he must be believed
e’en though he lies.” Still there was plenty of ignorance in
the world, and much pseudo-science — even in the Royal So-
cieties and Academies. And Spallanzani, freed from the horror
of an endless future of legal wranglings, threw himself with
vigor into getting all kinds of knowledge, into testing all kinds
of theories, into disrespecting all kinds of authorities no matter
how famous, into association with every kind of person, from
fat bishops, officials, and professors to outlandish actors and
minstrels.
28 SPALLANZANI
He was the very opposite of Leeuwenhoek, who so patiently
had ground lenses, and looked at everything for twenty years
before the learned world knew anything about him. At twenty-
five Spallanzani made translations of the ancient poets, and
criticized the standard and much admired Italian translation
of Homer. He brilliantly studied mathematics with his cousin,
Laura Bassi, the famous woman professor of Reggio. He now
skipped stones over the water in earnest, and wrote a scientific
paper on the mechanics of skipping stones. He became a
priest of the Catholic Church, and helped support himself by
saying masses.
Despising secretly all authority, he got himself snugly into
the good graces of powerful authorities, so that he might work
undisturbed. Ordained a priest, supposed to be a blind fol-
lower of the faith, he fell savagely to questioning everything,
to taking nothing for granted — excepting the existence of God,
of some sort of supreme being. At least if he questioned this
he kept it — rogue that he was — strictly to himself. Before he
was thirty years old he had been made professor at the Univer-
sity of Reggio, talking before enthusiastic classes that listened
to him with saucer-eyes. Here he started his first work on
the little animals, those weird new little beings that Leeuwen-
hoek had discovered. He began his experiments on them as
they were threatening to return to that misty unknown from
which the Dutchman had dredged them up.
The little animals had got themselves involved in a strange
question, in a furious fight, and had it not been for that, they
might have remained curiosities for centuries, or even have
been completely forgotten. This argument, over which dear
friends grew to hate each other and about which professors
tried to crack the skulls of priests, was briefly this: Can living
things arise spontaneously, or does every living thing have to
have parents? Did God create every plant and animal in the
first six days, and then settle down to be Managing Director
of the universe, or does He even now amuse Himself by allow-
ing new animals to spring up in humorous ways?
MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS! 39
In Spallanzani’s time the popular side was the party that as-
serted that life could arise spontaneously. The great majority
of sensible people believed that many animals did not have to
have parents — that they might be the unhappy illegitimate
children of a disgusting variety of dirty messes. Here, for
example, was a supposedly sure recipe for getting yourself a
good swarm of bees. Take a young bullock, kill him with a
knock on the head, bury him under the ground in a standing
position with his horns sticking out. Leave him there for a
month, then saw off his horns — and out will fly y'mr swarm of
bees.
n
Even the scientists were on this side of the question. The
English naturalist Ross announced learnedly that: “To ques-
tion that beetles and wasps were generated in cow dung is to
question reason, sense, and experience.” Even such compli-
cated animals as mice didn’t have to have mothers or fathers
— if anybody doubted this, let him go to Egypt, and there
he would find the fields literally swarming with mice, begot
of the mud of the River Nile — to the great calamity of the in-
habitants!
Spallanzani heard all of these stories which so many im-
portant people were sure were facts, he read many more of
them that were still more strange, he watched students get into
brawls in excited attempts to prove that mice and bees didn’t
have to have fathers or mothers. He heard all of these things
— and didn’t believe them. He was prejudiced. Great ad-
vances in science so often start from prejudice, on ideas got
not from science but straight out of a scientist’s head, on no-
tions that are only the opposite of the prevailing superstitious
nonsense of the day. Spallanzani had violent notions about
whether life could rise spontaneously; for him it was on the
face of things absurd to think that animals — even the wee
beasts of Leeuwenhoek— could arise in a haphazard way from
SPALLANZANI
30
any old thing or out of any dirty mess. There must be law
and order to their birth, there must be a rime and reason!
But how to prove it?
Then one night, in his solitude, he came across a little book,
a simple and innocent little book, and this book told him of
an entirely new way to tackle the question of how life arises.
The fellow who wrote the book didn’t argue with words — he
just made experiments — and God! thought Spallanzani, how
clear are the facts he demonstrates. He stopped being sleepy
and for got the dawn was coming, and read on. . . .
The book told him of the superstition about the generation
of maggots and flies, it told of how even the most intelligent
men believed that maggots and flies could arise out of putrid
meat. Then — and Spallanzani’s eyes nearly popped out with
wonder, with excitement, as he read of a little experiment that
blew up this nonsense, once and for always.
“A great man, this fellow Redi, who wrote this book,”
thought Spallanzani, as he took off his coat and bent his thick
neck toward the light of the candle. “See how easy he settles
it! He takes two jars and puts some meat in each one. He
leaves one jar open and then puts a light veil over the other
one. He watches — and sees flies go down into the meat in the
open pot — and in a little while there are maggots there, and
then new flies. He looks at the jar that has the veil over it —
and there are no maggots or flies in that one at all. How
easy! It is just a matter of the veil keeping the mother flies
from getting at the meat. . . . But how clever, because for a
thousand years people have been getting out of breath arguing
about the question — and not one of them thought of doing this
simple experiment that settles it in a moment.”
Next morning it was one jump from the inspiring book to
tackling this same question, not with flies, but with the micro*
scopic animals. For all the professors were saying just then
that though maybe flies had to come from eggs, little sub-visi-
ble animals certainly could rise by themselves.
Spallanzani began fumblingly to learn how to grow wee
MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS! 31
beasts, and how to use a microscope. He cut his hands and
broke large expensive flasks. He forgot to clean his lenses
and sometimes saw his little animals dimly through his fogged
glasses — just as you can faintly make out minnows in the water
riled up by your net. He raved at his blunders; he was not
the dogged worker that Leeuwenhoek had been — but. despite
his impetuousness he was persistent — he must prove that these
yams about the animalcules were yarns, nothing more. But
wait! “If I set out to prove something I am no real scientist
— I have to learn to follow where the facts lead me — I have to
learn to whip my prejudices. . . .” And he kept on learning
to study little animals, and to observe with a patient, if not
an unprejudiced eye, and gradually he taught the vanity of his
ideas to bow to the hard clearness of his facts.
At this time another priest, named Needham, a devout Cath-
olic who liked to think he could do experiments, was becoming
notorious in England and Ireland, claiming that little micro-
scopic animals were generated marvelously in mutton gravy.
Needham sent his experiments to the Royal Society, and the
learned Fellows deigned to be impressed.
He told them how he had taken a quantity of mutton gravy
hot from the fire, and put the gravy in a bottle, and plugged
the bottle up tight with a cork, so that no little animals or their
eggs could possibly get into the gravy from the air. Next he
even went so far as to heat the bottle and its mutton gravy in
hot ashes. “Surely,” said the good Needham, “this will kill
any little animals or their eggs, that might remain in the flask.”
He put this gravy flask away for a few days, then pulled the
cork — and marvel of marvels — when he examined the stuff
inside with his lens, he found it swarming with animalcules.
“A momentous discovery, this,” cried Needham to the Royal
Society, “these little animals can only have come from the
juice of the gravy. Here is a real experiment showing that life
can come spontaneously from dead stuff!” He told them
mutton-gravy wasn’t necessary — a soup made from seeds or
almonds would do the same trick.
32
SPALLANZANI
The Royal Society and the whole educated world were ex-
cited by Needham’s discovery. Here was no Old Wives’ tale.
Here was hard experimental fact; and the heads of the Society
got together and thought about making Needham a Fellow of
their remote aristocracy of learning. But away in Italy, Spal-
lanzani was reading the news of Needham’s startling creation
of little animals from mutton gravy. While he read he knit
his brows, and narrowed his dark eyes. At last he snorted:
“Animalcules do not arise by themselves from mutton gravy,
or almond seeds, or anything else! This fine experiment is
a fraud — maybe Needham doesn’t know it is — but there’s a
nigger in the wood pile somewhere. I’m going to find it. . . .”
The devil of prejudice was talking again. Now Spallanzani
began to sharpen his razors for his fellow priest — the Italian
was a nasty fellow who liked to slaughter ideas of any kind
that were contrary to his — he began to whet his knives, I say,
for Needham. Then one night, alone in his laboratory, away
from the brilliant clamor of his lectures and remote from the
gay salons where ladies adored his knowledge, he felt sure he
had found the loophole in Needham’s experiment. He chewed
his quill, he ran his hands through his shaggy hair, “Why have
those little animals appeared in that hot gravy, and in those
soups made from seeds?” Undoubtedly because Needham
didn’t heat the bottles long enough, and surely because he
didn’t plug them tight enough!
Here the searcher in him came forward — he didn’t go to his
desk to write Needham about it — instead he went to his dusty
glass-strewn laboratory, and grabbed some flasks and seeds,
and dusted off his microscope. He started out to test, even
to defeat, if necessary, his own explanations. Needham didn’t
heat his soups long enough — maybe there are little animals,
or their eggs, which can stand a tremendous heat, who knows?
So Spallanzani took some large glass flasks, round bellied with
tapering necks. He scrubbed and washed and dried them till
they stood in gleaming rows on his table. Then he put seeds
MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS! 33
of various kinds into some, and peas and almonds into others,
and following that poured pure water into all of them. “Now I
won’t only heat these soups for a short time,” he cried, “but
I’ll boil them for an hour!” He got his fires ready — then he
grunted: “But how shall I close up my flasks? Corks might
not be tight enough, they might let these infinitely wee things
through.” He pondered. “I’ve got it, I’ll melt the necks of
my bottles shut in a flame. I’ll close them with glass — nothing,
no matter how small, can sneak through glass!”
So he took his shining flasks one by one, and rolled their
necks gently in a hot flame till each one was fused completely
shut. He dropped some of them when they got too hot — he
sizzled the skin of his fingers, he swore, and got new flasks to
take the smashed ones’ places. Then when his flasks were all
sealed and ready, “Now for some real heat,” he muttered, and
for tedious hours he tended his bottles, as they bumped and
danced in caldrons of boiling water. One set he boiled for a
few minutes only. Another he kept in boiling water for a full
hour.
At last, his eyes near stuck shut with tiredness, he lifted the
flasks of stew steaming from their kettles, and put them care-
fully away — to wait for nervous anxious days to see whether
any little animals would grow in them. And he did another
thing, a simple one which I almost forgot to tell you about, he
made another duplicate set of stews in flasks plugged up with
corks, not sealed, and after boiling these for an hour put them
away beside the others.
Then he went off for days to do the thousand things that
were not enough to use up his buzzing energy. He wrote letters
to the famous naturalist Bonnet, in Switzerland, telling him his
experiments; he played football; he went hunting and fishing.
He lectured about science, and told his students not of dry
technicalities only, but of a hundred things — from the mar-
velous wee beasts that Leeuwenhoek had found in his mouth
to the strange eunuchs and the veiled multitudinous wives of
SPALLANZANI
34
Turkish harems. At last be vanished and students and pro*
fessors — and ladies — asked: “Where is the Abbe Spallanzani?”
He had gone back to his rows of flasks of seed soup.
m
He went to the row of sealed flasks first, and one by one he
cracked open their necks, and fished down with a slender
hollow tube to get some of the soup inside them, in order to
see whether any little animals at all had grown in these bottles
that he had heated so long, and closed so perfectly against the
microscopic creatures that might be floating in the dust of the
outside air. He was not the lively sparkling Spallanzani now.
He was slow, he was calm. Like some automaton, some
slightly animated wooden man he put one drop of seed-soup
after another before his lens.
He first looked at drop after drop of the soup from the
sealed flasks which had been boiled for an hour, and his long
looking was rewarded by — nothing. Eagerly he turned to the
bottles that had been boiled for only a few minutes, and
cracked their seals as before, and put drops of the soup inside
them before his lens.
“What’s this?” he cried. Here and there in the gray field
of his lens he made out an animalcule playing and sporting
about — these weren’t large microbes, like some he had seen —
but they were living little animals just the same.
“Why, they look like little fishes, tiny as ants,” he muttered
— and then something dawned on him “These flasks
were sealed — nothing could get into them from the outside,
yet here are little beings that have stood a heat of boiling water
for several minutes!”
He went with nervous hands to the long row of flasks he
had only stoppered with corks — as his enemy Needham had
done — and he pulled out the corks, one by one, and fished in
the bottles once more with his tubes. He growled excitedly,
he got up from his chair, he seized a battered notebook and
MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS! 33
feverishly wrote down obscure remarks in a kind of scrawled
shorthand. But these words meant that every one of the
flasks which had been only corked, not sealed, was alive with
little animals! Even the corked flasks which had been boiled
for an hour, “were like lakes in which swim fishes of all sizes,
from whales to minnows.”
“That means the little animals get into Needham’s flasks
from the air!” he shouted. “And besides I have discovered a
great new fact: living things exist that can stand boiling water
and still live — you have to heat them to boiling almost an hour
to kill them!”
It was a great day for Spallanzani, and though he did not
know it, a great day for the world. Spallanzani had proved
that Needham’s theory of little animals arising spontaneously
was wrong — just as the old master Redi had proved the idea
was wrong that flies can be bred in putrid meat. But he had
done more than that, for he had rescued the baby science of
microbe hunting from a fantastic myth, a Mother Goose yarn
that would have made all scientists of other kinds hold their
noses at the very mention of microbe hunting as a sound branch
of knowledge.
Excited, Spallanzani called his brother Nicolo, and his sister,
and told them his pretty experiment. And then, bright-eyed,
he told his students that life only comes from life; every liv-
ing thing has to have a parent — even these wretched little ani-
mals! Seal your soup flasks in a flame, and nothing can get
into them from outside. Heat them long enough, and every-
thing, even those tough beasts that can stand boiling, will be
killed. Do that, and you’ll never find any living animals aris-
ing in any kind of soup — you could keep it till doomsday.
Then he threw his work at Needham’s head in a brilliant sar-
castic paper, and the world of science was thrown into an up-
roar. Could Needham really be wrong? asked thoughtful
men, gathered in groups under the high lamps and candles of
the scientific societies of London and Copenhagen, of Paris and
Berlin.
36
SPALLANZANI
The argument between Spallanzani and Needham didn’t stay
in the academies among the highbrows. It leaked out through
heavy doors onto the streets and crept into stylish drawing-
rooms. The world would have liked to believe Needham, for
the people of the eighteenth century were cynical and gay;
everywhere men were laughing at religion and denying any
supreme power in nature, and they delighted in the notion that
life could arise haphazardly. But Spallanzani’s experiments
were so clear and so hard to answer, even with the cleverest
words. . . .
Meanwhile the good Needham had not been resting on his
oars exactly; he was an expert at publicity, and to help his
cause along he went to Paris and lectured about his mutton
gravy, and in Paris he fell in with the famous Count Buffon.
This count was rich; he was handsome; he loved to write
about science; he believed he could make up hard facts in his
head; he was rather too well dressed to do experiments. Be-
sides he really knew some mathematics, and had translated
Newton into French. When you consider that he could juggle
most complicated figures, that he was a rich nobleman as well,
you will agree that he certainly ought to know — without ex-
perimenting — whether little animals could come to life with-
out fathers or mothers! So argued the godless wits of Paris.
Needham and Buffon got on famously. Buffon wore purple
clothes and lace cuffs that he didn’t like to muss up on dirty
laboratory tables, with their dust and cluttered glassware and
pools of soup spilled from accidentally broken flasks. So he
did the thinking and writing, while Needham messed with the
experiments. These two men then set about to invent a great
theory of how life arises, a fine philosophy that every one
could understand, that would suit devout Christians as well as
witty atheists. The theory ignored Spallanzani’s cold facts,
but what would you have? It came from the brain of the
great Buffon, and that was enough to upset any fact, no matter
how hard, no matter how exactly recorded.
“What is it that causes these little animals to arise in mutton
MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS!
37
gravy, even after it has been heated, my Lord?” you can hear
Needham asking of the noble count. Count Buffon’s brain
whirled in a magnificent storm of the imagination, then he
answered: “You have made a great, a most momentous dis-
covery, Father Needham. You have put your finger on the
very source of life. In your mutton gravy you have uncovered
the very force — it must be a force, everything is force — which
creates life!”
“Let us then call it the Vegetative Force, my Lord,” replied
Father Needham.
“An apt name,” said Buffon, and he retired to his perfumed
study and put on his best suit and wrote — not from dry
laboratory notes or the exact records of lenses or flasks but
from his brain — he wrote, I say, about the marvels of this
Vegetative Force that could make little animals out of mutton
gravy and heated seed soups. In a little while Vegetative
Force was on everybody’s tongue. It accounted for everything.
The wits made it take the place of God, and the churchmen
said it was God’s most powerful weapon. It was popular like
a street song or an off color story — or like present day talk
about relativity.
Worst of all, the Royal Society tumbled over itself to get
ahead of the men in the street, and elected Needham a Fellow,
and the Academy of Sciences of Paris made him an Associate.
Meanwhile in Italy Spallanzani began to walk up and down his
laboratory and sputter and rage. Here was a danger to
science, here was ignoring of cold facts, without which science
is nothing. Spallanzani was a priest of God, and God was per-
haps reasonably sacred to him, he didn’t argue with any one
about that — but here was a pair of fellows who ignored his
pretty experiments, his clear beautiful facts!
But what could Spallanzani do? Needham and Buffon had
deluged the scientific world with words — they had not an-
swered his facts, they had not shown where Spallanzani’s ex-
periment of the sealed flasks was wrong. The Italian was a
fighter, but he liked to fight with facts and experiments, and
SPALLANZANI
38
here he was laying about him in this fog of big words, and
hitting nothing. Spallanzani stormed and laughed and was
sarcastic and bitter about this marvelous hoax, this mysterious
Vegetative Force. It was the Force, prattled Needham, that
had made Eve grow out of Adam’s rib. It was the Force, once
more, that gave rise to the remarkable worm-tree of China,
which is a worm in winter, and then marvelous to say is turned
by the Vegetative Force into a tree in summer! And much
more of such preposterous stuff, until Spallanzani saw the
whole science of living things in danger of being upset, by this
alleged Vegetative Force with which, next thing people knew,
Needham would be turning cows into men and fleas into ele-
phants.
Then suddenly Spallanzani had his chance, for Needham
made an objection to one of his experiments. “Your experi-
ment does not hold water,” he wrote to the Italian, “because
you have heated your flasks for an hour, and that fierce heat
weakens and so damages the Vegetative Force that it can no
longer make little animals.”
This was just what the energetic Spallanzani was waiting
for, and he forgot religion and large classes of eager students
and the pretty ladies that loved to be shown through his
museum. He rolled up his wide sleeves and plunged into
work, not at a writing desk but before his laboratory bench,
not with a pen, but with his flasks and seeds and microscopes.
iv
“So Needham says heat damages the Force in the seeds,
does he? Has he tried it? How can he see or feel or weigh
or measure this Vegetative Force? He says it is in the seeds,
well, well heat the seeds and see! ”
Spallanzani got out his flasks once more and cleaned them.
He brewed mixtures of different kinds of seeds, of peas and
beans and vetches with pure water, until his work room almost
ran over with flasks — they perched on high shelves, they sat
MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS! 39
on tables and chairs, they cluttered the floor so it was hard to
walk around.
“Now, we’ll boil a whole series of these flasks different
lengths of time, and see which one generates the most little
animals,” he said, and then doused one set of his soups in boil-
ing water for a few minutes, another for a half hour, another
for an hour, and still another for two hours. Instead of seal-
ing them in the flame he plugged them all up with corks —
Needham said that was enough — and then he put them care-
fully away to see what would happen. He waited. He went
off fishing and forgot to pull up his rod when a fish bit, he
collected minerals for his museum, and forgot to take them
home with him. He plotted for higher pay, he said masses, and
studied the copulation of frogs and toads — and then disap-
peared once more to his dim work room with its regiments of
bottles and weird machines. He waited.
If Needham were right, the flasks boiled for minutes should
be alive with little animals, but the ones boiled for an hour
or two hours should be deserted. He pulled out the corks one
by one, and looked at the drops of soup through his lens and
at last laughed with delight — the bottles that had been boiled
for two hours actually had more little animals sporting about
in them than the ones he had heated for a few minutes.
“Vegetative Force, what nonsense! so long as you only plug
up your flasks with corks the little animals will get in from
the air. You can heat your soups till you’re black in the face
— the microbes will get in just the same and grow, after the
broth has cooled.”
Spallanzani was triumphant, but then he did the curious
thing that only born scientists ever do— he tried to beat his
own idea, his darling theory — by experiments he honestly and
shrewdly planned to defeat himself. That is science! That
is the strange self-forgetting spirit of a few rare men, those
curious men to whom truth is more dear than their own cher-
ished whims and wishes. Spallanzani walked up and down
his narrow work room, hands behind him, meditating — “Wait,
SPALLANZANI
40
maybe after all Needham has guessed right, maybe there is
some mysterious force in these seeds that strong heat might
destroy.”
Then he cleaned his flasks again, and took some seeds, but
instead of merely boiling them in water, he put them in a
coffee-roaster and baked them till they were soot-colored
cinders. Next he poured pure distilled water over them, growl-
ing: “Now if there was a Vegetative Force in those seeds, I
have surely roasted it to death.”
Days later when he came back to his flasks, with their soups
brewed from the burned seeds, he smiled a sarcastic smile — a
smile that meant squirmings for Buffon and Needham — for
as one bottle after another yielded its drops of soup to his lens,
every drop from every bottle was alive with wee animals that
swam up and down in the liquid and went to and fro, living
their funny limited little lives as gayly as any animals in the
best soup made from unburned seeds. He had tried to defeat
his own theory, and so trying had licked the pious Needham
and the precious Buffon. They had said that heat would kill
their Force so that no little animals could arise — and here were
seeds charred to carbon, furnishing excellent food for the small
creatures — this so-called Force was a myth! Spallanzani pro-
claimed this to all of Europe, which now began to listen to
him.
Then he relaxed from his hard pryings into the loves and
battles and deaths of little animals by making deep studies of
the digestion of food in the human stomach — and to do this
he experimented cruelly on himself. This was not enough, so
he had to launch into weird investigations in the hot dark at-
tic of his house, on the strange problem of how bats can keep
from bumping into things although they cannot see. In the
midst of this he found time to help educate his little nephews
and to take care of his brother and sister, obscure beings who
did not share his genius — but they were of his blood, and he
loved them.
But he soon came back to the mysterious question of how
MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS! 41
life arises, that question which his religion taught him to ig-
nore, to accept with blind faith as a miracle of the Creator. He
didn’t work with little animals only; instead he turned his
curiosity onto larger ones, and began vast researches on the
mating of toads. “What is the cause of the violent and per-
sistent way in which the male toad holds the female?” he
asked himself, and his wonder at this strange event set his
ingenious brain to devising experiments of an unheard-of bar-
barity.
He didn’t do them out of any fiendish whim to hurt the
father toad — but this man must know every fact that could
possibly be known about how new toads arose. What will
make the toad let go this grip? And that mad priest cut off
a male toad’s hind legs in the midst of its copulation — but the
dying animal did not relax that blind grasp to which nature
drove it. Spallanzani mused over his bizarre experiment.
“This persistence of the toad,” he said, “is due less to his
obtuseness of feeling than to the vehemence of his passion.”
In his sniffing search for knowledge which let him stop at
nothing, he was led by an instinct that drove him into heart-
less experiments on animals — but it made him do equally cruel
and fantastic tests on himself. He studied the digestion of
food in the stomach, he gulped down hollowed-out blocks of
wood with meat inside them, then tickled his throat and made
himself vomit them up again so that he could find out what
had happened to the meat inside the blocks. He kept insanely
at this self-torture, until, as he admitted at last, a horrid
nausea made him stop the experiments.
Spallanzani held immense correspondences with half the
doubters and searchers of Europe. By mail he was a great
friend of that imp, Voltaire. He complained that there were
few men of talent in Italy, the air was too humid and foggy —
he became a leader of that impudent band of scientists and
philosophers who unknowingly prepared the bloodiest of rev-
olutions while they tried so honestly to find truth and estab-
lish happiness and justice in the world. These men believed
42
SPALLANZANI
that Spallanzani had spiked once for all that nonsense about
animals — even the tiniest ones — arising spontaneously. Led
by Voltaire they cracked vast jokes about the Vegetative Force
and its parents, the pompous Buffon and his laboratory boy,
Father Needham.
“But there is a Vegetative Force,” cried Needham, “a mys-
terious something — I’ll admit you can’t see it or weigh it — that
can make life arise out of gravy or soup or out of nothing at
all, perhaps. Maybe it can stand all of that roasting that
Spallanzani applies to it, but what it needs particularly is a
very elastic air to help it. And when Spallanzani boils his
flasks for an hour, he hurts the elasticity of the air inside the
flasks!”
Spallanzani was up in arms in a moment, and bawled for
Needham’s experiments. “Has he heated air to see if it got less
elastic?” The Italian waited for experiments — and got only
words. “Then I’ll have to test it out myself,” he said, and
once again he put seeds in rows of flasks and sealed off their
necks in a flame — and boiled them for an hour. Then one
morning he went to his laboratory, and cracked off the neck
of one of his bottles. . . .
He cocked his ear — he heard a little wh-i-s-s-s-s-t. “What’s
this,” he muttered, and grabbed another bottle and cracked
off its neck, holding his ear close by. Wh-i-s-s-st! There it
was again. “That means the air is coming out of my bottle,
or going into it,” he cried, and he lighted a candle and in-
geniously held it near the neck of a third flask as he cracked
the seal.
The flame sucked inward toward the opening.
“The air’s going in — that means the air in the bottle is less
elastic than the air outside, that means maybe Needham is
right! ”
For a moment Spallanzani had a queer feeling at the pit of
his stomach, his forehead was wet with nervous sweat, his
world tottered around him. . . . Could that fool Needham
have made a lucky stab, a clever guess about what heat did to
MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS!
43
air in sealed up Basks? Could this windbag knock out all of
this careful finding of facts, which had taken so many years
of hard work? For days Spallanzani went about troubled,
and snapped at students to whom before he had been gentle,
and tried to comfort himself by reciting Dante and Homer —
and this only made him more grumpy. A relentless torturing
imp pricked at him and this imp said: “Find out why the air
rushes into your flasks when you break the seals — it may not
have anything to do with elasticity.” The imp woke him up
in the night, it made him get tangled up in his masses. . . .
Then like a flash of lightning the explanation came to him
and he hurried to his work bench — it was covered with broken
flasks and abandoned bottles and its muddled disarray told
his discouragement — he reached into a cupboard and took out
one of his flasks. He was on the track, he would show Need-
ham was wrong, and even before he had proved it he stretched
himself with a heave of relief — so sure was he that the reason
for the little whistling of air had come to him. He looked at
the flasks, then smiled and said, “All the flasks that I have been
using have fairly wide necks. When I seal them in the flame
it takes a lot of heat to melt the glass till the neck is shut off —
all that heat drives most of the air out of the bottle before it’s
sealed up. No wonder the air rushes in when I crack the
seal!”
He saw that Needham’s idea that boiling water outside the
flask damaged the elasticity of the air inside was nonsense,
nothing less. But how to prove this, how to seal up the flasks
without driving out the air? His devilish ingenuity came to
help him, and he took another flask, put seeds into it, and filled
it partly with pure water. Then he rolled the neck of the bot-
tle around in a hot flame until it melted down to a tiny nar-
row opening — very, very narrow, but still open to the air out-
side. Next he let the flask cool — now the air inside must be
the same as the air outside — then he applied a tiny flame to
the now almost needle-fine opening. In a jiffy the flask was
sealed — without expelling any of the air from the inside. Cob
SPALLANZANI
44
tent, he put the bottle in boiling water and watched it bump
and dance in the kettle for an hour and while he watched he
recited verses and hummed gay tunes. He put the flask away
for days, then one morning, sure of his result, he came to his
laboratory to open it. He lighted a candle; he held it close to
the flask neck; carefully he broke the seal — wh-i-s-s-s-tl But
the flame blew away from the flask this time — the elasticity
of the air inside the flask was greater than that outside!
All of the long boiling had not damaged the air at all — it
was even more elastic than before — and elasticity was what
Needham said was necessary for his wonderful Vegetative
Force. The air in the flask was super-elastic, but fishing drop
after drop of the soup inside, Spallanzani couldn’t find a single
little animal. Again and again, with the obstinacy of a Leeu-
wenhoek, he repeated the same experiment. He broke flasks
and spilled boiling water down his shirt-front, he seared his
hands, he made vast tests that had to be done over — but al-
ways he confirmed his first result.
v
Triumphant he shouted his last experiment to Europe, and
Needham and Buffon heard it, and had to sit sullenly amid
the ruins of their silly theory, there was nothing to say —
Spallanzani had spiked their guns with a simple fact. Then
the Italian sat down to do a little writing himself. A virtuoso
in the laboratory, he was a fiend with his quill, when once he
was sure his facts had destroyed Needham’s pleasant myth
about life arising spontaneously. Spallanzani was sure now
that even the littlest beasts had to come — always — from beasts
that had lived before. He was certain too, that a wee microbe
always remained a microbe of the same kind that its parents
had been, just as a zebra doesn’t turn into a giraffe, or have
musk-oxen for children, but always stays a zebra — and has
zebra babies.
“In short,” shouted Spallanzani, “Needham is wrong, and
MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS! 45
I have proved that there is a law and order in the science of
animals, just as there is in the working of the stars.”
Then he told the muddle that Needham would have turned
the science of little animals into — if good facts hadn’t been
found to beat him. What animals this weird Vegetative Force
could make — what tricks it could do — if it had only existed!
“It could make,” said Spallanzani, “a microscopic animal
found sometimes in infusions, which like a new Protean, cease-
lessly changes its form, appearing now as a body thin as a
thread, now in an oval or spherical form, sometimes coiled like
a serpent, adorned with rays and armed with horns. This re-
markable animal furnishes Needham an example, to explain
easily how the Vegetative Force produces now a frog and again
a dog, sometimes a midge and at others an elephant, to-day a
spider and to-morrow a whale, this minute a cow and the next
a man.”
So ended Needham — and his Vegetative Force. It became
comfortable to live once more; you felt sure there was no
mysterious sinister Force sneaking around waiting to change
you into a hippopotamus.
Spallanzani’s name glittered in all the universities of Eu-
rope; the societies considered him the first scientist of the day;
Frederick the Great wrote long letters to him and with his own
hand made him a member of the Berlin Academy; and Fred-
erick’s bitter enemy, Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria, put
it over the great king by offering Spallanzani the job of pro-
fessor in her ancient and run-down University of Pavia, in
Lombardy. A pompous commission came, a commission of
eminent Privy Councillors weighed down with letters and Im-
perial Seals and begged Spallanzani to put this defunct col-
lege on its feet. There were vast interminable arguments and
bargainings about salary — Spallanzani always knew how to
feather his nest — bargains that ended in his taking the job of
Professor of Natural History and Curator of the Natural His-
tory Cabinet of Pavia.
Spallanzani went to the Museum, the Natural History Cab-
SPALLANZANI
46
inet, and found that cupboard bare. He rolled up his sleeves,
he lectured about everything, he made huge public experiments
and he awed his students because his deft hands always made
these experiments turn out successfully. He sent here and
there for an astounding array of queer beasts and strange
plants and unknown birds — to fill up the empty Cabinet. He
climbed dangerous mountains himself and brought back min-
erals and precious ores; he caught hammer-head sharks and
snared gay-plumed fowl; he went on incredible collecting ex-
peditions for his museum — and to work off that tormenting
energy that made him so fantastically different from the popu-
lar picture of a calm scientist. He was a Roosevelt with all
of Teddy’s courage and appeal to the crowd, but with none of
Teddy’s gorgeous inaccuracy.
In the intervals of this hectic collecting and lecturing he
shut himself in his laboratory with his stews and his micro-
scopic animals, and made long experiments to show that these
beasts obey nature’s laws, just as men and horses and ele-
phants are forced to follow them. He put drops of stews
swarming with microbes on little pieces of glass and blew to-
bacco smoke at them and watched them eagerly with his lens.
He cried out his delight as he saw them rush about trying to
avoid the irritating smoke. He shot electric sparks at them
and wondered at the way the little animals “became giddy”
and spun about, and quickly died.
“The seeds or eggs of the little animals may be different
from chicken eggs or frog’s eggs or fish eggs — they may stand
the heat of boiling water in my sealed flasks — but otherwise
these little creatures are really no different from other ani-
mals! ” he cried. Then just after that he had to take back his
confident words. . . .
“Every beast on earth needs air to live, and I am going to
show just how animal these little animals are by putting them
in a vacuum — and watching them die,” said Spallanzani to him-
self, alone one day in his laboratory. He cleverly drew out
some very thin tubes of glass, like the ones Leeuwenhoek had
MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS! 47
used to study his little animals. He dipped the tube into a soup
that swarmed with his microbes; the fluid rushed up into the
hair-fine pipe. Then Spallanzani sealed of! one end of it, and
ingeniously tied the other end to a powerful vacuum pump,
and set the pump going, and stuck his lens against the thin
wall of the tube. He expected to see the wee animals stop
waving the “little arms which they were furnished to swim
with;” he expected them to get giddy and then stop mov-
ing. . . .
The pump chugged on — and nothing whatever happened to
the microbes. They went nonchalantly about their business
and did not seem to realize there was such a thing as life-main-
taining air! They lived for days, for weeks — and Spallanzani
did the experiment again and again, trying to find something
wrong with it. This was impossible — nothing can live without
air — how the devil do these beasts breathe? He wrote his
amazement in a letter to his friend Bonnet:
“The nature of some of these animalcules is astonishing!
They are able to exercise in a vacuum the functions they use
in free air. They make all of their courses, they go up and
down in the liquid, they even multiply for several days in this
vacuum. How wonderful this is! For we have always be-
lieved there is no living being that can live without the advan-
tages air offers it.”
Spallanzani was very proud of his imagination and his quick
brain and he was helped along in this conceit by the flattery
and admiration of students and intelligent ladies and learned
professors and conquering kings. But he was an experimenter
too — he was really an experimenter first, and he bent his head
humbly when a new fact defeated one of the brilliant
guesses of his brain.
Meanwhile this man who was so rigidly honest in his ex-
periments, who would never report anything but the truth of
what he found amid the smells and poisonous vapors and shin-
ing machines of his laboratory, this superbly honest scientist,
I say. was planning low tricks to increase his pay as Professoi
SPALLANZANI
48
at Pavia. Spallanzani, the football player, the climber of
mountains and explorer, this Spallanzani whined to the au-
thorities at Vienna about his feeble health — the fogs and
vapors of Pavia were like to make him die, he said. To keep
him the Emperor had to increase his pay and double his vaca-
tions. Spallanzani laughed and cynically called his lie a politi-
cal gesture! He always got everything he wanted. He got
truth by dazzling experiments and close observation and in-
sane patience; he obtained money and advancement by work —
and by cunning plots and falsehoods; he received protection
from religious persecution by becoming a priest!
Now, as he grew older, he began to hanker for wild re-
searches in regions remote from his little laboratory. He must
visit the site of ancient Troy whose story thrilled him so; he
must see the harems and slaves and eunuchs, which to him
were as much a part of natural history as his bats and toads
and little animals of the seed infusions. He pulled wires, and
at last the Emperor Joseph gave him a year’s leave of absence
and the money for a trip to Constantinople — for his failing
health, which had never been more superb.
So Spallanzani put his rows of flasks away and locked his
laboratory and said a dramatic and tearful good-by to his
students; on the journey down the Mediterranean he got
frightfully sea-sick, he was shipwrecked — but didn’t forget to
try to save the specimens he had collected on some islands.
The Sultan wined and dined him, the doctors of the seraglios
let him study the customs of the beauteous concubines . . .
and afterward, good eighteenth century European that he was,
Spallanzani told the Turks that he admired their hospitality
and their architecture, but detested their custom of slavery
and their hopeless fatalistic view of life. . . .
“We Westerners, through this new science of ours, are going
to conquer the seemingly unavoidable, the apparently eternal
torture and suffering of man,” you can imagine him telling his
polite but stick-in-the-mud Oriental friends. He believed in an
all powerful God, but while he believed, the spirit of the
MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS!
49
searcher, the fact finder, dashed out of his eye, burdened all
his thought and talk, forced him to make excuses for God by
calling him Nature and the Unknown, compelled him to show
that he had appointed himself first-assistant to God in the dis-
covery and even the conquering of this unknown Nature.
After many months he returned overland through the Balkan
Peninsula, escorted by companies of crack soldiers, entertained
by Bulgarian dukes and Wallachian Hospodars. At last he
came to Vienna, to pay his respects to his boss and patron, the
Emperor Joseph II — it was the dizziest moment, so far as
honors went, of his entire career. Drunk with success, he
thought, you may imagine, of how all of his dreams had come
true, and then
VI
While Spallanzani was on his triumphant voyage a dark
cloud gathered away to the south, at his university, the school
at Pavia that he had done so much to bring back to life. For
years the other professors had watched him take their students
away from them, they had watched — and ground their tusks
and sharpened their razors — and waited.
Spallanzani by tireless expeditions and through many fa-
tigues and dangers had made the once empty Natural History
Cabinet the talk of Europe. Besides he had a little private
collection of his own at his old home in Scandiano. One day,
Canon Volta, one of his jealous enemies, went to Scandiano and
by a trick got into Spallanzani’s private museum; he sniffed
around, then smiled an evil grin — here were some jars, and
there a bird and in another place a fish, and all of them were
labeled with the red tags of the University museum of Pavia!
Volta sneaked away hidden in the dark folds of his cloak, and
on the way home worked out his malignant plans to cook the
brilliant Spallanzani’s goose; and just before Spallanzani got
home from Vienna, Volta and Scarpa and Scopoli let hell loose
by publishing a tract and sending it to every great man and
50
SPALLANZANI
society in Europe, and this tract accused Spallanzani of the
nasty crime of stealing specimens from the University of
Pavia and hiding them in his own little museum at Scandiano.
His bright world came down around his ears; in a moment
he saw his gorgeous career in ruins; in hideous dreams he heard
the delighted cackles of men who praised him and envied him;
he pictured the triumph of men whom he had soundly licked
with his clear facts and experiments — he imagined even the re-
turn to life of that fool Vegetative Force. . . .
But in a few days he came back on his feet, the center of a
dreadful scandal, it is true, but on his feet with his back to the
wall ready to face his accusers. Gone now was the patient,
hunter of microbes and gone the urbane correspondent of Vol-
taire. He turned into a crafty politician, he demanded an in-
vestigating committee and got it, he founded Ananias Clubs,
he fought fire with fire.
He returned to Pavia and on his way there I wonder what
his thoughts were — did he see himself slinking into the town,
avoided by old admirers and a victim of malignant hissing
whispers? Possibly, but as he got near the gates of Pavia a
strange thing happened — for a mob of adoring students came
out to meet him, told him they would stick by him, escorted
him with yells of joy to his old lecture chair. The once self-
sufficient, proud man’s voice became husky — he blew his nose —
he could only stutteringly tell them what their devotion meant
to him.
Then the investigating committee had him and his accusers
appear before it, and knowing Spallanzani as you already do,
you may imagine the shambles that followed 1 He proved
to the judges that the alleged stolen birds were misera-
bly stuffed, draggle-feathered creatures which would have dis-
graced the cabinet of a country school — they had been
merely pitched out. He had traded the lost snakes and the
armadillo to other museums and Pavia had profited by the
trade; not only so, but Volta, his chief accuser, had himself
MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS! 51
stolen precious stones from the museum and given them to his
friends. . . .
The judges cleared him of all guilt — though it is to-day not
perfectly sure that he wasn’t a little guilty; Volta and his corn-
plotters were fired from the University, and all parties, includ-
ing Spallanzani, were ordered by the Emperor to stop their de-
plorable brawling and shut up — this thing was getting to be a
smell all over Europe — students were breaking up the class-
room furniture about it, and other universities were snickering
at such an unparalleled scandal. Spallanzani took a last crack
at his routed enemies; he called Volta a perfect bladder full of
wind and invented hideous and unprintably improper names
for Scarpa and Scopoli; then he returned peacefully to his mi-
crobe hunting.
Many times in his long years of looking at the animalcules
he had wondered how they multiplied. Often he had seen two
of the wee beasts stuck together, and he wrote to Bonnet:
“When you see two individuals of any animal kind united, you
naturally think they are engaged in reproducing themselves.”
But were they? He jotted his observations down in old note-
books and made crude pictures of them, but, impetuous as he
was in many things, when it came to experiments or drawing
conclusions — he was almost as cagy as old Leeuwenhoek had
been.
Bonnet told Spallanzani’s perplexity about the way little
animals multiplied to his friend, the clever but now unknown
de Saussure. And this fellow turned his sharp eye through his
clear lenses onto the breeding habits of animalcules. In a short
while he wrote a classic paper, telling the fact that when you
see two of the small beasts stuck together, they haven’t come
together to breed. On the contrary — marvelous to say — these
coupled beasts are nothing more nor less than an old animal-
cule which is dividing into two parts, into two new little ani-
mals! This, said de Saussure, was the only way the microbes
ever multiplied — the joys of marriage were unknown to them!
SPALLANZANI
52
Reading this paper, Spallanzani rushed to his microscope
hardly believing such a strange event could be so — but careful
looking showed that de Saussure was right. The Italian wrote
the Swiss a fine letter congratulating him; Spallanzani was a
fighter and something of a plotter; he was infernally ambi-
tious and often jealous of the fame of other men, but he lost
himself in his joy at the prettiness of de Saussure’s sharp ob-
servations. Spallanzani and these naturalists of Geneva were
bound by a mysterious cement — a realization that the work of
finding facts and fitting facts together to build the high cathe-
dral of science is greater than any single finder of facts or
mason of facts. They were the first haters of war — the first
citizens of the world, the first genuine internationalists.
Then Spallanzani was forced into one of the most devilishly
ingenious researches of his life. He was forced into this by his
friendship for his pals in Geneva and by his hatred of another
piece of scientific claptrap almost as bad as the famous Veg-
etative Force. An Englishman named Ellis wrote a paper
saying de Saussure’s observations about the little animals
splitting into two was all wrong. Ellis admitted that the little
beasts might occasionally break into two. “But that,” cried
Ellis, “doesn’t mean they are multiplying! It simply means,”
he said, “that one little animal, swimming swiftly along in the
water, bangs into another one amidships — and breaks him in
half! That’s all there is to de Saussure’s fine theory.
“What is more,” Ellis went on, “little animals are born from
each other just as larger beasts come from their mothers.
When I look carefully with my microscope, I can actually see
young ones inside the old ones, and looking still more closely
— you may not believe it — I can see grandchildren inside
these young ones.”
“Rot!” thought Spallanzani. All this stuff smelled very
fishy to him, but how to show it wasn’t true, and how to show
that animalcules multiplied by breaking in two?
He was first of all a hard scientist, and he knew that
It was one thing to say Ellis was feeble-minded, but quite an-
MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS! S3
other to prove that the little animals didn’t bump into each
other and so knock each other apart. In a moment the one way
to decide it came to him “All I have to do,” he medi-
tated, “is to get one little beast off by itself, away from every
other one where nothing whatever can bump into it — and then
just sit and watch through the microscope to see if it breaks
into two.” That was the simple and the only way to do it, no
doubt, but how to get one of these infernally tiny creatures
away from his swarms of companions? You can separate one
puppy from a litter, or even a little minnow from its myriads
of brothers and sisters. But you can’t reach in with your
hands and take one animalcule by the tail — curse it — it is a
million times too small for that.
Then this Spallanzani, this fellow who reveled in gaudy
celebrations and vast enthusiastic lecturings, this hero of the
crowd, this magnifico, crawled away from all his triumphs and
pleasures to do one of the cleverest and most marvelously in-
genious pieces of patient work in his hectic life. He did no
less a thing than to invent a sure method of getting one ani-
malcule — a few twenty-five thousandths of an inch long — a
living animalcule, off by itself.
He went to his laboratory and carefully put a drop of seed
soup swarming with animalcules on a clean piece of crystal
glass. Then with a clean hair-fine tube he put a drop of pure
distilled water — that had not a single little animal in it — on
the same glass, close to the drop that swarmed with microbes.
“Now I shall trap one,” he muttered, as he trained his lens
on the drop that held the little animals. He took a fine clean
needle, he stuck it carefully into the drop of microbe soup —
and then made a little canal with it across to the empty water
drop. Quickly he turned his lens onto the passageway be-
tween the two drops, and grunted satisfaction as he saw the
wriggling cavorting little creatures begin to drift through this
little canal. He grabbed for a little camel’s-hair brush
“There 1 there’s one of the wee ones — just one, in the water
drop!” Deftly he flicked the little brush across the small
54
SPALLANZANI
canal, wiping it out, so cutting off the chance of any other wee
beast getting into the water drop to join its lonely little
comrade,
“God I ” he cried. “I’ve done it — no one’s ever done this be-
fore — I’ve got one animalcule all by himself; now nothing can
bump him, now we’ll see if he’ll turn into two new ones!” His
lens hardly quivered as he sat with tense neck and hands and
arms, back bent, eye squinting through the glass at the drop
with its single inhabitant. “How tiny he is,” he thought — “he
is like a lone fish in the spacious abysses of the sea.”
Then a strange sight startled him, not less dramatic for its
unbelievable littleness. The beast — it was shaped like a small
rod — began to get thinner and thinner in the middle. At last
the two parts of it were held together by the thickness of a
spider web thread, and the two thick halves began to wriggle
desperately — and suddenly they jerked apart. There they
were, two perfectly formed, gently gliding little beasts, where
there had been one before. They were a little shorter but
otherwise they couldn’t be told from their parent. Then,
what was more marvelous to see, these two children of the
first one in a score of minutes split up again — and now there
were four where there had been one!
Spallanzani did this ingenious trick a dozen times and got
the same result and saw the same thing; and then he de-
scended on the unlucky Ellis like a ton of brick and flattened
into permanent obscurity Ellis and his fine yarn about the
children and the grandchildren inside the little animals.
Spallanzani was sniffish, he condescended, he advised, he told
Ellis to go back to school and learn his a b c’s of microbe
hunting. He hinted that Ellis wouldn’t have made his mistake
if he’d read the fine paper of de Saussure carefully, instead
of inventing preposterous theories that only cluttered up the
hard job of getting genuine new facts from a stingy Nature.
A scientist, a really original investigator of nature, is like
a writer or a painter or a musician. He is part artist, part cool
searcher. Spallanzani told himself stories, he conceived him-
MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS!
55
self the hero of a new epic exploration, he compared himself
— in his writings even — to Columbus and Vespucci. He told
of that mysterious world of microbes as a new universe, and
thought of himself as a daring explorer making first groping
expeditions along its boundaries only. He said nothing about
the possible deadliness of the little animals — he didn’t like to
engage, in print, in wild speculations — but his genius whis-
pered to him that the fantastic creatures of this new world
were of some sure but yet unknown importance to their big
brothers, the human species. . . .
vn
Early in the year 1799, as Napoleon started thoroughly
smashing an old world to pieces, and just as Beethoven was
knocking at the door of the nineteenth century with the first of
his mighty symphonies, war-cries of that defiant spirit of
which Spallanzani was one of the chief originators — in the year
1799, I say, the great microbe hunter was struck with
apoplexy. Three days later he was poking his energetic and
irrepressible head above the bedclothes, reciting Tasso and
Homer to the amusement and delight of those friends who had
come to watch him die. But though he refused to admit it,
this, as one of his biographers says, was his Canto di Cigno, his
swan song, for in a few days he was dead.
Great Egyptian kings kept their names alive for posterity
by having the court undertaker embalm them into expensive
and gorgeous mummies. The Greeks and Romans had their
likenesses wrought into dignified statues. Paintings exist of a
hundred other distinguished men. What is left for us to see
of the marvelous Spallanzani?
In Pavia there is a modest little bust of him and in the
museum near by, if you are interested, you may see — his
bladder. What better epitaph could there be for Spallanzani?
What relic could more perfectly suggest the whole of his pas-
sion to find truth, that passion which stopped at nothing, which
SPALLANZANI
5 6
despised conventions, which laughed at hardship, which ig-
nored bad taste and the feeble pretty fitness of things?
He knew his bladder was diseased. “Well, have it out
after I’m dead,” you can hear him whisper as he lay dying.
“Maybe you’ll find an astonishing new fact about diseased
bladders.” That was the spirit of Spallanzani. This was the
very soul of that cynical, snif&ngly curious, coldly reasoning
century of his — the century that discovered few practical
things — but the same century that built the high clean house
for Faraday and Pasteur, for Arrhenius and Emil Fischer and
Ernest Rutherford to work in.
CHAPTER III
PASTEUR
MICROBES ARE A MENACE!
I
In 1831, thirty-two years after the magnificent Spallanzani
died, microbe hunting had come to a standstill once more.
The sub-visible animals were despised and forgotten while
other sciences were making great leaps ahead; clumsy horri-
bly coughing locomotives were scaring the horses of Europe
and America; the telegraph was getting ready to be invented.
Marvelous microscopes were being devised, but no man had
come to squint through these machines — no man had come to
prove to the world that miserable little animals could do use-
ful work which no complicated steam engine could attempt;
there was no hint of the somber fact that these wretched mi-
crobes could kill their millions of human beings mysteriously
and silently, that they were much more efficient murderers
than the guillotine or the cannon of Waterloo.
On a day in October in 1831, a nine-year-old boy ran
frightened away from the edge of a crowd that blocked the
door of the blacksmith shop of a village in the mountains of
eastern France. Above the awed excited whispers of the peo-
ple at the door this boy had heard the crackling “s-s-s-s-z” of
a white hot iron on human flesh, and this terrifying sizzling
had been followed by a groan of pain. The victim was the
farmer Nicole. He had just been mangled by a mad wolf that
charged howling, jaws dripping poison foam, through the
streets of the village. The boy who ran away was Louis Pas-
57
PASTEUR
58
teur, son of a tanner of Arbois and great-grandson of a serf
of the Count of Udressier.
Days and weeks passed and eight victims of the mad wolf
died in the choking throat-parched agonies of hydrophobia,
Their screams rang in the ears of this timid — some called him
stupid — boy; and the iron that had seared the farmer’s
wound burned a deep scar in his memory.
“What makes a wolf or a dog mad, father — why do people
die when mad dogs bite them?” asked Louis. His father the
tanner was an old sergeant of the armies of Napoleon. He
had seen ten thousand men die from bullets, but he had no
notion of why people die from disease. “Perhaps a devil got
into the wolf, and if God wills you are to die, you will die,
there is no help for it,” you can hear the pious tanner answer.
That answer was as good as any answer from the wisest
scientist or the most expensive doctor in the world. In 1831
no one knew what caused people to die from mad dog bites —
the cause of all disease was completely unknown and mys-
terious.
I am not going to try to make believe that this terrible event
made the nine-year-old Louis Pasteur determine to find out
the cause and cure of hydrophobia some day — that would be
very romantic — but it wouldn’t be true. It is true though that
he was more scared by it, haunted by it for a longer time,
brooded over it more, that he smelled the burned flesh and
heard the screams a hundred times more vividly than an ordi-
nary boy would — in short, he was of the stuff of which artists
are made; and it was this stuff in him, as much as his science,
that helped him to drag microbes out of that obscurity into
which they had passed once more, after the gorgeous Spallan-
zani died. Indeed, for the first twenty years of his life he
showed no signs at all of becoming a great searcher. This
Louis Pasteur was only a plodding, careful boy whom nobody
noticed particularly. He spent his playtime painting pictures
of the river that ran b.y the tannery, and his sisters posed for
MICROBES ARE A MENACE! 59
him until their necks grew stiff and their backs ached griev-
ously; he painted curiously harsh unflattering pictures of his
mother — they didn’t make her look pretty, but they looked
like his mother. . . .
Meanwhile it seemed perfectly certain that the little ani-
mals were going to be put permanently on the shelf along with
the dodo and other forgotten beasts. The Swede Linnaeus,
most enthusiastic pigeonholer, who toiled at putting all living
things in a neat vast card catalogue, threw up his hands at
the very idea of studying the wee beasts. “They are too small,
too confused, no one will ever know anything exact about them,
we will simply put them in the class of Chaos 1” said Linnaeus.
They were only defended by the famous round-faced Germain
Ehrenberg who had immense quarrels — in moments when he
wasn’t crossing oceans or receiving medals — futile quarrels
about whether the little animals had stomachs, strange argu-
ments about whether they were really complete little animals
or only parts of larger animals; or whether perchance they
might be little vegetables instead of little animals.
Pasteur kept plugging at his books though, and it was while
he was still at the little college of Arbois that the first of his
masterful traits began to stick out — traits good and bad, that
made him one of the strangest mixtures of contradictions that
ever lived. He was the youngest boy at the college, but he
wanted to be a monitor; he had a fiery ambition to teach other
boys, particularly to run other boys. He became a monitor.
Before he was twenty he had become a kind of assistant
teacher in the college of Bezangon, and here he worked like
the devil and insisted that everybody else work as hard as he
worked himself; he preached in long inspirational letters to
his poor sisters — who, God bless them, were already trying their
best
“To will is a great thing, dear sisters,” he wrote, “for
Action and Work usually follow Will, and almost always Work
is accompanied by Success. These three things, Work, Will,
6 o
PASTEUR
Success, fill human existence. Will opens the door to success
both brilliant and happy; Work passes these doors, and at the
end of the journey Success comes to crown one’s efforts.”
When he was seventy his sermons had lost their capital
letters, but they were exactly the same kind of simple earnest
sermons.
His father sent him up to Paris to the Normal School and
there he resolved to do great things, but he was carried away
by a homesickness for the smell of the tannery yard and he
came back to Arbois abandoning his high ambition. ... In
another year he was back at the same school in Paris and this
time he stuck at it; and then one day he passed in a tear-
stained trance out of the lecture room of the chemist Dumas.
“What a science is chemistry,” he muttered, “and how marvel-
ous is the popularity and glory of Dumas.” He knew then
that he was going to be a great chemist too; the misty gray
streets of the Latin Quarter dissolved into a confused and
frivolous world that chemistry alone could save. He had left
off his painting but he was still the artist.
Presently he began to make his first stumbling independent
researches with stinking bottles and rows of tubes filled with
gorgeous colored fluids. His good friend Chappuis, a mere
student of philosophy, had to listen for hours to Pasteur’s lec-
tures on the crystals of tartaric acid, and Pasteur told Chap-
puis: “It is sad that you are not a chemist too.” He would
have made all students chemists just as forty years later he
tried to turn all doctors into microbe hunters.
Just then, as Pasteur was bending his snub nose and broad
forehead over confused piles of crystals, the sub-visible living
microbes were beginning to come back into serious notice,
they were beginning to be thought of as important serious fel-
low creatures, just as useful as horses or elephants, by two
lonely searchers, one in France and one in Germany. A mod-
est but original Frenchman, Cagniard de la Tour, in 1837
poked round in beer vats of breweries. He dredged up a few
foamy drops from such a vat and looked at them through a
MICROBES ARE A MENACE! 6z
microscope and noticed that the tiny globules of the yeasts he
found in them sprouted buds from their sides, buds like seeds
sprouting. “They are alive then, these yeasts, they multiply
like other creatures,” he cried. His further searchings made
him see that no brew of hops and barley ever changed into
beer without the presence of the yeasts, living growing yeasts.
“It must be their life that changes barley into alcohol,” he
meditated, and he wrote a short clear paper about it. The
world refused to get excited about this fine work of the wee
yeasts — Cagniard was no propagandist, he had no press agent
to offset his own modesty.
In the same year in Germany Doctor Schwann published a
short paper in long sentences, and these muddy phrases told
a bored public the exciting news that meat only becomes putrid
when sub-visible animals get into it. “Boil meat thoroughly
and put it in a clean bottle and lead air into it that has passed
through red-hot pipes — the meat will remain perfectly fresh
for months. But in a day or two after you remove the stopper
and let in ordinary air, with its little animals, the meat will be-
gin to smell dreadfully; it will teem with wriggling, cavorting
creatures a thousand times smaller than a pinhead — it is these
beasts that make meat go bad.”
How Leeuwenhoek would have opened his large eyes at
this! Spallanzani would have dismissed his congregation and
rushed from his masses to his laboratory; but Europe hardly
looked up from its newspapers, and young Pasteur was getting
ready to make his own first great chemical discovery.
When he was twenty-six years old he made it. After long
peerings at heaps of tiny crystals he discovered that there are
four distinct kinds of tartaric acid instead of two; that there
are a variety of strange compounds in nature that are exactly
alike — excepting that they are mirror-images of each other.
When he stretched his arms and straightened up his lame
back and realized what he had done, he rushed out of
his dirty dark little laboratory into the hall, threw his arms
around a young physics assistant — he hardly knew him — and
PASTEUR
62
took him out under the thick shade of the Gardens of the
Luxembourg. There he poured mouthfuls of triumphant ex-
planation at him — he must tell some one. He wanted to tell
the world 1
n
In a month he was praised by gray-haired chemists and be-
came the companion of learned men three times his age. He
was made professor at Strasbourg and in the off moments of
researches he determined to marry the daughter of the dean.
He didn’t know if she cared for him but he sat down and wrote
her a letter that he knew must make her love him:
“There is nothing in me to attract a young girl’s fancy,” he
wrote, “but my recollections tell me that those who have
known me very well have loved me very much.”
So she married him and became one of the most famous and
long-suffering and in many ways one of the happiest wives in
history — and this story will have more to tell about her.
Now the head of a house, Pasteur threw himself more furi-
ously into his work; forgetting the duties and chivalries of a
bridegroom, he turned his nights into days. “I am on the
verge of mysteries,” he wrote, “and the veil is getting thinner
and thinner. The nights seem to me too long. I am often
scolded by Madame Pasteur, but I tell her I shall lead her to
fame.” He continued his work on crystals; he ran into blind
alleys, he did strange and foolish and impossible experiments,
the kind a crazy man might devise — and the kind that turn
a crazy man into a genius when they come off. He tried to
change the chemistry of living things by putting them
between huge magnets. He devised weird clockworks that
swung plants back and forward, hoping so to change the mys-
terious molecules that formed these plants into mirror images
of themselves. ... He tried to imitate God: he tried to
change species!
Madame Pasteur waited up nights for him and marveled
MICROBES ARE A MENACE! 63
at him and believed in him, and she wrote to his father: “You
know that the experiments he is undertaking this year will
give us, if they succeed, a Newton or a Galileo!” It is not
clear whether good Madame Pasteur formed this so high opin-
ion of her young husband by herself. ... At any rate, truth,
that will o’ the wisp, failed him this time — his experiments
didn’t come off.
Then Pasteur was made Professor and Dean of the Faculty
of Sciences in Lille and there he settled down in the Street of
the Flowers, and it was here that he ran, or rather stumbled
for the first time, upon microbes; it was in this good solid town
of distillers and sugar-beet raisers and farm implement dealers
that he began his great campaign, part science, part drama and
romance, part religion and politics, to put microbes on the
map. It was from this not too interesting middle sized city —
never noted for learning — that he splashed up a great wave of
excitement about microbes that rocked the boat of science for
thirty years. He showed the world how important microbes
were to it, and in doing this he made enemies and worshipers;
his name filled the front pages of newspapers and he received
challenges to duels; the public made vast jokes about his
precious microbes while his discoveries were saving the lives
of countless women in childbirth. In short it was here he
hopped off in his flight to immortality.
When he left Strasbourg truth was tricking him and he was
confused. He came to Lille and fairly stumbled on to the road
to fame — by offering help to a beet-sugar distiller.
When Pasteur settled in Lille he was told by the authorities
that highbrow science was all right —
“But what we want, what this enterprising city of Lille
wants most of all, professor,” you can hear the Committee of
business men telling him, “is a dose cooperation between your
science and our industries. What we want to know is — does
science pay? Raise our sugar yield from our beets and give
us a bigger alcohol output, and we’ll see you and your labora-
tory are taken care of.”
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64
Pasteur listened politely and then proceeded to show them
the stuff he was made of. He was much more than a man
of science! Think of a committee of business men asking
Isaac Newton to show them how his laws of motion were going
to help their iron works! That shy thinker would have thrown
up his hands and set himself to studying the meaning of the
prophecies of the Book of Daniel at once. Faraday would
have gone back to his first job as a bookbinder’s apprentice.
But Pasteur was no shrinking flower. A child of the nine-
teenth century, he understood that science had to earn its
bread and butter, and he started to make himself popular with
everybody by giving thrilling lectures to the townspeople on
science:
“Where in your families will you find a young man whose
curiosity and interest will not immediately be awakened when
you put into his hands a potato, and when with that potato
he may produce sugar, and with that sugar alcohol, and with
that alcohol ether and vinegar?” he shouted enthusiastically
one evening to an audience of prosperous manufacturers and
their wives. Then one day Mr. Bigo, a distiller of alcohol
from sugar beets, came to his laboratory in distress. “We’re
having trouble with our fermentations, Professor,” he com-
plained; “we’re losing thousands of francs every day. I won-
der if you could come over to the factory and help us out?”
said the good Bigo.
Bigo’s son was a student in the science course and Pasteur
hastened to oblige. He went to the distillery and sniffed at
the vats that were sick, that wouldn’t make alcohol; he fished
up some samples of the grayish slimy mess and put them in
bottles to take to his laboratory — and he didn’t fail to take
some of the beet pulp from the healthy foamy vats where
good amounts of alcohol were being made. Pasteur had no
idea he could help Bigo, he knew nothing of how sugar fer-
ments into alcohol — indeed, no chemist in the world knew any-
thing about it. He got back to his laboratory, scratched his
head, and decided to examine the stuff from the healthy vats
MICROBES ARE A MENACE! 63
first. He put some of this stuff — a drop of it — before his
microscope, maybe with an aimless idea of looking for crys-
tals, and he found this drop was full of tiny globules, much
smaller than any crystal, and these little globes were yellowish
in color, and their insides were full of a swarm of curious
dancing specks.
“What can these things be,” he muttered. Then suddenly
he remembered —
“Of course, I should have known — these are the yeasts you
find in all stews that have sugar which is fermenting into alco-
hol 1”
He looked again and saw the wee spheres alone; he saw some
in bunches, others in chains, and then to his wonder he came
on some with queer buds sprouting from their sides — they
looked like sprouts on infinitely tiny seeds.
“Cagniard de la Tour is right. These yeasts are alive. It
must be the yeasts that change beet sugar into alcohol!” he
cried. “But that doesn’t help Mr. Bigo — what on earth can
be the matter with the stuff in the sick vats?” He grabbed for
the bottle that held the stuff from the sick vat, he sniffed at
it, he peered at it with a little magnifying glass, he tasted it,
he dipped little strips of blue paper in it and watched them
turn red. . . . Then he put a drop from it before his micro-
scope and looked. . . .
“But there are no yeasts in this one; where are the yeasts?
There is nothing here but a mass of confused stuff — what is
it, what does this mean?” He took the bottle up again and
brooded over it with an eye that saw nothing — till at last a dif-
ferent, a strange look of the juice forced its way up into his
wool-gathering thoughts. “Here are little gray specks stick-
ing to the walls of the bottle — here are some more floating on
the surface — wait! No, there aren’t any in the healthy stuff
where there are yeasts and alcohol. What can that mean?”
he pondered. Then he fished down into the bottle and got a
speck, with some trouble, into a drop of pure water; he put it
before his microscope. . . .
66
PASTEUR
His moment had come.
No yeast globes here, do , but something different, something
strange he had never seen before, great tangled dancing masses
of tiny rod-like things, some of them alone, some drifting along
like strings of boats, all of them shimmying with a weird in-
cessant vibration. He hardly dared to guess at their size — they
were much smaller than the yeasts — they were only one-
twenty-five-thousandth of an inch long!
That night he tossed and didn’t sleep and next morning his
stumpy legs hurried him back to the beet factory. His glasses
awry on his nearsighted eyes, he leaned over and dredged up
other samples from other sick vats — he forgot all about Bigo
and thought nothing of helping Bigo; Bigo didn’t exist; noth-
ing in the world existed but his sniffing curious self and these
dancing strange rods. In every one of the grayish specks he
found millions of them. . . . Feverishly at night with Madame
Pasteur waiting up for him and at last going to bed without
him, he set up apparatus that made his laboratory look like
an alchemist’s den. He found that the rod-swarming juice
from the sick vats always contained the acid of sour milk —
and no alcohol. Suddenly a thought flooded through his brain:
“Those little rods in the juice of the sick vats are alive,
and it is they that make the acid of sour milk — the rods fight
with the yeasts perhaps, and get the upper hand. They are
the ferment of the sour-milk-acid, just as the yeasts must
be the ferment of the alcohol!” He rushed up to tell the
patient Madame Pasteur about it, the only half-understanding
Madame Pasteur who knew nothing of fermentations, the
Madame Pasteur who helped him so by believing always in his
wild enthusiasms. . . .
It was only a guess but there was something inside him that
whispered to him that it was surely true. There was nothing
uncanny about the rightness of his guess; Pasteur made thou-
sands of guesses about the thousand strange events of nature
that met his shortsighted peerings. Many of these guesses
were wrong — but when he did hit on a right one, how he did
MICROBES ARE A MENACE!
$7
test it and prove it and sniff along after it and chase it and
throw himself on it and bring it to earth I So it was now, when
he was sure he had solved the ten-thousand-year-old mystery
of fermentation.
His head buzzed with a hundred confused plans to see if
he was really right, but he never neglected the business men
and their troubles, or the authorities or the farmers or his
students. He turned part of his laboratory into a manure test-
ing station, he hurried to Paris and tried to get himself elected
to the Academy of Sciences — and failed — and he took his
classes on educational trips to breweries in Valenciennes and
foundries in Belgium. In the middle of this he felt sure, one
day, that he had a way to prove that the little rods were alive,
that in spite of their miserable littleness they did giant’s work,
the work no giant could do — of changing sugar into lactic acid.
“I can’t study these rods that I think are alive in this
mixed-up mess of the juice of the beet-pulp from the vats,”
Pasteur pondered. “I shall have to invent some kind of clear
soup for them so that I can see what goes on — I’ll have to
invent this special food for them and then see if they multiply,
if they have young, if a thousand of the small dancing beings
appears where there was only one at first.” He tried putting
some of the grayish specks from the sick vats into pure sugar
water. They refused to grow in it. “The rods need a richer
food,” he meditated, and after many failures he devised a
strange soup; he took some dried yeast and boiled it in pure
water and strained it so that it was perfectly clear, he added
an exact amount of sugar and a little carbonate of chalk to
keep the soup from being acid. Then on the point of a fine
needle he fished up one of the gray specks from some juice of
a sick fermentation. Carefully he sowed this speck in his new
clear soup — and put the bottle in an incubating oven — and
waited, waited anxious and nervous; it is this business of ex-
periments not coming off at once that is always the curse of
microbe hunting.
He waited and signed some vouchers and lectured to stu-
68
PASTEUR
dents and came back to peer into his incubator at his precious
bottle and advised farmers about their crops and fertilizers and
bolted absent-minded meals and peered once more at his tubes
— and waited. He went to bed without knowing what was
happening in his bottle — it is hard to sleep when you do not
know such things. . . .
All the next day it was the same, but toward evening when
his legs began to be heavy with failure once more, he muttered:
“There is no clear broth that will let me see these beastly rods
growing — but I’ll just look once more ”
He held the bottle up to the solitary gaslight that painted
grotesque giant shadows of the apparatus on the laboratory
walls. “Sure enough, there’s something changing here,” he
whispered; “there are rows of little bubbles coming up from
some of the gray specks I sowed in the bottle yesterday —
there are many new gray specks — all of them are sprouting
bubbles!” Then he became deaf and dumb and blind to the
world of men; he stayed entranced before his little incubator;
hours floated by, hours that might have been seconds for him.
He took up his bottle caressingly; he shook it gently before the
light — little spirals of gray murky cloud curled up from the
bottom of the flask and from these spirals came big bubbles
of gas. Now he would find out!
He put a drop from the bottle before his microscope.
Eureka! The field of the lens swarmed and vibrated with
shimmying millions of the tiny rods. “They multiply! They
are alive!” he whispered to himself, then shouted: “Yes, I’ll
be up in a little while!” to Madame Pasteur who had called
down begging him to come up for dinner, to come for a little
rest. For hours he did not come.
Time and again in the days that followed he did the same
experiment, putting a tiny drop from a flask that swarmed
with rods into a fresh clear flask of yeast soup that had none
at all — and every time the rods appeared in billions and each
time they made new quantities of the acid of sour milk. Then
Pasteur burst out — he was a c*. a patient man — to tell the
MICROBES ARE A MENACE! 69
world. He told Mr. Bigo it was the little rods that made his
fermentations sick: “Keep the little rods out of your vats and
you’ll always get alcohol, Mr. Bigo.” He told his classes about
his great discovery that such infinitely tiny beasts could make
acid of sour milk from sugar — a thing no mere man had ever
done or could do. He wrote the news to his old Professor
Dumas and to all his friends and he read papers about it to
the Lille Scientific Society and sent a learned treatise to the
Academy of Sciences in Paris. It is not clear whether Mr.
Bigo found it possible to keep the little rods out of his vats —
for they wore like bad weeds that get into gardens. But to
Pasteur that didn’t matter so much. Here was the one im-
portant fact:
It is living things, sub-visible living beings, that are the real
cause of fermentations !
Innocently he told every one that his discovery was remark-
able — he was too much of a child to be modest — and from
now on and for years these little ferments filled his sky; he ate
and slept and dreamed and loved — after his absent-minded
fashion — with his ferments by him. They were his life.
He worked alone for he had no assistant, not even a boy
to wash his bottles for him; how then, you will ask, did he
find time to cram his days with such a bewildering jumble of
events? Partly because he was an energetic man, and partly
it was thanks to Madame Pasteur, who in the words of Roux,
“loved him even to the point of understanding his work.” On
those evenings when she wasn’t waiting up lonely for him —
when she had finished putting to bed those children whose
absent-minded father he was — this brave lady sat primly on
a straight-backed chair at a little table and wrote scientific
papers at his dictation. Again, while he was below brooding
over his tubes and bottles she would translate the cramped
scrawls of his notebooks into a clear beautiful handwriting.
Pasteur was her life and since Pasteur thought only of work
her own life melted more and more into his work. « <= ,
70
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in
Then one day in the midst of all this — they were just nicely
settled in Lille — he came to her and said: “We are going to
Paris, I have just been made Administrator and Director of
Scientific Studies in the Normal School. This is my great
chance.”
They moved there, and Pasteur found there was absolutely
no place for him to work in; there were a few dirty laboratories
for the students but none for the professors; what was worse,
the Minister of Instruction told him there was not one cent
in the budget for those bottles and ovens and microscopes with-
out which he could not live. But Pasteur snooped round in
every cranny of the dirty old building and at last climbed
tricky stairs to a tiny room where rats played, to an attic
under the roof. He chased the rats out and proclaimed this
den his laboratory; he got money — in some mysterious way
that is still not clear — for his microscopes and tubes and
flasks. The world must know how important ferments are in
its life. The world soon knew I
His experiment with the little rods that made the acid of
sour milk convinced him — why, no one can tell — that other
kinds of small beings did a thousand other gigantic and useful
and perhaps dangerous things in the world. “It is those yeasts
that my microscope showed me in the healthy beet vats, it is
those yeasts that turn sugar into alcohol — it is undoubtedly
yeasts that make beer from barley and it is certainly yeasts
that ferment grapes into wine — I haven’t proved it yet, but I
know it.” Energetically he wiped his fogged spectacles and
cheerfully he climbed to his attic. Experiments would tell
him; he must make experiments; he must prove to himself he
was right — more especially he must prove to the world he
was right. But the world of science was against him.
Liebig, the great German, the prince of chemists, the pope
of chemistry, was opposed to his idea. “So Liebig says yeasts
have nothing to do with the turning of sugar into alcohol — so
MICROBES ARE A MENACE! 71
fie claims that you have to have albumen there, and that it is
just the albumen breaking down that carries the sugar along
down with it, into alcohol.” He would show this Liebig!
Then a trick to beat Liebig flashed into his head, a crafty trick,
a simple clear experiment that would smash Liebig and all
other pooh-bahs of chemistry who scorned the important work
that his precious microscopic creatures might do.
“What I have to do is to grow yeasts in a soup that has no
albumen in it at all. If yeasts will turn sugar into alcohol in
such a soup — then Liebig and his theories are finished.”
Defiance was in every fiber of him. This business was turn-
ing from an affair of cold science into a purely personal matter.
But it was one thing to have this bright idea and quite another
to find an albumenless food for yeasts — yeasts were squeamish
in their tastes, confound them — and he fussed around his
drafty attic and was for weeks an exasperated, a very grumpy
Pasteur. Until one morning a happy accident cleared the road
for him.
He had by chance put some salt of ammonia into an albumen
soup in which he grew the yeasts for his experiments. “What’s
this,” he meditated. “The ammonia salt keeps disappearing as
my yeasts bud and multiply. What does this mean?” He
thought, he fumbled — “Wait! The yeasts use up the
ammonia salt, they will grow without the albumen!” He
slammed shut the door of his attic room, he must be alone
while he worked — he loved to be alone as he worked just as
he greatly enjoyed spouting his glorious results to worshipful,
brilliant audiences. He took clean flasks and poured distilled
water into them, and carefully weighed out pure sugar and
slid it into this water, and then put in his ammonia salt — it
was the tartrate of ammonia that he used. He reached for
a bottle that swarmed with young budding yeasts; with care
he fished out a yellowish flake of them and dropped it into his
new albumenless soup. He put the bottle in his incubating
oven. Would they grow?
That night he turned over and over in his bed. He whis*
PASTEUR
72
pered his hopes and fears to Madame Pasteur — she couldn’t
advise him but she comforted him. She understood every-
thing but couldn’t explain away his worries. She was his per-
fect assistant. . . .
He was back in his attic next morning not knowing how he
had got up the stairs, not remembering his breakfast — he might
have floated from his bed directly to the rickety dusty in-
cubator that held his flask — that fatal flask. He opened the
bottle and put a tiny cloudy drop from it between two thin
bits of glass and slid the specimen under the lens of his micro-
scope — and knew the world was his.
“Here they are,” he cried, “lovely budding growing young
yeasts, hundreds of thousands of them — yes, and here are
some of the old ones, the parent yeasts I sowed in the bottle
yesterday.” He wanted to rush out and tell some one, but he
held himself — he must find out something more — he got some
of the soup from the fatal bottle into a retort, to find out
whether his budding beings had made alcohol. “Liebig is
wrong — albumen isn t necessary — it is yeasts, the growth of
yeasts that ferments sugar.” And he watched trickling tears
of alcohol run down the neck of the retort. He spent the next
weeks in doing the experiment over and over, to be sure that
the yeasts would keep on living, to be certain that they would
keep on making alcohol. He transferred them monotonously,
from one bottle to another — he put them through countless
flasks of this same simple soup of ammonia salt and sugar in
water and always the yeasts budded lustily and filled the bottles
with a foamy collar of carbonic acid gas. Always they made
alcohol! This checking-up of his discoveries was dull work.
There was not the excitement, the sleepless waiting for a
result be hoped for passionately or feared terribly would not
come.
His new fact was old stuff by now but still he kept on, he
cared for his yeasts like some tender father, he fed them
and loved them and was proud of their miraculous work of
turning great quantities of sugar into alcohol. He ruined his
I MICROBES ARE A MENACE! 73
health watching them and he violated sacred customs of all
good middle-class Frenchmen. He writes of how he sat down
before his lens at seven in the evening — and this is the dinner
hour of France! — he sat down to watch and see if he could
spy on his yeasts in the act of budding. “And from that
time,” he writes, “I did not take my eye from the microscope.”
It was half past nine before he was satisfied that he had seen
them bud. He made vast crazy tests that lasted from June
until September to find out how long yeasts would keep at
their work of turning sugar into alcohol, and at the end he
cried: “Give your yeasts enough sugar, and they will not stop
working for three months, or even more!”
Then for a moment the searcher in him changed into a show-
man, an exhibitor of stupendous surprises, a missionary in the
cause of microbes. The world must know and the people of
the world must gasp at this astounding news that millions of
gallons of wine in France and boundless oceans of beer in
Germany are not made by men at all but by incessantly toiling
armies of creatures ten-billion times smaller than a wee baby!
He read papers about this and gave speeches and threw his
proofs insolently at the great Liebig’s head — and in a little
while a storm was up in the little Republic of Science on the
left bank of the Seine in Paris. His old Professors beamed
pride on him and the Academy of Sciences, which had refused
to elect him a member, now gave him the Prize of Physiology,
and the magnificent Claude Bernard — whom Frenchmen called
Physiology itself — praised him in stately sentences. The next
night, Dumas, his old professor — whose brilliant lectures had
made him cry when he was a green boy in Paris — threw bou-
quets at Pasteur in a public speech that would have made
another man than Pasteur bow his head and blush and protest.
Pasteur did not blush — he was perfectly sure that Dumas was
right. Instead he sat down proudly and wrote to his father:
“Mr. Dumas, after praising the so great penetration I had
given proof of . . . added: ‘The Academy, sir, rewarded you
a few days ago for other profound researches; your audience
PASTEUR
n
this evening will applaud you as one of the most distinguished
professors we possess All that I have underlined was said in
these very words by Mr. Dumas, and was followed by great
applause.”
It is only natural that in the midst of this hurrahing there
was some quiet hissing. Opponents began to rise on all sides.
Pasteur made these enemies not entirely because his discoveries
stepped on the toes of old theories and beliefs. No, his
bristling curious impudent air of challenge got him enemies.
He had a way of putting “am-I-not-clever-to-have-found-this-
and-aren’t-all-of-you-fools-not-to-believe-it-at-once” between
the lines of all of his writings and speeches. He loved to fight
with words, he had a cocky eagerness to get into an argument
with every one about anything. He would have sputtered in-
dignantly at an innocently intended comment on his grammar
or his punctuation. Look at portraits of him taken at this
time — it was i860 — read his researches, and you will find a
fighting sureness of his perpetual rightness in every hair of
his eyebrow and even in the technical terms and chemical
formulas of his famous scientific papers.
Many people objected to this scornful cockiness — but some
good men of science had better reasons for disagreeing with
him — his experiments were brilliant, they were startling, but
his experiments stopped short of being completely proved.
They had loopholes. Every now and then when he set out
confidently with some of his gray specks of ferment to make
the acid of sour milk, he would find to his disgust a nasty
smell of rancid butter wafting up from his bottles. There
would be no little rods in the flask — alas — and none of the
sour-milk-acid that he had set out to get. These occasional
failures, the absence of sure-fire in these tests gave ammuni-
tion to his enemies and brought sleepless nights to Pasteur.
But not for longl It is not the least strange thing about him
that it didn’t seem to matter to him that he never quite solved
this confusing going wrong of his fermentations; he was a
cunning map — instead of butting his head against the wall of
MICROBES ARE A MENACE!
75
this problem, he slipped around it and turned it to his great
fame and advantage.
Why this annoying randd butter smell — why sometimes no
sour-milk-add? One morning, in one of his bottles that had
gone bad, he noticed another kind of wee beasts swimming
around among a few of the discouraged dancing rods which
should have been there in great swarms.
“What are these beasts? They’re much bigger than the
rods — they don’t merely quiver and vibrate — they actually
swim around like fish; they must be little animals.”
He watched them peevishly, he had an instinct they had no
business there. There were processions of them hooked to-
gether like barges on the River Seine, strings of clumsy barges
that snaked along. Then there were lonely ones that would
perform a stately twirl now and again; sometimes they would
make a pirouette and balance — the next moment they would
shiver at one end in a curious kind of shimmy. It was all very
interesting, these various pretty cavortings of these new beasts.
But they had no business there! He tried a hundred ways to
keep them out, ways that would seem very clumsy to us now,
but just as he thought he had cleaned them out of all his bot-
tles, back they popped. Then one day it flashed over him
that every time that his bottles of soup swarmed with this
gently moving larger sort of animal, these same bottles of
soup had the strong nasty smell of rancid butter.
So he proved, after a fashion, that this new kind of beast
was another kind of ferment, a ferment that made the rancid-
butter-acid from sugar; but he didn’t nail down his proof, be-
cause he couldn’t be sure, absolutely, that there was one kind
and only one kind of beast present in his bottles. While he
was a little confused and uncertain about this, he turned his
troubles once more to his advantage. He was peering, one
day, at the rancid butter microbes swarming before his micro-
scope. “There’s something new here — in the middle of the
drop they are lively, going every which way.” Gently, pre-
cisely, a little aimlessly, he moved the specimen so that the
PASTEUR
76
edge of the drop was under his lens. . . . “But here at the
edge they’re not moving, they’re lying round stiff as pokers .’ 1
It was so with every specimen he looked at. “Air kills them,”
he cried, and was sure he had made a great discovery. A little
while afterward he told the Academy proudly that he had not
only discovered a new ferment, a wee animal that had a curious
trick of making stale-butter-acid from sugar, but besides this
he had discovered that these animals could live and play and
move and do their work without any air whatever. Air even
killed them! “And this,” he cried, “is the first example of
little animals living without air!”
Unfortunately it was the third example. Two hundred years
before old Leeuwenhoek had seen the same thing. A hundred
years later Spallanzani had been amazed to find that micro-
scopic beasts could live without breathing.
Very probably Pasteur didn’t know about these discoveries
of the old trail blazers — I am sure he was not trying to steal
their stuff — but as he went up in his excited climb toward
glory and toward always increasing crowds of new discoveries,
he regarded less and less what had been done before him and
what went on around him. He re-discovered the curious fact
that microbes make meat go bad. He failed to give the first
discoverer, Schwann, proper credit for it!
But this strange neglect to give credit for the good work of
others must not be posted too strongly against him in the
Book of St. Peter, because you can see his fine imagination,
that poet’s thought of his, making its first attempts at showing
that microbes are the real murderers of the human race. He
dreams in this paper that just as there is putrid meat, so there
are putrid diseases. He tells how he suffered in this work with
meat gone bad; he tells about the bad smells — and how he
hated bad smells! — that filled his little laboratory during these
researches: “My researches on the fermentations have led
me naturally toward these studies to which I have resolved to
devote myself without too much thought of their danger or
of the disgust which they inspire in me,” and then he told the
MICROBES ARE A MENACE! 77
Academy of the hard job that awaited him; he explained to
them why he must not shrink from it, by making a graceful
quotation from the great Lavoisier: “Public usefulness and
the interests of humanity ennoble the most disgusting work
and only allow enlightened men to see the zeal which is needed
to overcome obstacles.”
IV
So he prepared the stage for his dangerous experiments —
years before he entered on them. He prepared a public stage-
setting. His proposed heroism thrilled the calm men of science
that were his audience. As they returned home through the
gray streets of the ancient Latin Quarter they could imagine
Pasteur bidding them a farewell full of emotion, they could
see him marching with set lips — wanting to hold his nose but
bravely not doing it — into the midst of stinking pestilences
where perilous microbes lay in wait for him. ... It is so that
Pasteur proved himself much more useful than Leeuwenhoek
or Spallanzani — he did excellent experiments, and then had a
knack of presenting them in a way to heat up the world about
them. Grave men of science grew excited. Simple people saw
clear visions of the yeasts that made the wine that was their
staff of life and they were troubled at nights by thoughts of
hovering invisible putrid microbes in the air. . . .
He did curious tests that waited three years to be completed.
He took flasks and filled them part way full with milk or urine.
He doused them in boiling water and sealed their slender necks
shut in a blast flame — then for years he guarded them. At
last he opened them, to show that the urine and the milk were
perfectly preserved, that the air above the fluid in the bottles
still had almost all of its oxygen; no microbes, no destruction
of the milk! He allowed germs to grow their silent swarms in
other flasks of urine and milk that he had left unboiled, and
when he tested these for oxygen he found that the oxygen had
been completely used up — the microbes had used it to burn up,
PASTEUR
7 »
to destroy the stuff on which they fed. Then like a great bird
Pasteur spread his wings of fancy and soared up to fearsome
speculations — he imagined a weird world without microbes,
a world whose air had plenty of oxygen, but this oxygen would
be of no use, alas, to destroy dead plants and animals, because
there were no microbes to do the oxidations. His hearers had
nightmare glimpses of vast heaps of carcasses choking de-
serted lifeless streets — without microbes life would not be
possible!
Now Pasteur ran hard up against a question that was
bound to pop up and look him in the face sooner or later. It
was an old question. Adam had without doubt asked it of
God, while he wondered where the ten thousand living beings
of the garden of Eden came from. It was the question that
had all thinkers by the ears for a hundred centuries, that had
given Spallanzani so much exciting fun a hundred years be-
fore. It was the simple but absolutely insoluble question:
Where do microbes come from?
“How is it,” Pasteur’s opponents asked him, “how is it that
yeasts appear from nowhere every year of every century in
every comer of the earth, to turn grape juice into wine?
Where do the little animals come from, these little animals
that turn milk sour in every can and butter rancid in every jar,
from Greenland to Timbuctoo?”
Like Spallanzani, Pasteur could not believe that the microbes
rose from the dead stuff of the milk or butter. Surely mi-
crobes have to have parents! He was, you see, a good Cath-
olic. It is true that he lived among the brainy skeptics on the
left bank of the Seine in Paris, where God is as popular as a
Soviet would be in Wall Street, but the doubts of his colleagues
didn’t touch Pasteur. It was beginning to be the fashion of
the doubters to believe in Evolution: the majestic poem that
tells of life, starting as a formless stuff stirring in a steamy
ooze of a million years ago, unfolding through a stately pro-
cession of living beings until it gets to monkeys and at last —
triumphantly — to men. There doesn’t have to be a God to
MICROBES ARE A MENACE! 79
start that parade or to run it — it just happened, said the new
philosophers with an air of science.
But Pasteur answered: “My philosophy is of the heart and
not of the mind, and I give myself up, for instance, to those
feelings about eternity that come naturally at the bedside of
a cherished child drawing its last breath. At those supreme
moments there is something in the depths of our souls which
tells us that the world may be more than a mere combination
of events due to a machine-like equilibrium brought out of the
chaos of the elements simply through the gradual action of the
forces of matter.” He was always a good Catholic.
Then Pasteur dropped philosophy and set to work. He
believed that his yeasts and rods and little animals came from
the air — he imagined an air full of these invisible things.
Other microbe hunters had shown there were germs in the air,
but Pasteur made elaborate machines to prove it all over again.
He poked gun cotton into little glass tubes, put a suction pump
on one end of them and stuck the other end out of the window,
sucked half the air of the garden through the cotton — and
then gravely tried to count the number of living beings in this
cotton. He invented clumsy machines for getting these mi-
crobe-loaded bits of cotton into yeast soup, to see whether
the microbes would grow. He did the good old experiment of
Spallanzani over; he got himself a round bottle and put some
yeast soup in it, and sealed off the neck of the bottle in the
stuttering blast lamp flame, then boiled the soup for a few
minutes — and no microbes grew in this bottle.
“But you have heated the air in your flask when you boiled
the yeast soup — what yeast soup needs to generate little ani-
mals is natural air — you can’t put yeast soup together with
natural unheated air without its giving rise to yeasts or molds
or torulas or vibrions or animalcules 1” cried the believers in
spontaneous generation, the evolutionists, the doubting botan-
ists, cried all Godless men from their libraries and their arm-
chairs. They shouted, but made no experiments.
Pasteur, in a muddle, tried to invent ways of getting un-
8o
PASTEUR
heated air Into a boiled yeast soup — and yet keep it from
swarming with living sub-visible creatures. He fumbled at
getting a way to do this; he muddled — keeping all the time a
brave face toward the princes and professors and publicists
that were now beginning to swarm to watch his miracles. The
authorities had promoted him from his rat-infested attic to a
little building of four or five two-by-four rooms at the gate
of the Normal School. It would not be considered good enough
to house the guinea-pigs of the great Institutes of to-day, but
it was here that Pasteur set out on his famous adventure to
prove that there was nothing to the notion that microbes could
arise without parents. It was an adventure that was part good
experiment, part unseemly scuffle — a scuffle that threatened at
certain hilariously vulgar moments to be settled by a fist fight.
He messed around, I say, and his apparatus kept getting more
and more complicated, and his experiments kept getting easier
to object to and less clear, he began to replace his customary
easy experiments that convinced with sledge-hammer force, by
long drools of words. He was stuck.
Then one day old Professor Balard walked into his work-
room. Balard had started life as a druggist; he had been an
owlish original druggist who had amazed the scientific world
by making the discovery of the element bromine, not in a fine
laboratory, but on the prescription counter in the back room of
a drugstore. This had got him fame and his job of professor
of chemistry in Paris. Balard was not ambitious; he had no
yearning to make all the discoveries in the world — discovering
bromine was enough for one man’s lifetime — but Balard did
like to nose around to watch what went on in other laboratories.
“You say you’re stuck, you say you do not see how to get
air and boiled yeast soup together without getting living crea-
tures into the yeast soup, my friend?” you can hear the lazy
Balard asking the then confused Pasteur. “Look here, you
and I both believe there is no such thing as microbes rising in
a yeast soup by themselves — we both believe they fall in or
creep in with the dust of the air, is it not so?”
MICROBES ARE A MENACE!
81
“Yes,” answered Pasteur, “but ”
“Wait a minute!” interrupted Balard. “Why don’t you just
try the trick of putting some yeast soup in a bottle, boiling it,
then fixing the opening so the dust can’t fall in. At the same
time the air can get in all it wants to.”
“But how?” asked Pasteur.
“Easy,” replied the now forgotten Balard. “Take one of
your round flasks, put the yeast soup into it, then soften the
glass of the flask neck in your blast lamp— and draw the neck
out and downward into a thin little tube — turn this little tube
down the way a swan bends his neck when he’s picking some-
thing out of the water. Then just leave the end of the tube
open. It’s like this ” and Balard sketched a diagram:
Pasteur looked, then
suddenly saw the mag-
nificent ingeniousness of
this little experiment.
“Why, then microbes
can’t fall into the flask,
because the dust they
stick to can’t very well
fall upward — marvelous!
I see it nowl”
“Exactly,” smiled Balard. “Try it and find out if it works
— see you later,” and he left to continue his genial round of
the laboratories.
Pasteur had bottle washers and assistants now, and he or-
dered them to hurry and prepare the flasks. In a moment the
laboratory was buzzing with the stuttering ear-shattering
b-r-r-r-r-r of the enameler’s lamps; he fell to work savagely.
He took flasks and put yeast soup into them and then melted
their necks and drew them out and curved them downward —
into swan’s necks and pigtails and Chinaman’s cues and a half-
dozen fantastic shapes. Next he boiled the soup in them —
that drove out all the air — but as the flasks cooled down new
air came in — unheated air, perfectly clean air.
82
PASTEUR
The flasks ready, Pasteur crawled on his hands and knees,
back and forth with a comical dignity on his hands and knees,
carrying one flask at a time, through a low cubby hole under
the stairs to his incubating oven. Next morning he was first at
the laboratory, and in a jiffy, battered notebook in his hand,
if you had been there you would have seen his rear elevation
disappearing underneath the stairway. Like a beagle to its
rabbit Pasteur was drawn to this oven with its swan neck
flasks. Family, love, breakfast, and the rest of a silly world
no longer existed for him.
Had you still been there a half hour later, you would have
seen him come crawling out, his eyes shining through his fogged
glasses. He had a right to be happy, for every one of the long
twisty necked bottles in which the yeast soup had been boiled
Was perfectly clear — there was not a living creature in them.
The next day they remained the same and the next. There
was no doubt now that Balard’s scheme had worked. There
was no doubt that spontaneous generation was nonsense.
“What a fine experiment is this experiment of mine — this
proves that you can leave any kind of soup, after you’ve boiled
it, you can leave it open to the ordinary air, and nothing will
grow in it — so long as the air gets into it through a narrow
twisty tube.”
Balard came back and smiled as Pasteur poured the news
of the experiment over him. “I thought it would work — you
see, when the air comes back in, as the flask cools, the dusts
and their germs start in through the narrow neck — but they
get caught on the moist walls of the little tube.”
“Yes, but how can we prove that?” puzzled Pasteur.
“Just take one of those flasks that has been in your oven
all these days, a flask where no living things have appeared,
and shake that flask so that the soup sloshes over and back
and forth into the swan’s neck part of it. Put it back in the
oven, and next morning the soup will be cloudy with thick
swarms of little beasts— children of the ones that were caught
in the neck.”
MICROBES ARE A MENACE! 83
Pasteur tried it, and it was so! A little later at a brilliant
meeting where the brains and wit and art of Paris fought to
get in, Pasteur told of his swan neck flask experiment in rap-
turous words. “Never will the doctrine of Spontaneous Gen-
eration recover from the mortal blow that this simple experi-
ment has dealt it,” he shouted. If Balard was there you may
be sure he applauded as enthusiastically as the rest. A rare
soul was Balard.
Then Pasteur invented an experiment that was — so far as
one can tell from a careful search through the records — really
his own. It was a grand experiment, a semi-public experi-
ment, an experiment that meant rushing across France in
trains, it was a test in which he had to slither around on
glaciers. Once more his laboratory became a shambles of
cluttered flasks and hurrying assistants and tinkling glassware
and sputtering, bubbling pots of yeast soup. Pasteur and his
enthusiastic slaves — they were more like fanatic monks than
slaves — were getting ready hundreds of round bellied bottles.
They filled each one of them part full of yeast soup and then,
during many hours that shot by like moments — such was
their excitement — they doused each bottle for a few minutes in
boiling water. And while the soup was boiling they drew the
flask necks out in a spitting blue flame until they were sealed
shut. Each one of this regiment of bottles held boiled yeast
soup — and a vacuum.
Armed with these dozens of flasks, and fussing about then^
Pasteur started on his travels. He went down first into the
dank cellars of the Observatory of Paris, that famous Ob-
servatory where worked the great Le Verrier, who had done
the proud feat of prophesying the existence of the planet Nep-
tune. “Here the air is so still, so calm,” said Pasteur to his
boys, “that there will be hardly any dust in it, and almost no
microbes.” Then, holding the flasks far away from their
bodies, using forceps that had been heated red hot in a flame,
they cracked the necks of ten of the flasks in succession; as
the neck came off each one. there was a hissing “s-s-s-s” of
PASTEUR
8 4
air rushing in. At once they sealed the bottles shut again in
the flickering flame of an alcohol lamp. They did the same
stunt in the yard of the observatory with another ten bottles,
then hurried back to the little laboratory to crawl under the
stairs to put the bottles in the incubating oven.
A few days later Pasteur might have been seen squatting
before his oven, handling his rows of flasks lovingly, laughing
his triumph with one of those extremely rare laughs of his —
he only laughed when he found out he was right. He put down
tiny scrawls in his notebook, and then crawled out of his
cubby-hole to tell his assistants: “Nine out of ten of the bot-
tles we opened in the cellar of the Observatory are perfectly
clear — not a single germ got into them. All the bottles we
opened in the yard are cloudy — swarming with living creatures.
It’s the air that sucks them into the yeast soup — it’s the dust
•of the air they come in with!”
He gathered up the rest of the bottles and hurried to the
train — it was the time of the summer vacation when other
professors were resting — and he went to his old home in the
Jura mountains and climbed the hill of Poupet and opened
twenty bottles there. He went to Switzerland and perilously
let the air hiss into twenty flasks on the slopes of Mont Blanc;
and found, as he had hoped, that the higher he went, the fewer
were the flasks of yeast soup that became cloudy with swarms
of microbes. “That is as it ought to be,” he cried, “the higher
and clearer the air, the less dust — and the fewer the microbes
that always stick to particles of the dust.” He came back
proudly to Paris and told the Academy — with proofs that
would astonish everybody! — that it was now sure that air
alone could never cause living things to rise in yeast soup.
“Here are germs, right beside them there are none, a little
further on there are different ones . . . and here where the
air is perfectly calm there are none at all,” he cried. Then
once more he set a new stage for possible magnificent ex-
ploits: “I would have liked to have gone up in a balloon to
open my bottles still higher up!” But he didn’t go up in that
MICROBES ARE A MENACE!
85
balloon, for his hearers were already sufficiently astonished.
Already they considered him to be more than a man of science;
he became for them a composer of epic searchings, a Ulysses
of microbe hunters — the first adventurer of that heroic age
to which you will soon come in this story.
Many times Pasteur won his arguments by brilliant experi-
ments that simply floored every one, but sometimes his victories
were due to the weakness or silliness of his opponents, and
again they were the result of — luck. Before a society of chem-
ists Pasteur had insulted the scientific ability of naturalists;
he was astonished, he shouted, that naturalists didn’t stretch
out a hand to the real way of doing science — that is, to experi-
ments. “I am of the persuasion that that would put a new sap
into their science,” he said. You can imagine how the natural-
ists liked that kind of talk; particularly Mr. Pouchet, director
of the Museum of Rouen, did not like it and he was enthusias-
tically joined in not liking it by Professor Joly and Mr. Mus-
set, famous naturalists of the College of Toulouse. Nothing
could convince these enemies of Pasteur that microscopic
beasts did not come to life without parents. They were sure
there was such a thing as life arising spontaneously; they de-
cided to beat Pasteur on his own ground at his own game.
Like Pasteur they filled up some flasks, but unlike him they
used a soup of hay instead of yeast, they made a vacuum in
their bottles and hastened to high Maladetta in the Pyrenees,
and they kept climbing until they had got up many feet higher
than Pasteur had been on Mont Blanc. Here, beaten upon by
nasty breezes that howled out of the caverns of the glaciers
and sneaked through the thick linings of their coats, they
opened their flasks — Mr. Joly almost slid off the edge of the
ledge and was only saved from a scientific martyr’s death when
a guide grabbed him by the coat tail! Out of breath and
chilled through and through they staggered back to a little
tavern and put their flasks in an improvised incubating oven —
and in a few days, to their joy, they found every one of their
bottles swarming with little creatures. Pasteur was wrong !
86
PASTEUR
Now the fight was on. Pasteur became publicly sarcastic
about the experiments of Pouchet, Joly and Musset; he made
criticisms that to-day we know are quibbles. Pouchet came
back with the remark that Pasteur “had presented his own
flasks as an ultimatum to science to astonish everybody.” Pas-
teur was furious, denounced Pouchet as a liar and bawled for a
public apology. It seemed, alas, as if the truth were going to
be decided by the spilling of blood, instead of by calm experi-
ment. Then Pouchet and Joly and Musset challenged Pasteur
to a public experiment before the Academy of Sciences, and
they said that if one single flask would fail to grow microbes
after it had been opened for an instant, they would admit they
were wrong. The fatal day for the tests dawned at last — what
an interesting day it would have been — but at the last moment
Pasteur’s enemies backed down. Pasteur did his experiments
before the Commission — he did them confidently with ironical
remarks — and a little while later the Commission announced:
“The facts observed by Mr. Pasteur and contested by Messrs.
Pouchet, Joly and Musset, are of the most perfect exactitude.”
Luckily for Pasteur, but alas for Truth, both sides happened
to be right. Pouchet and his friends had used hay instead of
yeast soup, and a great Englishman, Tyndall, found out years
later that hay holds wee stubborn seeds of microbes that will
stand boiling for hours! It was really Tyndall that finally set-
tled this great quarrel; it was Tyndall that proved Pasteur was
right.
v
Pasteur was now presented to the Emperor Napoleon III.
He told that dreamy gentleman that his whole ambition was to
find the microbes that he was sure must be the cause of disease.
He was invited to an imperial house party at Compiegne,
The guests were commanded to get ready to go hunting, but
Pasteur begged to be excused; he had had a dray load of ap-
paratus sent up from Paris — though he was only staying at the
palace for a week! — and he impressed their Imperial Majes*
MICROBES ARE A MENACE! 87
ties enormously by bending over his microscope while every-
body else was occupied with frivolous and gay amusements.
The world must know that microbes have got to have par-
ents! At Paris he made a popular speech at the scientific
soiree at the Sorbonne, before Alexandre Dumas, the novelist,
and the woman genius, George Sand, the Princess Mathilde,
and a hundred more smart people. That night he staged a
scientific vaudeville that sent his audience home in awe and
worry; he showed them lantern slides of a dozen different kinds
of germs; mysteriously he darkened the hall and suddenly shot
a single bright beam of light through the blackness. “Observe
the thousands of dancing specks of dust in the path of this
ray,” he cried; “the air of this hall is filled with these specks of
dust, these thousands of little nothings that you should not
despise always, for sometimes they carry disease and death;
the typhus, the cholera, the yellow fever and many other pesti-
lences!” This was dreadful news; his audience shuddered,
convinced by his sincerity. Of course this news was not
strictly true, but Pasteur was no mountebank — he believed it
himself! Dust and the microbes of the dust had become his
life — he was obsessed with dust. At dinner, even at the smart-
est houses, he would hold his plates and spoons close up to his
nose, peer at them, scour them with his napkin, he was with
a vengeance putting microbes on the map. . . .
Every Frenchman from the Emperor down was becoming ex-
cited about Pasteur and his microbes. Whisperings of mysteri-
ous and marvelous events seeped through the gates of the Nor-
mal School. Students, even professors, passed the laboratory
a little atremble with awe. One student might be heard remark-
ing to another, as they passed the high gray walls of the Nor-
mal School in the Rue d’Ulm: “There is a man working here —
his name is Pasteur — who is finding out wonderful things about
the machinery of life, he knows even about the origin of life,
he is even going to find out, perhaps, what causes disease. . .
So Pasteur succeeded in getting another year added to the
course of scientific studies; new laboratories began to go up;
88
PASTEUR
his students shed tears of emotion at the fiery eloquence of his
lectures. He talked about microbes causing disease long be-
fore he knew anything about whether or not they caused dis-
ease — he hadn’t yet got his fingers at the throats of mysterious
plagues and dreadful deaths, but he knew there were other
ways to interest the public, to arouse even such a hardheaded
person as the average Frenchman.
“I beg you,” he addressed the French people in a passionate
pamphlet, “take some interest in those sacred dwellings mean-
ingly called laboratories. Ask that they be multiplied and
completed. They are the temples of the future, of riches and
comfort.” Fifty years ahead of his time as a forward-looking
prophet, he held fine austere ideals up to his countrymen while
he appealed to their wishes for a somewhat piggish material
happiness. A good microbe hunter, he was much more than a
mere woolgathering searcher, much more than a mere man of
science. . . .
Once more he started out to show all of France how science
could save money for her industry; he packed up boxes of
glassware and an eager assistant, Duclaux, and bustled off to
Arbois, his old home — he hurried off up there to study the dis-
eases of wine — to save the imperiled wine industry. He set up
his laboratory in what had been an old cafe and instead of gas
burners he had to be satisfied with an open charcoal brazier
that the enthusiastic Duclaux kept glowing with a pair of bel-
lows; from time to time Duclaux would scamper across to the
town pump for water; their clumsy apparatus was made by
the village carpenter and tinsmith. Pasteur rushed around to
his friends of long ago and begged bottles of wine, bitter wine,
ropy wine, oily wine; he knew from his old researches that it
was yeasts that changed grapejuice into wine — he felt certain
that it must be some other wee microscopic being that made
wines go bad.
Sure enough! When he turned his lens on to ropy wines he
found them swarming with very tiny curious microbes hitched
together like strings of beads; he found the bottles of bitter
MICROBES ARE A MENACE! 89
wine infested with another kind of beast and the kegs of turned
wine by still another. Then he called the winegrowers and the
merchants of the region together and proceeded to show them
magic.
“Bring me a half dozen bottles of wine that has gone bad
with different sicknesses,” he asked them. “Do not tell me
what is wrong with them, and I’ll tell you what ails them
without tasting them.” The winegrowers didn’t believe
him; among each other they snickered at him as they went to
fetch the bottles of sick wine; they laughed at the fantastic
machinery in the old cafe; they took Pasteur for some kind of
earnest lunatic. They planned to fool him and brought him
bottles of perfectly good wine among the sick ones. Then he
set about flabbergasting them! With a slender glass tube he
sucked a drop of wine out of a bottle and put it between two
little slips of glass before his microscope. The wine raisers
nudged each other and winked French winks of humorous com-
mon sense, while Pasteur sat hunched over his microscope,
and they became more merry as minutes passed. . . .
Suddenly he looked at them and said: “There is nothing the
matter with this wine — give it to the taster — let him see if I’m
right.”
The taster did his tasting, then puckered up his purple nose
and admitted that Pasteur was correct; and so it went through
a long row of bottles — when Pasteur looked up from his micro-
scopes and prophesied: “Bitter wine” — it turned out to be bit-
ter; and when he foretold that the next sample was ropy, the
taster acknowledged that ropy was right!
The wine raisers mumbled their thanks and lifted their hats
to him as they left. “We don’t get the way he does this — but
he is a very clever man, very, very clever,” they muttered.
That is much for a peasant Frenchman to admit. . . .
When they left, Pasteur and Duclaux worked triumphantly
in their tumbledown laboratory; they tackled the question of
how to keep these microbes out of healthy wines — they found
at last that if you heat wine just after it has finished ferment-
go
PASTEUR
ing, even if you heat it gently, way below the point of boiling,
the microbes that have no business in the wine will be killed —
and the wine will not become sick. That little trick is now
known to everybody by the name of pasteurization.
Now that people of the East of France had been shown how
to keep their wine from going bad, the people of the middle of
France clamored for Pasteur to come and save their vinegar-
making industry. So he rushed down to Tours. He had got
used to looking for microscopic beings in all kinds of things by
now — he no longer groped as he had had to do at first; he ap-
proached the vinegar kegs, where wine was turning itself into
vinegar, he saw a peculiar-looking scum on the surface of the
liquor in the barrels. “That scum has to be there, otherwise
we get no vinegar,” explained the manufacturers. In a few
weeks of swift, sure-fingered investigation that astonished the
vinegar-makers and their wives, Pasteur found that the scum
on the kegs was nothing more nor less than billions upon bil-
lions of microscopic creatures. He took off great sheets of this
scum and tested it and weighed it and fussed with it, and at
last he told an audience of vinegar-makers and their wives and
families that the microbes which change wine to vinegar actu-
ally eat up and turn into vinegar ten thousand times their own
weight of alcohol in a few days. What gigantic things these
infinitely tiny beings can do — think of a man of two hundred
pounds chopping two millions of pounds of wood in four days!
It was by some such homely comparison as this one that he
made microbes part of these humble people’s lives, it was so
that he made them respect these miserably small creatures; it
was by pondering on their fiendish capacity for work that
Pasteur himself got used to the idea that there was nothing so
strange about a tiny beast, no larger than the microbe of
vinegar, getting into an ox or an elephant or a man — and doing
him to death. Before he left them he showed the people of
Tours how to cultivate and care for those useful wee creatures
that so strangely added oxygen to wine to turn it into vinegar
— and millions of francs for them.
MICROBES ARE A MENACE!
91
These successes made Pasteur drunk with confidence in his
method of experiment; he began to dream impossible gaudy
dreams — of immense discoveries and super-Napoleonic microbe
huntings — and he did more than brood alone over these
dreams; he put them into speeches and preached them. He be-
came, in a word, a new John the Baptist of the religion of the
Germ Theory, but unlike the unlucky Baptist, Pasteur was a
forerunner who lived to see at least some of his prophecies come
true.
Then for a short time he worked quietly in his laboratory in
Paris — there was nothing for him to save just then — until one
day in 1865 Fate came to his door and knocked. Fate in the
guise of his old professor, Dumas, called on him and asked him
to change himself from a man of science into a silkworm doc-
tor. “What’s wrong with silkworms? I did not know that
they ever had diseases — I know nothing at all about silk-
worms — what’s more, I have never even seen one!” protested
Pasteur.
VI
“The silk country of the South is my native country,” an-
swered Dumas. “I’ve just come back from there — it is terrible
— I cannot sleep nights for thinking of it, my poor country,
my village of Alais. . . . This country that used to be rich,
that used to be gay with mulberry trees which my people used
to call the Golden Tree — this country is desolate now. The
lovely terraces are going to ruin — the people, they are my
people, they are starving. . . .” Tears were in his voice.
Anything but a respecter of persons, Pasteur who loved and
respected himself above all men, had always kept a touching
reverence for Dumas. He must help his sad old professor!
But how? It is doubtful at this time if Pasteur could have
told a silkworm from an angle worm! Indeed, a little later,
when he was first given a cocoon to examine, he held it up to
his ear, shook it, and cried: “Why, there is something inside
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92
it!” Pasteur hated to go South to try to find out what ailed
silk worms, he knew he risked a horrid failure by going and he
detested failure above everything. But it is one of the charm-
ing things about him that in the midst of all his arrogance, his
vulgar sureness of himself, he had kept that boyish love and
reverence for his old master — so he said to Dumas: “I am in
your hands, I’m at your disposal, do with me as you wish — I
will go!”
So he went. He packed up the never complaining Madame
Pasteur and the children and a microscope and three energetic
and worshiping young assistants and he went into the epidemic
that was slaughtering millions of silkworms and ruining the
South of France. Knowing less of silkworms and their sick-
nesses than a babe in swaddling clothes he arrived in Alais; he
got there and he learned that a silkworm spins a cocoon round
itself and turns into a chrysalid inside the cocoon; he found
out that the chrysalid changes into a moth that climbs out and
lays eggs — which hatch out the next spring into new broods of
young silkworms. The silkworm growers — disgusted at his
great ignorance — told him that the disease which was killing
their worms was called pebrine, because the sick worms were
covered with little black spots that looked like pepper. Pas-
teur found out that there were a thousand or so theories about
the sickness, but that the little pepper spots — and the curious
little globules inside the sick worms, wee globules that you
could only see with a microscope — were the only facts that were
known about it
Then Pasteur unlimbered his microscope, before he had got
his family settled — he was like one of those trout fishing
maniacs who starts to cast without thought of securing his
canoe safely on the bank — he unlimbered his microscope, I
say, and began to peer at the insides of sick worms, and
particularly at these wee globules. Quickly he concluded that
the globules were a sure sign of the disease. Fifteen days after
he had come to Alais he called the Agricultural Committee to-
gether and told them: “At the moment of egg-laying put aside
MICROBES ARE A MENACE!
93
each couple of moths, the father and the mother. Let them
mate; let the mother lay her eggs — then pin the father and
mother moths down onto a little board, slit open their bellies
and take out a little of the fatty tissue under their skin; put
this under a microscope and look for those tiny globules. If
you can’t find any, you can be sure the eggs are sound — you
can use those eggs for new silkworms in the spring.”
The committee looked at the shining microscope. “We
farmers can’t run a machine like that,” they objected. They
were suspicious, they didn’t believe in this newfangled ma-
chine. Then the salesman that was in Pasteur came to the
front. “Nonsense! ” he answered. “There is an eight-year-old
girl in my laboratory who handles this microscope easily and is
perfectly able to spot these little globules — these corpuscles —
and then you grown men tiy to tell me you couldn’t learn to use
a microscope!” So he shamed them. And the committee
obediently bought microscopes and tried to follow his direc-
tions. Then Pasteur started a hectic life; he was everywhere
around the tragic silk country, lecturing, asking innumerable
questions, teaching the farmers to use microscopes, rushing
back to the laboratory to direct his assistants — he directed
them to do complicated experiments that he hadn’t time to do,
or even watch, himself — and in the evenings he dictated an-
swers to letters and scientific papers and speeches to Madame
Pasteur. The next morning he was off again to the neighbor-
ing towns, cheering up despairing farmers and haranguing
them. . . .
But the next spring his bubble burst, alas. The next spring,
when it came time for the worms to climb their mulberry twigs
to spin their silk cocoons, there was a horrible disaster. His
confident prophecy to the farmers did not come true. These
honest people glued their eyes to their microscopes to pick out
the healthy moths, so as to get healthy eggs, eggs without the
evil globules in them — and these supposed healthy eggs hatched
worms, sad to tell, who grew miserably, languid worms who
would not eat, strange worms who failed to molt, sick worms
PASTEUR
94
who shriveled up and died, lazy worms who hung around at
the bottoms of their twigs, not caring whether there was ever
another silk stocking on the leg of any fine lady in the world.
Poor Pasteur 1 He had been so busy trying to save the silk-
worm industry that he hadn’t taken time to find out what really
ailed the silkworms. Glory had seduced him into becoming a
mere savior — for a moment he forgot that Truth is a will o’
the wisp that can only be caught in the net of glory-scorning
patient experiment. . . .
Some silkworm raisers laughed despairing laughs at him —
others attacked him bitterly; dark days were on him. He
worked the harder for them, but he couldn’t find bottom. He
came on broods of silkworms who fairly galloped up the twigs
and proceeded to spin elegant cocoons — then at the microscope
he found these beasts swarming with the tiny globules. He
discovered other broods that sulked on their branches and
melted away with a gassy diarrhoea and died miserably — but in
these he could find no globules whatever. He became com-
pletely mixed up; he began to doubt whether the globules had
anything to do with the disease. Then to make things worse,
mice got into the broods of his experimental worms and made
cheerful meals on them and poor Duclaux, Maillot and Gernez
had to stay up by turns all night to catch the raiding mice;
next morning everybody would be just started working when
black clouds appeared in the West, and all of them — Madame
Pasteur and the children bringing up the rear — had to scurry
out to cover up the mulberry trees. In the evenings Pasteur
had to settle his tired back in an armchair, to dictate answers
to peeved silkworm growers who had lost everything — using his
method of sorting eggs.
After a series of such weary months, his instinct to do experi-
ments, this instinct — and the Goddess of Chance — came to-
gether to save him. He pondered to himself : “I’ve at least man-
aged to scrape together a few broods of healthy worms — if I
feed these worms mulberry leaves smeared with the discharges
of sick worms, will the healthy worms die?” He tried it, and
MICROBES ARE A MENACE! 95
the healthy worms died sure enough, but, confound it! the ex-
periment was a fizzle again — for instead of getting covered with
pepper spots and dying slowly in twenty-five days or so, as
worms always do of pibrine — the worms of his experiment
curled up and passed away in seventy-two hours. He was dis-
couraged, he stopped his experiments; his faithful assistants
worried about him — why didn’t he try the experiment over?
At last Gemez went off to the north to study the silk worms
of Valenciennes, and Pasteur, not clearly knowing the reason
why, wrote to him and asked him to do that feeding experiment
up there. Gernez had some nice broods of healthy worms.
Gemez was sure in his own head — no matter what his chief
might think — that the wee globules were really living things,
parasites, assassins of the silkworm. He took forty healthy
worms and fed them on good healthy mulberry leaves that had
never been fed on by sick beasts. These worms proceeded to
spin twenty-seven good cocoons and there were no globules in
the moths that came from them. He smeared some other
leaves with crushed-up sick moths and fed them to some day-
old worms — and these worms wasted away to a slow death,
they became covered with pepper spots and their bodies
swarmed with the sub-visible globules. He took some more
leaves with crushed-up sick moths and fed these to some old
worms just ready to spin cocoons; the worms lived to spin the
cocoons, but the moths that came out of the cocoons were loaded
with the globules, and the worms from their eggs came to noth-
ing. Gernez was excited — and he became more excited when
still nights at his microscope showed him that the globules in-
creased tremendously as the worms faded to their deaths. . . .
Gernez hurried to Pasteur. “It is solved,” he cried, “the
little globules are alive — they are parasites ! — They are what
make the worms sick!”
It was six months before Pasteur was convinced that Ger-
nez was right, but when at last he understood, he swooped back
on his work, and once more called the Committee together.
“The little corpuscles are not only a sign of the disease, they
PASTEUR
96
axe its cause. These globules are alive, they multiply, they
force themselves into every part of the moth’s body. Where
we made our mistake was to examine only a little part of the
moth, we only looked under the skin of the moth’s belly —
we’ve got to grind up the whole beast and examine all of it.
Then if we do not find the globules we can safely use the eggs
for next year’s worms! ”
The committee tried the new scheme and it worked — the next
year they had fine worms that gave them splendid yields of
silk.
Pasteur saw now that the little globule, the cause of the p6-
brine, came from outside the worm — it did not rise by itself
inside the worm — and he went everywhere, showing the farm-
ers how to keep their healthy worms away from all contact
with leaves that sick worms had soiled. Then suddenly he fell
a victim of a hemorrhage of the brain — he nearly died, but
when he heard that work of building his new laboratory had
been stopped, frugally stopped in expectation of his death, he
was furious and made up his mind to live. He was paralyzed
on one side after that — he never got over it — but he earnestly
read Dr. Smiles’ book, “Self Help,” and vigorously decided to
work in spite of his handicap. At a time when he should have
stayed in his bed, or have gone to the seaside, he staggered to
his feet and limped to the train for the South, exclaiming in-
dignantly that it would be criminal not to finish saving the silk-
worms while so many poor people were starving! All French-
men, excepting a few nasty fellows who called it a magnificent
gesture, joined in praising him and adoring him.
For six years Pasteur struggled with the diseases of silk-
worms. He had no sooner settled pcbrine than another mal-
ady of these unhappy beasts popped up, but he knew his prob-
lem and found the microbe of this new disease much more
quickly. Tears of joy were in the voice of old Dumas now as
he thanked his dear Pasteur — and the mayor of the town of
Alais talked enthusiastically of raising a golden statue to the
great Pasteur.
MICROBES ARE A MENACE!
97
vn
He was forty-five. He wallowed in this glory for a moment,
and then — having saved the silkworm industry, with the help of
God and Gernez — he raised his eyes toward one of those bright,
impossible, but always partly true visions that it was his poet’s
gift to see. He raised his artist’s eyes from the sicknesses of
silkworms to the sorrows of men, he sounded a trumpet call of
hope to suffering mankind;
“It is in the power of man to make parasitic maladies dis-
appear from the face of the globe, if the doctrine of sponta-
neous generation is wrong, as I am sure it is.”
The siege of Paris In the bitter winter of 1870 had driven
him from his work to his old home in the Jura hills. He wan-
dered pitifully around battlefields looking for his son who was
a sergeant. Here he worked himself up into a tremendous
hate, a hate that never left him, of all things German; he be-
came a professional patriot. “Every one of my works will bear
on its title page, ‘Hatred to Prussia. Revenge! Revenge!’ ”
he shrieked, good loyal Frenchman that he was. Then with a
magnificent silliness he proceeded to make his next research a
revenge research. Even he had to admit that French beer was
much inferior to the beer of the Germans. Well — he would
make the beer of France better than the beer of Germany — he
must make the French beer the peer of beers, no, the emperor
of all beers of the world!
He embarked on vast voyages to the great breweries of
France and here he questioned everybody from the brewmaster
in his studio to the lowest workman that cleaned out the vats.
He journeyed to England and gave advice to those red-faced
artists who made English porter and to the brewers of the
divine ale of Bass and Burton. He trained his microscope on
the must of a thousand beer vats to watch the yeast globules
at their work of budding and making alcohol. Sometimes he
discovered the same kind of miserable sub-visible beings that
he had found in sick wines years before, and he told the brew-
PASTEUR
98
ers that if they would heat their beer, they would keep these
invaders out; he assured them that then they would be able to
ship their beer long distances, that then they would be able to
brew the most incredibly marvelous of all beers! He begged
money for his laboratory from brewers, explaining to them how
they would be repaid a thousand fold, and with this money he
turned his old laboratory at the Normal School into a small
scientific brewery that glittered with handsome copper vats
and burnished kettles.
But in the midst of all this feverish work, alas, Pasteur grew
sick of working on beer. He hated the taste of beer just as he
loathed the smell of tobacco smoke; to his disgust he found
that he would have to become a good beer-taster in order to
become a great beer-scientist, to his dismay he discovered that
there was much more to the art of brewing than simply keep-
ing vicious invading microbes out of beer vats. He puckered
his snub nose and buried his serious mustache in foamy mugs
and guzzled determined draughts of the product of his pretty
kettles — but he detested this beer, even good beer, in fact all
beer. Bertin, the physics professor, his old friend, smacked
his lips and laughed at him as he swallowed great gulps of
beer that Pasteur had denounced as worthless. Even the young
assistants snickered — but never to his face. Pasteur, most ver-
satile of men, was after all not a god. He was an investigator
and a marvelous missionary — but beer-loving is a gift that is
born in a limited number of connoisseurs, just as the ear for
telling good music from trash is born in some men!
Pasteur did help the French beer industry. For that we
have the testimony of the good brewers themselves. It is my
duty to doubt, however, the claims of those idolizers of his who
insist that he made French the equal of German beer. I do not
deny this claim, but I beg that it be submitted to a commission,
one of those solemn impartial international commissions, the
kind of commission that Pasteur himself so often demanded to
decide before all the world whether he or his detested oppo-
nents were in the right. . . .
MICROBES ARE A MENACE! 99
Pasteur’s life was becoming more and more unlike the aus-
tere cloistered existence that most men of science lead. His
experiments became powerful answers to the objections that
swarmed on every side against his theory of germs, they be-
came loud public answers to such objections — rather than calm
quests after facts; but in spite of his dragging science into the
market place, there is no doubt that his experiments were mar-
velously made, that they fired the hopes and the imagination
of the world. He got himself into a noisy argument on the way
yeasts turn grape juice into wine, with two French naturalists,
Fremy and Trecul. Fremy admitted that yeasts were needed
to make alcohol from grape juice, but he argued ignorantly be-
fore the amused Academy that yeasts were spontaneously gen-
erated inside of grapes. The wise men of the Academy pooh-
poohed; they were amused, all except Pasteur.
“So Fremy says that yeasts rise by themselves inside the
grape!” cried Pasteur. “Well, let him answer this experiment
then!” He took a great number of
round-bellied flasks and filled them part
full of grape juice. He drew each one
out into a swan’s neck; then he boiled
the grape juice in all of them for a few
minutes and for days and weeks this
grape juice, in every one of all these
flasks, showed no bubbles, no yeasts,
there was no fermentation in them.
Then Pasteur went to a vineyard and
gathered a few grapes — they were just
ripe — and with a pure water he washed
the outsides of them with a clean,
heated, badger hairbrush. He put a drop of the wash water
under his lens — sure enough! — there were globules, a few wee
globes, of yeasts. Then he took ten of his swan neck flasks
and ingeniously sealed straight tubes of glass into their sides,
and through these straight tubes in each one he put a drop of
this wash water from the ripe grapes- Presto! Every one of
IOO
PASTEUR
these ten flasks was filled to the neck in a few days with the
pink foam of a good fermentation. There was a little of the
wash water left; he boiled that and put drops of this through
the straight tubes of ten more flasks. “Just so! ” he cried a few
days later, “there’s no fermentation in these flasks, the boiling
has killed the yeasts in the wash water.”
“Now I shall do the most remarkable experiment of all — I’ll
prove to this ignorant Fremy that there are no yeasts inside of
ripe grapes,” and he took a little hollow tube with a sharp
point, sealed shut; it was a little tube he had heated very hot
in an oven to kill all life — all yeasts — that might have been in
it. Carefully he forced the sharp closed point of the tube
through the skin into the middle of the grape; delicately he
broke the sealed tip inside the grape — and the little drop of
juice that welled up into the tube he transferred with devilish
cunning into another swan-necked flask part filled with grape
juice. A few days later he cried, “That finishes Fremy — there
is no fermentation in this flask at all — there is no yeast inside
the grape!” He went on to one of those sweeping statements
he loved to make: “Microbes never rise by themselves inside
of grapes, or silkworms, or inside of healthy animals — in ani-
mal’s blood or urine. All microbes have to get in from the out-
side! That settles Fremy.” Then you can fancy him whisper-
ing to himself: “The world will soon learn the miracles that
will grow from this little experiment.”
vm
Surely it looked then as if Pasteur had a right to his fantas-
tic dreams of wiping out disease. He had just received a wor-
shiping letter from the English surgeon Lister — and this letter
told of a scheme for cutting up sick people in safety, of doing
operations in a way that kept out that deadly mysterious in-
fection that in many hospitals killed eight people out of ten.
“Permit me,” wrote Lister, “to thank you cordially for having
shown me the truth of the theory of germs of putrefaction by
MICROBES ARE A MENACE! ioi
your brilliant researches, and for having given me the single
principle which has made the antiseptic system a success. If
you ever come to Edinburgh it will be a real recompense to you,
I believe, to see in our hospital in how large a measure hu-
manity has profited from your work.”
Like a boy who has just built a steam engine all by himself
Pasteur was proud; he showed the letter to all his friends; he
inserted it with all its praise in his scientific papers; he pub-
lished it — of all places — in his book on beer! Then he took a
final smash at poor old Fremy, who you would have thought
was already sufficiently crushed by the gorgeous experiments;
he smashed Fremy not by damning Fremy, but by praising
himself! He spoke of his own “remarkable discoveries,” he
called his own theories the true ones and ended: “In a word, the
mark of true theories is their fruitfulness. This is the charac-
teristic which Mr. Balard, with an entirely fatherly friendli-
ness, has made stand out in speaking of my researches.”
Fremy had no more to say.
All Europe by now was in a furor about microbes, and he
knew it was himself that had changed microbes from play-
things into useful helpers of mankind — and perhaps, the world
would soon be astounded by it — into dread infinitesimal ogres
and murdering marauders, the worst enemies of the race. He
had become the first citizen of France and even in Denmark
prominent brewers were having his bust put in their labora-
tories. When suddenly Claude Bernard died, and some of Ber-
nard’s friends published this great man’s unfinished work.
Horrible to tell, this unfinished work had for its subject
fermentation of grape juice into wine, and it ended by showing
that the whole theory of Pasteur was destroyed because . . .
and Bernard closed by giving a series of reasons.
Pasteur could not believe his eyes. Bernard had done this,
the great Bernard who had been his seatmate in the Academy
and had always praised his work; Bernard who had exchanged
sly sarcastic remarks with him at the Academy of Medicine
about those blue-coated pompous brass-buttoned doctors whose
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PASTEUR
talk was keying real experiment out of medicine. “It’s bad
enough for these doctors and these half-witted naturalists to
contradict me — but truly great men have always appreciated
my work — and now Bernard . . you can hear him mutter-
ing.
Pasteur was overwhelmed, but only for a moment. He de-
manded Bernard’s original manuscript. They gave it to him.
He studied it with all the close attention in his power. He
found Bernard’s experiments were only beginnings, rough
sketches; gleefully he found that Bernard’s friends who had
published it had made some discreet changes to make it read
better. Then he rose one day, to the scandal of the entire
Academy and the shocked horror of all the great men of
France, and bitterly scolded Bernard’s friends for publishing a
research that had dared to question his own theories. Vul-
garly he shouted objections at Bernard — who, after all, could
not answer Pasteur from his grave. Then he published a
pamphlet against his old dead friend’s last researches. It was
a pamphlet in the worst of taste, accusing Bernard of having
lost his memory. That pamphlet even claimed that Bernard,
who was to his finger tips a hard man of science, had become
tainted with mystical ideas by associating too much with literary
lights of the French Academy. It even proved that in his last
researches Bernard couldn’t see well any more — “I’ll wager
he had become farsighted and could not see the yeasts!”
cried Pasteur. Vulgarly, by all this criticism, he left people
to conclude that Bernard had been in his dotage when he
did his last work — without any sense of the fitness of things
this passionate Pasteur jumped up and down on Bernard’s
grave.
Finally he argued with Bernard by beautiful experiments — a
thing most other men would have done without making un-
seemly remarks. Like an American about to build a skyscraper
in six weeks he rushed to carpenters and hardware stores and
bought huge pieces of expensive glass and with this glass he
had the carpenters build ingenious portable hothouses. Hi9
MICROBES ARE A MENACE! 103
assistants worked dinnerless and sleepless, preparing flasks and
microscopes and wads of heated cotton; and in an unbelievably
short time Pasteur gathered up all this ponderous paraphernalia
and hastened to catch a train for his old home in the Jura
mountains. Like the so typical misplaced American that he
really was, he threw every consideration and all other work to
the winds and went directly to the point of settling: “Does my
theory of fermentation hold?”
Coming to his own little vineyard in Arbois, he hastily put
up his hothouses around a part of his grape-vines. They were
admirable close-fitting hothouses that sealed the grape-vines
from the outside air. “It’s midsummer, now, the grapes are
far from ripe,” he pondered, “and I know that at this time there
are never any yeasts to be found on the grapes.” Then, to
make doubly sure that no yeasts from the air could fall on the
grapes, he carefully wrapped wads of cotton — which his as-
sistants had heated to kill all living beings — around some of
the bunches under the glass of the hothouses. He hurried
back to Paris and waited nervously for the grapes to ripen.
He went back to Arbois too soon in his frantic eagerness to
prove that Bernard was wrong — but at last he got there to find
them ripe. He examined the hothouse grapes with his micro-
scope; there was not a yeast to be found on their skins. Fever-
ishly he crushed some of them up in carefully heated bottles —
not a single bubble of fermentation rose in these flasks — and
when he did the same thing to the exposed grapes from the
vines outside the hothouse, these bubbled quickly into wine!
At last he gathered up Madame Pasteur and some of the vines
with their cotton-wrapped bunches of grapes — he was going
to take these back to the Academy, where he would offer a
bunch to each member that wanted one, and he was going to
challenge everybody to try to make wine from these protected
bunches. ... He knew they couldn’t do it without putting
yeasts into them. . . . He would show them all Bernard was
wrong! Madame Pasteur sat stiffly in the train all the way
back to Paris, carefully holding the twigs straight up in front
104
PASTEUR
of her so that the cotton wrappings wouldn’t come undone. It
was a whole day’s trip to Paris. . . .
Then at the next meeting Pasteur told the Academy of how
he had quarantined his grape-vines against yeasts: “Is it not
worthy of attention,” he shouted, “that in this vineyard of
Arbois, and this would be true of millions of acres of vineyards
all over the world, there was at the moment I made these ex-
periments, not a speck of soil which was not capable of fer-
menting grapes into wine; and is it not remarkable that, on
the contrary, the soil of my hothouses could not do this? And
why? Because at a definite moment, I covered this soil with
some glass. . . .”
Then he jumped to marvelous predictions, prophecies that
have since his time come true, he leaped to poetry, I say, that
makes you forget h is vulgar wrangling with his dead friend
Bernard. “Must we not believe, as well, that a day will come
when preventive measures that are easy to apply, will arrest
those plagues . . .” and he painted them a lurid picture of the
terrible yellow fever that just then had changed the gay streets
of New Orleans into a desolation. He made them shiver to
hear of the black plague on the far banks of the Volga. Finally
he made them hope . . .
Meanwhile in a little village in Eastern Germany a young
stubborn round-headed Prussian doctor was starting on his road
to those very miracles that Pasteur was prophesying — this
young doctor was doing strange experiments with mice in time
stolen from his practice. He was devising ingenious ways to
handle microbes so that he could be dead sure he was handling
only one kind — he was learning to do a thing that Pasteur with
all his brilliant skill had never succeeded in doing. Let us
leave Pasteur for a while — even though he is on the threshold
of his most exciting experiments and funniest arguments — let
us leave him for a chapter and go with Robert Koch, while he
is learning to do fantastic, and marvelously important things
with those microbes which had been subjects of Pasteur’s king-
dom for so many years.
CHAPTER IV
KOCH
THE DEATH FIGHTER
I
In those astounding and exciting years between i860 and
1870, when Pasteur was saving vinegar industries and astonish-
ing emperors and finding out what ailed sick silkworms, a
small, serious, and nearsighted German was learning to be a
doctor at the University of Gottingen. His name was Robert
Koch. He was a good student, but while he hacked at cadavers
he dreamed of going tiger-hunting in the jungle. Conscien-
tiously he memorized the names of several hundred bones and
muscles, but the fancied moan of the whistles of steamers
bound for the East chased this Greek and Latin jargon out of
his head.
Koch wanted to be an explorer; or to be a military surgeon
and win Iron Crosses; or to be ship’s doctor and voyage to
impossible places. But alas, when he graduated from the
medical college in 1866 he became an interne in a not very in-
teresting insane asylum in Hamburg. Here, busy with raving
maniacs and helpless idiots, the echoes of Pasteur’s prophecies
that there were such things as terrible man-killing microbes
hardly reached Koch’s ears. He was still listening for steamer-
whistles and in the evenings he took walks down by the
wharves with Emmy Fraatz; he begged her to marry him; he
held out the bait of romantic trips around the world to her.
Emmy told Robert that she would marry him, but on condi-
tion that he forget this nonsense about an adventurous life,
io6
KOCH
provided that he would settle down to be a practicing doctor,
a good useful citizen, in Germany.
Koch listened to Emmy — for a moment the allure of fifty
years of bliss with her chased away his dreams of elephants
and Patagonia — and he settled down to practice medicine; he
began what was to him a totally uninteresting practice of medi-
cine in a succession of unromantic Prussian villages.
Just now, while Koch wrote prescriptions and rode horse-
back through the mud and waited up nights for Prussian
farmer women to have their babies, Lister in Scotland was
beginning to save the lives of women in childbirth — by keep-
ing microbes away from them. The professors and the stu-
dents of the medical colleges of Europe were beginning to be
excited and to quarrel about Pasteur’s theory of malignant
microbes, here and there men were trying crude experiments,
but Koch was almost as completely cut off from this world
of science as old Leeuwenhoek had been, two hundred years
before, when he first fumbled at grinding glass into lenses in
Delft in Holland. It looked as if his fate was to be the con-
soling of sick people and the beneficent and praiseworthy at-
tempt to save the lives of dying people — mostly, of course, he
did not save them — and his wife Emmy was quite satisfied
with this and was proud when Koch earned five dollars and
forty-five cents on especially busy days.
But Robert Koch was restless. He trekked from one
deadly village to another still more uninteresting, until at last
he came to Wollstein, in East Prussia, and here, on his twenty-
eighth birthday, Mrs. Koch bought him a microscope to play
with.
You can hear the good woman say: “Maybe that will take
Robert’s mind off what he calls his stupid practice . . . per-
haps this will satisfy him a little . . . he’s always looking at
everything with his old magnifying glass. . . .”
Alas for her, this new microscope, this plaything, took her
husband on more curious adventures than any he would have
met in Tahiti or Lahore; and these weird experiences — that
THE DEATH FIGHTER 107
Pasteur had dreamed of but which no man had ever had be-
fore — came on him out of the dead carcasses of sheep and
cows. These new sights and adventures jumped at him im-
possibly on his very doorstep, and in his own drug-reeking
office that he was so tired of, that he was beginning to loathe.
“I hate this bluff that my medical practice is ... it isn’t
because I do not want to save babies from diphtheria . . . but
mothers come to me crying — asking me to save their babies
— and what can I do? — Grope . . . fumble . . . reassure
them when I know there is no hope. . . . How can I cure
diphtheria when I do not even know what causes it, when the
wisest doctor in Germany doesn’t know? . . So you can
imagine Koch complaining bitterly to Emmy, who was irritated
and puzzled, and thought that it was a young doctor’s busi-
ness to do as well as he could with the great deal of knowledge
that he had got at the medical school— oh! would he never be
satisfied?
But Koch was right. What, indeed, did doctors know about
the mysterious causes of disease? Pasteur’s experiments were
brilliant, but they had proved nothing about the how and why
of human sicknesses. Pasteur was a trail-blazer, a fore-runner
crying possible future great victories over disease, shouting
about magnificent stampings out of epidemics; but meanwhile
the moujiks of desolate towns in Russia were still warding off
scourges by hitching four widows to a plow and with them
drawing a furrow round their villages in the dead of night —
and their doctors had no sounder protection to offer them.
“But the professors, the great doctors in Berlin, Robert,
they must know what is the cause of these sicknesses you don’t
know how to stop.” So Frau Koch might have tried to con-
sole him. But in 1873 — that is only fifty years ago — I must
repeat that the most eminent doctors had not one bit better
explanation for the causes of epidemics than the ignorant Rus-
sian villagers who hitched the town widows to their plows. In
Paris Pasteur was preaching that microbes would soon be found
to be the murderers of consumptives: and against this crazy
io8
KOCH
prophet rose the whole corps of the doctors of Paris, headed
by the distinguished brass-buttoned Doctor Pidoux.
“What!” roared this Pidoux, “consumption due to a germ —
one definite kind of germ? Nonsense! A fatal thought!
Consumption is one and many at the same time. Its conclu-
sion is the necrobiotic and infecting destruction of the plas-
matic tissue of an organ by a number of roads that the hy-
gienist and the physician must endeavor to close!” It was so
that the doctors fought Pasteur’s prophecies with utterly
meaningless and often idiotic words.
n
Koch was spending his evenings fussing with his new micro-
scope, he was beginning to find out just the right amount of
light to shoot up into its lens with the reflecting mirror, he
was learning just how needful it was to have his thin glass
slides shining clean — those bits of glass on which he liked to
put drops of blood from the carcasses of sheep and cows, that
had died of anthrax. . . .
Anthrax was a strange disease which was worrying farmers
all over Europe, that here and there ruined some prosperous
owner of a thousand sheep, that in another place sneaked in
and killed the cow — the one support — of a poor widow. There
was no rime or reason to the way this plague conducted its
maraudings; one day a fat lamb in a flock might be frisking
about, that evening this same lamb refused to eat, his head
drooped a little — and the next morning the farmer would find
him cold and stiff, his blood turned ghastly black. Then the
same thing would happen to another lamb, and a sheep, four
sheep, six sheep — there was no stopping it. And then the
farmer himself, and a shepherd, and a woolsorter, and a dealer
in hides might break out in horrible boils — or gasp out their
last breaths in a swift pneumonia.
Koch had started using his microscope with the more or
less thorough aimlessness of old Leeuwenhoek; he examined
THE DEATH FIGHTER
iog
everything under the sun, until he ran on to this blood of sheep
and cattle dead of anthrax. Then he began to concentrate, to
forget about making a call when he found a dead sheep in a
field — he haunted butcher shops to find out about the farms
where anthrax was killing the flocks. Koch hadn’t the leisure
of Leeuwenhoek; he had to snatch moments for his peerings,
between prescribing for some child that bawled with a belly-
ache and the pulling out of a villager’s aching tooth. In these
interrupted hours he put drops of the blackened blood of a
cow dead of anthrax between two thin pieces of glass, very
clean shining bits of glass. He looked down the tube of his mi-
croscope and among the wee round drifting greenish globules of
this blood he saw strange things that looked like little sticks.
Sometimes these sticks were short, there might be only a few
of them, floating, quivering a little, among the blood globules.
But here were others, hooked together without joints — many
of them ingeniously glued together till they appeared to him
like long threads a thousand times thinner than the finest silk.
“What are these things ... are they microbes ... are
they alive? They do not move . . . maybe the sick blood of
these poor beasts just changes into these threads and rods,”
Koch pondered. Other men of science, Davaine and Rayer in
France, had seen these same things in the blood of dead sheep;
and they had announced that these rods were bacilli, living
germs, that they were undoubtedly the real cause of anthrax
— but they hadn’t proved it, and except for Pasteur, no one
in Europe believed them. But Koch was not particularly in-
terested in what anybody else thought about the threads and
rods in the blood of dead sheep and cattle — the doubts and
the laughter of doctors failed to disturb him, and the enthusi-
asms of Pasteur did not for one moment make him jump at
conclusions. Luckily nobody anxious to develop young mi-
crobe hunters had ever heard of Koch, he was a lone wolf
searcher — he was his own man, alone with the mysterious
tangled threads in the blood of the dead beasts.
“I do not see a way yet of finding out whether these little
no KOCH
sticks and threads are alive,” he meditated, “but there are
other things to learn about them. . . Then, curiously, he
stopped studying diseased creatures and began fussing around
with perfectly healthy ones. He went down to the slaughter
houses and visited the string butchers and hobnobbed with
the meat merchants of Wollstein, and got bits of blood from
tens, dozens, fifties of healthy beasts that had been slaughtered
for meat. He stole a little more time from his tooth-pullings
and professional layings-on-of-hands. More and more Mrs.
Koch worried at his not tending to his practice. He bent over
his microscope, hours on end, watching the drops of healthy
blood.
“Those threads and rods are never found in the blood of
any healthy animal,” Koch pondered, “ — this is all very well,
but it doesn’t tell me whether they are bacilli, whether they are
alive ... it doesn’t show me that they grow, breed, multi-
ply. . . .”
But how to find this out? Consumptives — whom, alas, he
could not help — babies choking with diphtheria, old ladies who
imagined they were sick, all his cares of a good physician be-
gan to be shoved away into one corner of his head. How-to-
prove-these-wee-sticks-are-alive, this question made him for-
get to sign his name to prescriptions, it made him a morose
husband, it made him call the carpenter in to put up a parti-
tion in his doctor’s office. And behind this wall Koch stayed
more and more hours, with his microscope and drops of black
blood of sheep mysteriously dead — and with a growing num-
ber of cages full of scampering white mice.
“I haven’t the money to buy sheep and cows for my ex-
periments,” you can hear him muttering, while some impatient
invalid shuffled her feet in the waiting room, “besides, cows
would be a little inconvenient to have around my office — but
maybe I can give anthrax to these mice . . . maybe in them I
can prove that the sticks really grow. . . .”
So this foiled globe-trotter started on his strange explora-
tions. To me Koch is a still more weird and uncanny microbe
THE DEATH FIGHTER in
hunter than Leeuwenhoek, certainly he was just as much of
a self-made scientist. Koch was poor, he had his nose on the
grindstone of a medical practice, all the science he knew was
what a common medical course had taught him — and from
this, God knows, he had learned nothing whatever about the
art of doing experiments; he had no apparatus but Emmy’s
birthday present, that beloved microscope — everything else he
had to invent and fashion out of bits of wood and strings and
sealing wax. Worst of all, when he came into the living room
from his mice and microscope to tell Frau Koch about the new
strange things he had discovered, this good lady wrinkled up
her nose and told him:
“But, Robert, you smell sol”
Then he hit upon a sure way to give mice the fatal disease
of anthrax. He hadn’t a convenient syringe with which to shoot
the poisonous blood into them, but after sundry cursings and
the ruin of a number of perfectly good mice, he took slivers
of wood, cleaned them carefully, heated them in an oven to
kill any chance ordinary microbes that might be sticking to
them. These slivers he dipped into drops of blood from sheep
dead of anthrax, blood filled with the mysterious, motionless
threads and rods, and then — heaven knows how he managed
to hold his wiggling mouse — he made a little cut with a clean
knife at the root of the tail of the mouse, and into this cut he
delicately slid the blood-soaked splinter. He dropped this
mouse into a separate cage and washed his hands and went off
in a kind of conscientious wool-gathering way to see what was
wrong with a sick baby. . . . “Will that beast, that mouse
die of anthrax. . . . Your child will be able to go back to
school next week, Frau Schmidt. ... I hope I didn’t get any
of that anthrax blood into that cut on my finger. . . .” Such
was Koch’s life.
And next morning Koch came into his home-made labora-
tory — to find the mouse on its back, stiff, its formerly sleek
fur standing on end and its whiteness of yesterday turned into
a leaden blue, its legs sticking up in the air. He heated his
112
KOCH
kni ves, fastened the poor dead creature onto a board, dissected
it, opened it down to its liver and lights, peered into every
corner of its carcass. “Yes, this looks like the inside of an
anthrax sheep ... see the spleen, how big, how black it
is ... it almost fills the creature’s body. . . .” Swiftly he
cut with a clean heated knife into this swollen spleen and put
a drop of the blackish ooze from it before his lens. . . .
At last he muttered: “They’re here, these sticks and threads
. . . they are swarming in the body of this mouse, exactly as
they were in the drop of dead sheep’s blood that I dipped
the little sliver in yesterday.” Delighted, Koch knew that
he had caused in the mouse, so cheap to buy, so easy to handle,
the sickness of sheep and cows and men. Then for a month
his life became a monotony of one dead mouse after another,
as, day after day, he took a drop of the blood or the spleen of
one dead beast, put it carefully on a clean splinter, and slid
this sliver into a cut at the root of the tail of a new healthy
mouse. Each time, next morning, Koch came into his labora-
tory to find the new animal had died, of anthrax, and each time
in the blood of the dead beast his lens showed him myriads of
those sticks and tangled threads — those motionless, twenty-
five-thousandth-of-an-inch thick filaments that he could never
discover in the blood of any healthy animal.
“These threads must be alive,” Koch pondered, “the sliver
that I put into the mouse has a drop of blood on it and that
drop holds only a few hundreds of those sticks — and these have
grown into billions in the short twenty-four hours in which
the beast became sick and died. . . . But, confound it, I must
see these rods grow — and I can’t look inside a live mouse!”
How - shall - 1 - find - a - way - to - see - the - rods - grow -
out - into - threads? This question pounded at him while he
counted pulses and looked at his patient’s tongues. In the
evenings he hurried through supper and growled good-night to
Mrs. Koch and shut himself up in his little room that smelled
of mice and disinfectant, and tried to find ways to grow his
threads outside a mouse’s body. At this time Koch knew
THE DEATH FIGHTER 113
little or nothing about the yeast soups and flasks of Pasteur,
and the experiments he fussed with had the crude originality
of the first cave man trying to make fire.
“I will try to make these threads multiply in something that
is as near as possible like the stuff an animal’s body is made
of — it must be just like living stuff,” Koch muttered, and he
put a wee pin-point piece of spleen from a dead mouse — spleen
that was packed with the tangled threads, into a little drop of
the watery liquid from the eye of an ox. “That ought to be
good food for them,” he grumbled. “But maybe, too, the
threads have got to have the temperature of a mouse’s body
to grow,” he said, and he built with his own hands a clumsy
incubator, heated by an oil lamp. In this uncertain machine
he deposited the two flat pieces of glass between which he had
put the drop of liquid from the ox-eye. Then, in the middle
of the night, after he had gone to bed, but not to sleep, he
got up to turn the wick of his smoky incubator lamp down
a little, and instead of going back to rest, again and again he
slid the thin strips of glass with their imprisoned infinitely
little sticks before his microscope. Sometimes he thought he
could see them growing — but he could not be sure, because
other microbes, swimming and cavorting ones, had an abomi-
nable way of getting in between these strips of glass, over-grow-
ing, choking out the slender dangerous rods of anthrax.
“I must grow my rods pure, absolutely pure, without any
other microbes around,” he muttered. And he kept flounder-
ingly trying ways to do this, and his perplexity pushed up
huge wrinkles over the bridge of his nose, and built crow’s-feet
round his eyes. . . .
Then one day a perfectly easy, a foolishly simple way to
watch his rods grow flashed into Koch’s head. “I’ll put them
in a hanging-drop, where no other bugs can get in among
them,” he muttered. On a flat, clear piece of glass, very thin,
which he had heated thoroughly to destroy all chance microbes,
Koch placed a drop of the watery fluid of an eye from a just-
butchered healthy ox; into this drop he delicately inserted the
1 14
KOCH
wee-est fragment of spleen, fresh out of a mouse that had a
moment before died miserably of anthrax. Over the drop he
put a thick oblong piece of glass with a concave well scooped
out of it so that the drop would not be touched. Around this
well he had smeared some vaseline to make the thin glass stick
to the thick one. Then, dextrously, he turned this simple ap-
paratus upside down, and presto! — here was his hanging-
drop, his ox-eye fluid with its rod-swarming spleen, imprisoned
in the well — away from all other microbes.
1 - I
Koch did not know it, perhaps, but this — apart from that
day when Leeuwenhoek first saw little animals in rain water
— was a most important moment in microbe hunting, and in
the fight of mankind against death.
“Nothing can get into that drop— only the rods are there —
now we’ll see if they will grow,” whispered Koch as he slid his
hanging-drop under the lens of his microscope; in a kind of
stolid excitement he pulled up his chair and sat down to watch
what would happen. In the gray circle of the field of his lens
he could see only a few shreddy lumps of mouse spleen — they
looked microscopically enormous — and here and there a very
tiny rod floated among these shreds. He looked — fifty min-
utes out of each hour for two hours he looked, and nothing
happened. But then a weird business began among the shreds
of diseased spleen, an unearthly moving picture, a drama that
made shivers shoot up and down his back.
The little drifting rods had begun to grow! Here were two
where one had been before. There was one slowly stretching
itself out into a tangled endless thread, pushing its snaky way
across the whole diameter of the field of the lens — in a couple
of hours the dead small chunks of spleen were completely hid-
den by the myriads of rods, the masses of thread that were
THE DEATH FIGHTER
115
like a hopelessly tangled ball of colorless yam, living yarn—
silent murderous yarn.
“Now I know that these rods are alive,” breathed Koch.
“Now I see the way they grow into millions in my poor little
mice — in the sheep, in the cows even. One of these rods, these
bacilli — he is a billion times smaller than an ox — just one of
them maybe gets into an ox, and he doesn’t bear any grudge
against the ox, he doesn’t hate him, but he grows, this bacillus,
into millions, everywhere through the big animal, swarming
in his lungs and brain, choking his blood-vessels — it is terri-
ble.”
Time, his office and its dull duties, his waiting and com-
plaining patients — all of these things became nonsense, seemed
of no account, were unreal to Koch whose head was now full
of nothing but dreadful pictures of the tangled skeins of the
anthrax threads. Then each day of a nervous experiment that
lasted eight days Koch repeated his miracle of making a mil-
lion bacilli grow where only a few were before. He planted
a wee bit of his rod-swarming hanging-drop into a fresh, pure
drop of the watery fluid of an ox-eye and in every one of these
new drops the few rods grew into myriads.
“I have grown these bacilli for eight generations away from
any animal, I have grown them pure, apart from any other
microbe — there is no part of the dead mouse’s spleen, no dis-
eased tissue left in this eighth hanging-drop — only the chil-
dren of the bacilli that killed the mouse are in it. . . . Will
these bacilli still grow in a mouse, or in a sheep, if I inject
them — are these threads really the cause of anthrax?”
Carefully Koch smeared a wee bit of his hanging-drop that
swarmed with the microbes of the eighth generation — this drop
was murky, even to his naked eye, with countless bacilli — he
smeared a part of this drop on to a little splinter of wood.
Then, with that guardian angel who cares for daring stumbling
imprudent searchers of nature standing by him, Koch deftly
slid this splinter under the skin of a healthy mouse.
n6 KOCH
The next day Koch was bending near-sightedly over the
body of this little creature pinned on his dissecting board;
giddy with hope, he was carefully flaming his knives. . . .
Not three minutes later Koch is seated before his microscope,
a bit of the dead creature’s spleen between two thin bits of
glass. “I’ve proved it,” he whispers, “here are the threads,
the rods — those little bacilli from my hanging drop were just
as murderous as the ones right out of the spleen of a dead
sheep.”
So it was that Koch found in this last mouse exactly the
same kind of microbe that he had spied long before — having
no idea it was alive — in the blood of the first dead cow he had
peered at when his hands were fumbling and his microscope
was new. It was precisely the same kind of bacillus that he
had nursed so carefully, through long successions of mice,
through I do not know how many hanging-drops.
First of all searchers, of all men that ever lived, ahead of
the prophet Pasteur who blazed the trail for him, Koch had
really made sure that one certain kind of microbe causes one
definite kind of disease, that miserably small bacilli may be
the assassins of formidable animals. He had angled for these
impossibly tiny fish, and spied on them without knowing any-
thing at all of their habits, their lurking places, of how hardy
they might be or how vicious, of how easy it might be for them
to leap upon him from the perfect ambush their invisibility
gave them.
ra
Cool and stolid, Koch, now that he had come through these
perils, never thought himself a hero; he did not even think of
publishing his experiments! To-day it would be inconceivable
for a man to do such magnificent work and discover such mo-
mentous secrets, and keep his mouth shut about it.
But Koch plugged on, and it is doubtful whether this hesi-
tating, entirely modest genius of a German country doctor
THE DEATH FIGHTER 117
realized the beauty or the importance of his lonely experi-
ments.
He plugged on. He must know morel He went pell-mell
at the inoculating of guinea-pigs and rabbits, and at last even
sheep, with the innocent looking but fatal fluid from the hang-
ing-drops; and in each one of these beasts, in the sheep just
as quickly and horribly as the mouse, the few thousands of
microbes on the splinter multiplied into billions in the animals,
in a few hours they teemed poisonously in what had been
robust tissues, choking the little veins and arteries with their
myriads, turning to a sinister black the red blood — so killing
the sheep, the guinea-pigs, and the rabbits.
At one fantastic jump Koch had soared out of the vast
anonymous rank and file of pill-rollers and landed among the
most original of the searchers, and the more ingeniously he
hunted microbes, the more miserably he tended to the impor-
tant duties of his practice. Babies in far-off farms howled, but
he did not come; peasants, with jumping aches in their teeth,
waited sullen hours for him — and at last he had to turn over
part of his practice to another doctor. Mrs. Koch saw little
of him and worried and wished he would not go on his calls
smelling of germicides and of his menagerie of animals. But
so far as he was concerned his suffering patients and his wife
might have been inhabitants of the other side of the moon —
for a new mysterious question was worrying at his head, tug-
ging at him, keeping him awake:
How, in nature, do these little weak anthrax bacilli that fade
away and die so easily on my slides, how do they get from sick
animals to healthy ones?
There were superstitions among the farmers and horse doc-
tors of Europe about this disease, strange beliefs in regard to
the mysterious power of this plague that hung always over
their flocks and herds like some cruel invisible sword. Why,
this disease is too terrible to be caused by such a wretched little
creature as a twenty-thousandth-of-an-inch-Iong bacillus!
“Your little germ may be what kills our herds, all right,
KOCH
118
Herr Doktor,” the cattle men told Koch, “but How is it that
our cows or sheep can be all right in one pasture — perfectly
healthy, and then, when we take them into another field, with
fine grazing in it, they die like flies?”
Koch knew of this troublesome, mysterious fact too. He
knew that in Auvergne in France there were green mountains,
horrible mountains where no flock of sheep could go without
being picked off, one by one, or in dozens and even hundreds
by the black disease, anthrax. And in the country of the
Beauce there were fertile fields where sheep grew fat — only to
die of anthrax. The peasants shivered at night by their fires:
“Our fields are cursed,” they whispered.
These things bothered Koch — how could his tiny bacilli live
over winter, even for years, in the fields and on the mountains?
How could they, indeed, when he had smeared a little bacillus-
swarming spleen from a dead mouse on a clean slip of glass,
and watched the microbes grow dim, break up, and fade from
view? And when he put the nourishing watery fluid of ox-
eyes on these bits of glass, the bacilli would no longer grow;
when he washed the dried blood off and injected it into mice
— these little beasts continued to scamper gayly about in their
cages. The microbes, which two days before could have killed
a heavy cow, were dead!
“What keeps them alive in the fields, then,” muttered Koch,
“when they die on my clean glasses in two days?”
Then one day he ran on to a curious sight under his micro-
scope — a strange transformation of his microbes that gave him
a clew to his question; and Koch sat down on his stool in his
eight-by-ten laboratory in East Prussia and solved the mys-
tery of the cursed fields and mountains of France. He had
kept a hanging-drop, in its closed glass well, at the temper-
ature of a mouse’s body for twenty-four hours. “Ah, this ought
to be full of nice long threads of bacilli,” he muttered, and
looked down the tube of his microscope — “What’s this?” he
cried.
The outlines of the threads had grown dim, and each threat
THE DEATH FIGHTER
119
was speckled, through its whole length, with little ovals that
shone brightly like infinitely tiny glass beads, and these beads
were arranged along the threads as perfectly as a string of
pearls.
To himself Koch muttered guttural curses. “Other microbes
have doubtless gotten into my hanging-drop,” he grumbled, but
when he looked very carefully he saw that wasn’t true, for the
shiny little beads were inside the threads — the bacilli that make
up the threads have turned into these beads! He dried this
hanging-drop, and put it away carefully, for a month or so,
and then as luck would have it, looked at it once more through
his lens. The strange strings of beads were still there, shining
as brightly as ever. Then an idea for an experiment got hold
of him — he took a drop of pure fresh watery fluid from the
eye of an ox. He placed it on the dried-up smear with its
months-old bacilli that had turned into beads. His head swam
with confused surprise as he looked, and watched the beads
grow back into the ordinary bacilli, and then into long threads
once more. It was outlandish!
“Those queer shiny beads have turned back into ordinary
anthrax bacilli again,” cried Koch, “the beads must be the
spores of the microbe — the tough form of them that can stand
great heat, and cold, and drying. . . . That must be the way
the anthrax microbe can keep itself alive in the fields for so
long — the bacilli must turn into spores. . . .”
Then Koch launched himself into thorough, ingenious tests
to see if his quick guess was right. Expertly now he took
spleens out of mice which had perished of anthrax — he lifted
this deadly stuff out carefully with heated knives and forceps.
Protected from all chance of contamination by stray microbes
of the air, he kept the spleens for a day at the temperature of
a mouse’s body, and, sure enough, the microbes, every thread
of them, turned into glassy spores.
Then in experiments that kept him incessantly in his dirty
little room he found that the spores remained alive for months,
ready to hatch out into deadly bacilli the moment he put them
120
KOCH
into a fresh drop of the watery fluid of ox-eyes, or the instant
he stuck them, on one of his thin slivers, into the root of a
mouse’s tail.
“These spores never form in an animal while he is still alive
— they only appear after he has died, and then only when he is
kept very warm,” said Koch, and he proved this beautifully by
clapping spleens into an ice chest — and in a few days this
stuff, smeared on splinters, was no more dangerous than if he
had shot so much beefsteak into his mice.
It was now the year 1876, and Koch was thirty-four years
old, and at last he emerged out of the bush of Wollstein, to
tell the world — stuttering a little — that it was at last proved
that microbes were the cause of disease. Koch put on his best
suit and his gold-rimmed spectacles and packed up his micro-
scope, a few hanging-drops in their glass cells, swarming with
murderous anthrax bacilli; and besides these things he bundled
a cage into the train with him, a cage that bounced a little with
several dozen healthy white mice. He took a train for Breslau
to exhibit his anthrax microbes and the way they kill mice, and
the weird way in which they turn into glassy spores — he
wanted to demonstrate these things to old Professor Cohn, the
botanist at the University, who had sometimes written him en-
couraging letters.
Professor Cohn, who had been amazed at the marvelous ex-
periments about which the lonely Koch had written him, old
Cohn snickered when he thought of how this greenhorn doctor
— who had no idea, himself, of how original he was — would
surprise the highbrows of the University. He sent out invita-
tions to the most eminent medicoes of the school to come to
the first night of Koch’s show.
iv
And they came. To hear the unscientific backwoodsman—
they came. They came maybe out of friendliness to old Pro-
fessor Cohn. But Koch didn’t lecture — he was never much at
THE DEATH FIGHTER
121
talking — instead of telling them that his microbes were the
true cause of anthrax, he showed these sophisticated professors.
For three days and nights he showed them, taking them in
swift steps through those searchings he had sweated at — grop-
ing and failing often — for years. Never was there a greater
come-down for bigwigs who had arrived prepared to be indul-
gent to a nobody. Koch never argued once, he never bubbled
and raved and made prophecies — but he slipped slivers into
mouse tails with an unearthly cleverness, and the experienced
professors of pathology opened their eyes to see him handle
his spores and bacilli and microscopes like a sixty-year-old
master. It was a knock-out!
At last Professor Cohnheim, one of the most skillful scien-
tists in the study of diseases in all of Europe, could hold him-
self no longer. He rushed from the hall, hurried to his
own laboratory, and burst into the room where his young
student searchers were working. He shouted to them: “My
boys, drop everything and go see Doctor Koch — this man
has made a great discovery!” Cohnheim gasped to get his
breath.
“But who is this Koch, Herr Professor? We’ve never even
heard of him.”
“No matter who he is — it is a great discovery, so exact, so
simple. It is astounding! This Koch is not a professor,
even. ... He hasn’t even been taught how to do research!
He’s done it all by himself, complete — there is nothing more
to do!”
“But what is this discovery, Herr Professor?”
“Go, I tell you, every one of you, and see for yourselves. It
is the most marvelous discovery in the realm of microbes . . .
he will make us all ashamed of ourselves. . . . Go ” But
by this time, all of them, including Paul Ehrlich, had dis-
appeared through the door.
Seven years before, Pasteur had foretold: “It is within the
power of man to make parasitic maladies disappear from the
face of the earth. . . .” And when he said these words the
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KOCH
wisest doctors in the world put their fingers to their heads,
thinking: “The poor fellow is cracked!”
But this night Robert Koch had shown the world the first
step toward the fulfillment of Pasteur’s seemingly insane vision:
“Tissues from animals dead of anthrax, whether they are fresh,
or putrid, or dried, or a year old, can only produce anthrax
when they contain bacilli or the spores of bacilli. Before this
fact all doubt must be laid aside that these bacilli are the cause
of anthrax,” he told them finally, as if his experiments had not
convinced them already. And he ended by telling his amazed
audience how to fight this terrible disease — how his experi-
ments showed a way to stamp it out in the end: “All animals
that die of anthrax must be destroyed at once after they die
— or if they can not be burned, they should be buried deep
in the ground, where the earth is so cold that the bacilli can-
not turn into the tough, long-lived spores. . . .”
So it was that in these three days at Breslau this Koch put
a sword Excalibur into the hands of men, with which to begin
the fight against their enemies the microbes, their fight against
lurking death; so it was that he began to change the whole
business of doctors from a foolish hocus-pocus with pills and
leeches into an intelligent fight where science instead of super-
stition was the weapon.
Koch fell among friends — among honest generous men — at
Breslau. Cohn and Cohnheim, instead of trying to steal his
stuff (there are no fewer shady fellows in science than in any
other human activity), these two professors immediately set
up a great whooping for Koch, an applause that echoed over
Europe and made Pasteur a bit uneasy for his job as Dean of
the Microbe Hunters. These two friends began to bombard
the authorities of the Imperial Health Office at Berlin about
this unknown that Germany ought to be proud of — they did
their best to give Koch a chance to do nothing but chase the
microbes of disease, to get away from that dull practice of his.
Left alone, or snubbed at Breslau, he might easily have gone
back to Wollstein to his business of telling people to stick out
THE DEATH FIGHTER iaj
their tongues. In short, men of science have either to be
showmen — as were the magnificent Spallanzani and the pas*
sionate Pasteur — or they have to have impresarios.
Koch packed up Emmy and his household goods and moved
to Breslau and was given a job as city physician at four hun-
dred and fifty dollars a year, and was supposed to eke out his
living with the private patients that would undoubtedly flock
to be treated by such a brilliant man.
So thought Cohn and Cohnheim. But the doorbell of Koch’s
little office didn’t ring, hardly any one came to ring it, and so
Koch learned that it is a great disadvantage for a doctor to
be brainy and inquire into the final causes of things. He went
back to Wollstein, beaten, and here from 1878 to 1880 he
made long jumps ahead in microbe hunting once more — spying
on and tracking down the strange sub-visible beings that cause
the deadly infections of wounds in animals and in human be-
ings. He learned to stain all kinds of bacilli with different
colored dyes, so that the very tiniest microbe would stand out
clearly. In some unknown way he saved money enough to
buy a camera and stuck its lens against his microscope and
learned — no one helping him — how to take pictures of these
little creatures.
“You’ll never convince the world about these murderous
bugs until you can show them photographs,” Koch said. “Two
men can’t look through one microscope at the same time, no
two men will ever draw the same picture of a germ — so there’ll
Always be wrangling and confusion. . . . But these photo-
graphs can’t lie — and ten men can study them, and come to an
agreement on them. . . So it was that Koch began to try
to introduce rime and reason into the baby science of microbe
hunting which up till now had been as much a wordy brawl as
a quest for knowledge.
Meanwhile his friends at Breslau had not forgotten him and
in 1880 — it was like some bush-leaguer breaking into the big
team — he was told by the government to come to Berlin and
be Extraordinary Associate of the Imperial Health Office.
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KOCH
Here he was given a fine laboratory and a sudden un-
dreamed-of wealth of apparatus and two assistants and enough
money so that he could spend sixteen or eighteen hours of his
working day among his stains and tubes and chittering guinea*
pigs.
By this time the news of Koch’s discoveries had spread to
all of the laboratories of Europe and had crossed the ocean
and inflamed the doctors of America. The vast exciting Bat-
tle of the Germ Theory was on! Every medical man and
Professor of Diseases who knew — or thought he knew — the
top end from the bottom of a microscope set out to become
a microbe hunter. Every week brought glad news of the sup-
posed discovery of some new deadly microbe, surely the as-
sassin of suffering from cancer or typhoid fever or consump-
tion. One enthusiast would shout across continents that he
had discovered a kind of pan-germ that caused all diseases
from pneumonia to the pip — only to be forgotten for an idiot
who might claim that he had proved one disease, let us say
consumption, to be the result of the attack of a hundred dif-
ferent species of microbes.
So great was the enthusiasm about germs — and the con-
fusion — that Koch’s discoveries were in danger of being
laughed into obscurity along with the vast magazines full of
balderdash that were being printed on the subject of the germ
theory.
And yet to-day we demand with a great hue and cry more
laboratories, more microbe hunters, better paid searchers to
free us from the diseases that scourge us. How futile! For
progress, God must send us a few more infernal marvelous
searchers of the kind of Robert Koch.
But in the midst of the danger that foolish enthusiasm
would kill the new science of microbe hunting, Koch kept his
head, and sat down to find a way to grow germs pure. “One
germ, one kind of germ only, causes one definite kind of dis-
ease — every disease has its own specific microbe, I know that,”
said Koch — without knowing it. “I’ve got to find a sure easy
THE DEATH FIGHTER
125
method of growing one species of germ away from all other
contaminating ones that are always threatening to sneak in!”
But how to cage one kind of microbe? All manner of weird
machines were being invented to try to keep different sorts of
germs apart. Several microbe hunters devised apparatus so
complicated that when they had finished building it they prob-
ably had already forgotten what they set out to invent it for.
To keep stray germs of the air from falling into their bottles
some heroic searchers did their inoculations in an actual rain
of poisonous germicides!
Until, one day, Koch — who frankly admitted it was by acci-
dent — looked at the flat surface of half of a boiled potato left
on a table in his laboratory. “What’s this, I wonder?” he
muttered, as he stared at a curious collection of little colored
droplets scattered on the surface of the potato. “Here’s a
gray colored drop, here’s a red one, there’s a yellow, a violet
one — these little specks must be made up of germs from the
air. I’ll have a look at them.”
He stuck his short-sighted eyes down close to the potato so
that his scraggly little beard almost dragged in it; he got ready
his thin plates of glass and polished off the lenses of his micro-
scope.
With a slender wire of platinum he fished delicately into one
of the gray droplets and put a bit of its slimy stuff in a little
pure water between two bits of glass, under his microscope.
Here he saw a swarm of bacilli, swimming gently about, and
every one of these microbes looked exactly like his thousands
of brothers in this drop. Then Koch peered at the bugs from
a yellow droplet on the potato, and at those of a red one and
a violet one. The germs from one were round, from another
they had the appearance of swimming sticks, from a third
microbes looked like living corkscrews — but all the microbes
in one given drop were like their brothers, invariably 1
126
KOCH
Then in a flash Koch saw the beautiful experiment nature
had done for him. “Every one of these droplets is a pure
culture of one definite kind of microbe — a pure colony of one
species of germs. . . . How simple! When germs fall from
the air into the liquid soups we have been using — the different
kinds of them get all mixed up and swim among each
other. . . . But when different bugs fall from the air on the
solid surface of this potato — each one has to stay where it
falls ... it sticks there . . . then it grows there, multiplies
into millions of its own kind . . . absolutely pure!”
Koch called Loeffler and Gaffky, his two military doctor as-
sistants, and soberly he showed them the change in the whole
mixed-up business of microbe hunting that his chance glance at
an abandoned potato had brought. It was revolutionary! The
three of them set to work with an amazing — loyal Frenchmen
might call it stupid — German thoroughness to see if Koch was
right. There they sat before the three windows of their room,
Koch before his microscope on a high stool in the middle,
Loeffler and Gaffky on stools on his left hand and his right —
a kind of grimly toiling trinity. They tried to defeat their
hopes, but quickly they discovered that Koch’s prophecy was
an even more true one than he had dreamed. They made mix-
tures of two or three kinds of germs, mixtures that could never
have been untangled by growing in flasks of soup; they
streaked these confused species of microbes on the cut flat
surfaces of boiled potatoes. And where each separate tiny
microbe landed, there it stuck, and grew into a colony of mil-
lions of its own kind — and nothing but its own kind.
Now Koch, who, by this simple experience of the old potato,
had changed microbe hunting from a guessing game into some-
thing that came near the sureness of a science — Koch, I say,
got ready to track down the tiny messengers that bring a dozen
murderous diseases to mankind. Up till this time Koch had
had very little criticism or opposition from other men of
science, mainly because he almost never opened his mouth un-
til he was sure of his results. He told of his discoveries with
THE DEATH FIGHTER
127
a disarming modesty and his work was so unanswerably com-
plete — he had a way of seeing the objections that critics might
make and replying to them in advance — that it was hard to
find protestors.
Full of confidence Koch went to Professor Rudolph Vir-
chow, by far the most eminent German researcher in disease,
an incredible savant, who knew more than there was to be
known about a greater number of subjects than any sixteen
scientists together could possibly know. Virchow was, in brief,
the ultimate Pooh-Bah of German medical science. He had
spoken the very last word on clots in blood vessels and had
invented the impressive words, heteropopia, agenesia, and
ochronosis, and many others that I have been trying for years
to understand the meaning of. He had — with tremendous mis-
takenness — maintained that consumption and scrofula were
two different diseases; but with his microscope he had made
genuinely good, even superb descriptions of the way sick tissues
look and he had turned his lens into every noisome nook and
cranny of twenty-six thousand dead bodies. Virchow had
printed — I do not exaggerate — thousands of scientific papers,
on every subject imaginable, from the shapes of little German
schoolboys’ heads and noses to the remarkably small size of
the blood vessels in the bodies of sickly green-faced girls.
Properly awed — as any one would be — Koch tiptoed re-
spectfully into this Presence.
“I have discovered a way to grow microbes pure, unmixed
with other germs, Herr Professor,” the bashful Koch told Vir-
chow, with deference.
“And how, I beg you tell me, can you do that? It looks to
me to be impossible.”
“By growing them on solid food — I can get beautiful isolated
colonies of one kind of microbe on the surface of a boiled po-
tato. . . . And now I have invented a better way than
that ... I mix gelatin with beef broth . . . and the gelatin
sets and makes a solid surface, and ”
But Virchow was not impressed. He made a sardonic re-
KOCH
128
mark that it was so hard to keep different races of germs from
getting mixed up that Koch would have to have a separate
laboratory for each species of microbe. ... In short, Virchow
was very sniffish and cold to Koch, for he had come to that
time of life when ageing men believe that everything is known
and there is nothing more to be found out. Koch went away
a bit depressed, but not one jot was he discouraged. Instead
of arguing and writing papers and making speeches against
Virchow he launched himself into the most exciting and superb
of all his microbe huntings — he set out to spy upon and dis-
cover the most vicious of microbes, that mysterious marauder
which each year killed one man, woman, and child out of every
seven that died, in Europe, in America. Koch rolled up his
sleeves and wiped his gold-rimmed glasses and set out to hunt
down the microbe of tuberculosis.
VI
Compared to this sly murderer the bacillus of anthrax had
been reasonably easy to discover — it was a large bug as mi-
crobes go, and the bodies of sick animals were literally alive
with anthrax germs when the beasts were about to die. But
this tubercle germ — if indeed there was such a creature — was
a different matter. Many searchers were looking in vain for
it. Leeuwenhoek, with his sharpest of all eyes, would never
have found it even if he had looked at a hundred sick lungs;
Spallanzani’s microscopes would not have been good enough to
have revealed this sly microbe; Pasteur, searcher that he was,
had neither the precise methods of searching, nor, perhaps, the
patience, to lay bare this assassin.
All that was known about tuberculosis was that it must be
caused by some kind of microbe, since it could be transmitted
from sick men to healthy animals. An old Frenchman, Ville-
min, had pioneered in this work, and Cohnheim, the brilliant
professor of Breslau, had found that he could give tuberculosis
to rabbits — by putting a bit of the consumptive’s sick lung
THE DEATH FIGHTER
129
into the front chamber of a rabbit’s eye. Here Cohnheim
could watch the little islands of sick tissue — the tubercles —
spread and do their deadly work; it was a strange clever ex-
periment that was like looking through a window at a disease
growing. . . .
Koch had studied Cohnheim’s experiments closely. “This
is what I need,” he meditated. “I may not use human beings
for experimental animals, but now I can give the disease,
whenever I wish, to animals . . . here is a real chance to
study it, handle it, to look for the microbe that must cause
it . . . there must be a microbe there. . . .”
So Koch set to work — he did everything with a cold system
that gives one the shivers when one reads his scientific reports
— and he got his first consumptive stuff from a powerful man,
a laborer aged thirty-six. This man had been superbly healthy
three weeks before, when all at once he began to cough, little
pains shot through his chest, his body seemed literally to melt
away. Four days after this poor fellow entered the hospital,
he was dead, riddled with tubercles — every organ was peppered
with little grayish-yellow, millet-seed-like specks
With this dangerous stuff Koch set to work, alone, for
Loeffler had set out to track down the microbe of diphtheria
and Gaffky was busy trying to find the sub-visible author of
typhoid fever. Koch, meanwhile, crushed the yellowish tuber-
cles from the body of the dead man between two heated
knives; he ground these granules up and delicately, with a
little syringe, injected them into the eyes of numerous rabbits
and under the skins of flocks of foolish guinea-pigs. He put
these beasts in clean cages and tended them lovingly. And
while he waited for his creatures to develop signs of the con-
sumption, he began to peer with his most powerful micro-
scope through the sick tissues that he had taken from the body
of the dead workman.
For days he saw nothing. His best lenses, that magnified
many hundred times, showed him only the dead ruins of what
had once been good healthy lung or liver. “If there is a tuber-
130
KOCH
cle microbe, he is such a sneaky fellow that I won’t be able,
perhaps, to see him in his native state. But I can try painting
the tissue with a powerful dye — that may make this bug stand
out. . . .”
Day after day, Koch set about staining the stuff from the
dead workman brown and blue and violet and most of the
colors of the rainbow. Carefully, dipping his hands in the
germ-killing bichloride of mercury after almost every move —
blackening and wrinkling them with it — he smeared the peril-
ous material from the tubercles on thin clean bits of glass and
kept these pieces of glass for hours in a strong blue dye. . . .
Then one morning he took his specimens out of their bath
of stain, and put them under his lens, and focussed his micro-
scope and out of the gray mist a strange picture untangled it-
self. Lying among the shattered diseased lung cells were curi-
ous masses of little, infinitely thin bacilli — blue colored rods
— so slim that he could not guess their size, and they were less
than a fifteen-thousandth of an inch long.
“Ah! they are pretty,” he muttered. “They’re not straight
like the anthrax bugs . . . they have little bends and curves
in them. Wait! here are whole bunches of them . . . like
cigarettes in a pack — Heh! here is one lone devil inside a lung
cell ... I wonder . . . have I found him — that tubercle
bug, already?”
Koch went on, precisely, with that efficiency of his, to stain-
ing tubercles from every part of the workman’s body, and
everywhere his blue dye showed up these same slender crooked
bacilli — strange creatures unlike any he had seen in all the
thousands of animals or men, diseased or healthy, into whose
insides he had pried. And now, sorry things began to happen
to his inoculated guinea-pigs and rabbits. The guinea-pigs
began to huddle disconsolately in the corners of their cages;
their sleek coats ruffled and their bouncing little bodies began
to fall away until they were sad bags of bones. They were
feverish, their cavortings stopped and they looked listlessly at
their fine carrots and their fragrant meals of hay — and one by
THE DEATH FIGHTER
131
one they died. And as these unconscious martyrs died — for
Koch’s mad curiosity and for suffering men — the little microbe
hunter pinned them down on his post-mortem board and
soaked their sick hair with bichloride of mercury and precisely
and with breathless care cut them open with sterile knives.
And inside these poor beasts Koch found the same kind of
grayish-yellow sinister tubercles that had filled the body of the
workman. Into the baths of blue stain on his eternal strips
of glass Koch dipped them — and everywhere, in every one, he
found the same terrible curved sticks that had jumped into his
astounded gaze when he had stained the lung of the dead man.
“I have it!” he whispered, and called the busy Loeffler and
the faithful Gaffky from their own spyings on other microbes.
“Look!” Koch cried. “One little speck of tubercle I put into
this beast six weeks ago — there could not have been more
than a few hundred of those bacilli in that small bit — and
now they’ve grown into billions! What devils they are, those
germs — from that one place in the guinea-pig’s groin they have
sneaked everywhere into his body, they have gnawed — they
have grown through the walls of his arteries ... the blood
has carried them into his bones . . . into the farthest cor-
ner of his brain. . . .”
Now he went to hospitals everywhere in Berlin, and begged
the bodies of men or women that had died of consumption, he
spent dreary days in dead houses and every evening before his
microscope in his laboratory where the stillness was broken
only by the eerie purrings and scurryings of guinea-pigs. He
injected the sick tissue from the wasted bodies of consumptives
who had died, into hundreds of guinea-pigs, into rabbits and
three dogs, thirteen scratching cats, ten flopping chickens and
twelve pigeons. He didn’t stop with these wholesale insane
inoculations but shot the same kind of deadly cheesy stuff
into white mice and rats and field mice and into two marmots.
Never in microbe hunting has there been such appalling thor-
oughness.
“Ach! this is a little hard on the nerves, this work,” he
KOCH
13a
muttered (thinking, perhaps of the lightning move of the paw
of one of his cats jabbing the germ-filled syringe needle into
his own hand). For Koch, hunting his invisible foes alone,
there were so many disagreeable and always imminent possi-
bilities of excitement — of something tragically worse than mere
excitement. . . .
But the hand of this completely unheroic looking little mi-
crobe hunter never slipped, it just grew drier and more
wrinkled and blacker from its incessant baths in the bichloride
of mercury — that good bichloride, with which in those old
days the groping microbe hunters used to swab down every-
thing, including their own persons. Then, week by week, in all
of Koch’s meaouwing, crowing, barking, clucking menagerie of
beasts those small curved bacilli grew into their relentless mil-
lions — and one by one the animals died, and gave eighteen-
hour-days of work to Robert Koch in post-mortems and blear-
eyed peerings through the microscope.
“It is only when a man or beast has tuberculosis that I can
find these blue-stained rods, these bacilli,” Koch told Loeffler
and Gaffky. “In healthy animals — I have looked, you know,
at hundreds of them — I never find them.”
“That means, without doubt, that you have discovered the
bacillus that is the cause, Herr Doktor ”
“No — not yet — what I have done might make Pasteur sure,
but I am not at all convinced yet. ... I have to get these
bacilli out of the bodies of my dying animals now . . . grow
them on our beef broth jelly, pure colonies of these microbes
I must get, and cultivate them for months, away from any
living creature . . . and then, if I inoculate these cultivations
into good healthy animals, and they get tuberculosis . . .”
and Koch’s sober wrinkled face smiled for a moment. Loef-
fler and Gaffky, ashamed of their jumping at conclusions, went
back awed to their own searchings.
Testing every possible combination that his head could in-
vent, Koch set out to try to grow his bacilli pure on beef -broth
jelly. He made a dozen different kinds of good soup for them.
THE DEATH FIGHTER 133
he kept his tubes and bottles at the temperature of the room
and the temperature of a man’s body and the temperature of
fever. He cleverly used the sick lungs of guinea-pigs that
teemed with bacilli, lungs that held no other stray microbes
which might over-grow and choke out those delicate germs
which he was sure must be the authors of consumption. The
stuff from these lungs he planted dangerously into hundreds
of tubes and bottles, but all this work ended in — nothing. In
brief, those slim bacilli that grew like weeds in tropic gardens
in the bodies of his sick animals, those microbes that swarmed
in millions in sick men, those bacilli turned up their noses —
that is, they would have if they had been equipped with noses
— at the good soups and jellies that Koch cooked for them.
It was no go!
But one day a reason for his failures popped into Koch’s
head: “The trouble is that these tubercle bacilli will only grow
in the bodies of living creatures — they are maybe almost com-
plete parasites — I must fix a food for them that is as near as
possible like the stuff a living animal’s body is made of!”
So it was that Koch invented his famous food — blood-serum
jelly — for microbes that are too finicky to grow on common
provender. He went to string-butchers and got the clear
straw-colored serum from the clotted blood of freshly slaugh-
tered healthy cattle and carefully heated this fluid to kill all
the stray microbes that might have fallen into it. Delicately
he poured this serum into each one of dozens of narrow test-
tubes, and placed these on a slant so that there would be a
long flat surface on which to smear the sick consumptive
tissues. Then ingeniously he heated each tube just hot enough
to make the serum set, on a slant, into a clear beautiful jelly.
That morning a guinea-pig, sadly riddled with tuberculosis,
had died. He dissected out of it a couple of the grayish yel-
low tubercles, and then, with a wire of platinum he streaked
bits of this bacillus-swarming stuff on the moist surface of his
serum jelly, on tube after tube of it. Then, with that drawing in
and puffing out of breath that comes after a nasty piece of
134
KOCH
work, well done, Koch took his tubes and put them in the oven
— at the exact temperature of a guinea-pig’s body.
Day after day Koch hurried in the morning to his incubat-
ing oven, and took out his tubes and held them close to his
gold-rimmed glasses, and saw — nothing.
“Well, I have failed again,” he mumbled — it was the four-
teenth day after he had planted his consumptive stuff — “every
other microbe I have ever grown multiplies into large colonies
in a couple of days, but here, confound it — there is nothing,
nothing . .
Any other man would have pitched these barren disappoint-
ing serum-tubes out, but at this stubbly-haired country doc-
tor’s shoulder his familiar demon whispered: “Wait — be pa-
tient, my master — you know that tubercle germs sometimes
take months, years to kill men. Maybe too they grow very
slowly in the serum tubes.” So Koch did not pitch the tubes
out, and on the morning of the fifteenth day he came back to
his incubator — to find the velvety surface of the serum jelly
covered with tiny glistening specks! Koch reached a trem-
bling hand for his pocket lens, clapped it to his eye and peered
at one tube after another, and through his lens these glistening
specks swelled out into dry tiny scales. . . .
In a daze Koch pulled the cotton plug out of one of his
tubes, mechanically he flamed its mouth in the sputtering blue
fire of the Bunsen burner, with a platinum wire he picked off
one of these little flaky colonies — they must be microbes —
and not knowing how or what, he got them before his micro-
scope* • • •
Then he knew that he had got to a warm inn on the stony
road of his adventure — here they were, countless myriads of
these same bacilli, these crooked rods that he had first spied
in the lung of the dead workman. They were motionless but
surely multiplying and alive — they were delicate and finicky
about their food and feeble in size, but more savage than
hordes of Huns and more murderous than ten thousand nests
of rattlesnakes
THE DEATH FIGHTER
135
Now Koch, in taut intent months, confirmed his first suc-
cess — he went after proving it with a patience and a detail
that made me sick of his everlasting thoroughness and pru-
dence as I read the endlessly multiplied experiments in his
classic report on tuberculosis — from consumptive monkeys
and consumptive oxen and consumptive guinea-pigs Koch grew
forty-three different families of these deadly rods on his slanted
tubes of serum jelly!
And only from animals sick or dying of tuberculosis, could
he grow them. For months he nursed these wee murderers
along, planting them from one tube to another — with marvel-
ous watchfulness he kept all other chance microbes away from
them.
“Now I must shoot these bacilli — these pure cultivations of
my bacilli — into healthy guinea-pigs, into all kinds of healthy
animals. If then these creatures get tuberculosis, I shall know
that my bacilli are necessarily and beyond all doubt the cause! ”
That man with the terrible single-mindedness of a maniac
driven by a fixed idea changed his laboratory into the weird-
est kind of zoo. He became grouchy to every one — to curious
visitors he was a sarcastic, spiteful little German ogre. Alone
he sterilized batteries of shining syringes and shot the crinkly
masses of microbes from the cultivations in his serum-jelly
tubes — he injected these bacilli ground up in a little pure water
into guinea-pigs and rabbits and hens and rats and mice and
monkeys. “That’s not enough!” he growled, “I’ll try some
animals that never are known to have tuberculosis naturally.”
So he ranged abroad and gathered to his laboratory and injected
his beloved terrible bacilli into tortoises, sparrows, five frogs
and three eels.
Insanely Koch completed this most fantastic test by stick-
ing his microbes from the serum cultivation into — a goldfish!
Days dragged by, weeks passed, and every day Koch walked
into his workshop in the morning and made straight for the
cages and jars that held these momentous animals. The gold-
fish continued to open and shut his mouth and swim placidly
KOCH
136
about in his round-bellied bowl. The frogs croaked unconcern-
edly and the eels kept all of their slippery liveliness; the tor-
toise now and then stuck his head out of his shell and seemed
to wink an eye at Koch as if to say: “Your tubercle bugs are
food for me — give me some more.”
But while his injections worked no harm to these creatures,
that do not in the course of nature get consumption anyway
— at the same time the guinea-pigs began to droop, to lie piti-
fully on their sides, gasping. One by one they died, their
bodies wasting terribly into tubercles. . . .
Now Koch had forged the last link of the chain of his ex-
periments and was ready to give his news to the world: The
bacillus, the true cause of tuberculosis, has been trapped, dis-
covered! When suddenly he decided there was one more thing
to do.
“Human beings surely must catch these bacilli by inhaling
them, in dust, or from the coughing of people sick with con-
sumption. I wonder, will healthy animals be infected that
way too?” At once Koch began to devise ways of doing this
experiment — it was a nasty job. “I’ll have to spray the bacilli
from my cultivations at the animals,” he pondered. But this
was a more serious business than turning ten thousand mur-
derers out of jail. . . .
Like the good hunter that he was, he took a chance with the
dangers that he couldn’t avoid. He built a big box and put
guinea-pigs and mice and rabbits inside it and set this box in
the garden. Then through the window he ran a lead pipe that
opened in a spray nozzle inside the box, and for three days,
for half an hour each day, he sat in his laboratory, pumping
at a pair of bellows that shot a poisonous mist of bacilli into
the box — to be breathed by the cavorting beasts inside it.
In ten days three of the rabbits were gasping, fighting for
that precious air that their sick lungs could no longer give
them. In twenty-five days the guinea-pigs had done their
humble work — one and all they were dead, of tuberculosis.
Koch told nothing of the ticklish job it was to take these
THE DEATH FIGHTER 137
beasts out of their germ-soaked box — if I had been in his place
I would rather have handled a boxful of boa-constrictors —
and he makes no mention of how he disposed of this little
house whose walls had been wet with this so-deadly spray.
What chances for making heroic flourishes were missed by
this quiet Kochi
vn
On the twenty-fourth of March in 1882 in Berlin there was
a meeting of the Physiological Society in a plain small room
made magnificent by the presence of the most brilliant men
of science in Germany. Paul Ehrlich was there and the most
eminent Professor Rudolph Virchow — who had but lately
sniffed at this crazy Koch and his alleged bacilli of disease —
and nearly all of the famous German battlers against disease
were there.
A bespectacled wrinkled small man rose and put his face
close to his papers and fumbled with them. The papers quiv-
ered and his voice shook a little as he started to speak. With
an admirable modesty Robert Koch told these men the plain
story of the way he had searched out the invisible assassin of
one human being out of every seven that died. With no
oratorical raisings of his voice he told these disease fighters
that the physicians of the world were now able to learn all of
the habits of this bacillus of tuberculosis — this smallest but
most savage enemy of men. Koch recited to them the lurking
places of this slim microbe, its strengths and weaknesses, and
he showed them how they might begin the fight to crush, to
wipe out this sub-visible deadly enemy.
At last Koch sat down, to wait for the discussion, the in-
evitable arguments and objections that greet the finish of rev-
olutionary papers. But no man rose to his feet, no word was
spoken, and finally eyes began to turn toward Virchow, the
oracle, the Tsar of German science, the thunderer whose mere
frown had ruined great theories of disease.
KOCH
138
All eyes looked at him, but Virchow got up, put on his hat,
and left the room — he had no word to say.
If old Leeuwenhoek, two hundred years before, had made
so astounding a discovery, Europe of the Seventeenth Century
would have heard the news in months. But in 1882 the news
that Robert Koch had found the microbe of tuberculosis
trickled out of the little room of the Physiological Society the
same evening, sang to Kamchatka and to San Francisco on
the cable wires that night, and exploded on the front pages of
the newspapers in the morning. Then the world went wild over
Koch, doctors boarded ships and hopped trains for Berlin to
learn from him the secret of hunting microbes; vast crowds
of them rushed to Berlin to sit at Koch’s feet to learn how
to make beef-broth jelly and how to stick syringes full of
germs into the wiggling carcasses of guinea-pigs.
Pasteur’s deeds had set France by the ears, but Koch’s ex-
periments with the dangerous tubercle bacilli rocked the earth,
and Koch waved worshipers away, saying:
“This discovery of mine is not such a great advance.”
He tried to get away from his adorers and to dodge his
eager pupils, to snatch what moments he could for his own
new searchings. He loathed teaching — that way he was pre-
cisely like Leeuwenhoek— but he was forced, cursing under
his breath, to give lessons in microbe hunting to Japanese who
spoke horrible German and understood less than they spoke,
and to Portuguese, who could never, by any amount of in-
struction, learn to hunt microbes. He started a huge fight
with Pasteur — but of this I shall tell in the next chapter — and
between times he showed his assistant, Gaffky, how to spy on
and track down the bacillus of typhoid fever. He was forced
to attend idiotic receptions and receive medals, and came away
from these occasions to guide his fierce-mustached assistant
Loeffler, who was on the trail of the poison-dripping microbe
that kills babies with diphtheria. It was thus that Koch shook
the tree of his marvelous simple method of growing microbes
THE DEATH FIGHTER
139
on the surface of solid food — he shook the tree, as Gaffky said
long afterward, and discoveries rained into his lap.
In all of his writings I have never found any evidence that
Koch considered himself a great originator; never, like Pas-
teur, did he seem to realize that he was the leader in the most
beautiful and one of the most thrilling battles of men against
cruel nature — there was no actor in this mussy-bearded little
man. But he did set under way an inspiring drama, a struggle
with the messengers of death that turned some of the microbe-
hunting actors into maniac searchers, men who went to nearly
suicidal lengths, almost murderous extremes — to prove that
microbes were the cause of dangerous diseases.
Doctor Fehleisen, to take one instance, went out from Koch’s
laboratory and found a curious little ball-shaped microbe,
hitched to its brothers in chains like the beads of a rosary — he
cultivated these bugs from skin gouged out of people sick with
erysipelas, that sky-rockety disease that used to be called St.
Anthony’s Fire. On the theory that an attack of erysipelas
might cure cancer — a mad man’s excuse! — Fehleisen shot bil-
lions of these chain microbes, now known as streptococci, into
people hopelessly sick with cancer. And in a few days each
one of these human experimental animals of his flamed red
with St. Anthony’s Fire — some collapsed dangerously and
nearly died — and so this desperado proved his case: That
streptococcus is the cause of erysipelas.
Another pupil of Koch was the now forgotten hero, Doctor
Garre of Basel, who gravely rubbed whole test-tubes full of
another kind of microbe — which Pasteur had alleged was the
cause of boils — into his own arm. Garre came down horribly
with an enormous carbuncle and twenty boils — the tremen-
dous dose of microbes he shot into himself might easily have
finished him — but he dismissed his danger as merely “un-
pleasant” and shouted triumphantly: “I now know that this
microbe, this staphylococcus, is the true cause of boils and
carbuncles!”
Then a strange race started between Pasteur and Koch,
which meant between France and Germany, to search out the
microbe of this cholera that flared threatening on the horizon.
Koch and Gaffky went armed with microscopes and a me-
nagerie of animals from Berlin; Pasteur — who was desperately
busy struggling to conquer the mysterious microbe of hydro-
phobia — sent the brilliant and devoted £mile Roux and the
silent Thuillier, youngest of the microbe hunters of Europe.
Koch and Gaffky worked forgetting to eat or sleep; they toiled
in dreadful rooms cutting up the bodies of Egyptians dead of
cholera; in their muggy laboratory with the air fairly drip-
ping with a steamy heat, sweat dropping off the ends of their
noses on to the lenses of their microscopes, they shot stuff
from the tragic carcasses of just-dead Alexandrians into apes
and dogs and hens and mice and cats. But while these rival
teams of searchers hunted frantically the epidemic began te
fade away as mysteriously as it came. None of them had yet
found a microbe they could surely accuse, and all of them —
there is a kind of twisted humor in this — grumbled as they
Koch and Pasteur hated each other sincerely and enthusi-
astically, like the good patriots that they were, but now the
two Germans went to the bereaved Roux and offered their help
and their condolences; and Koch was one of those that car-
ried in a plain box to its last home the body of Thuillier, this
daring young Thuillier whom the miserably weak — but treach-
erous — cholera microbe had turned upon and done to death
before he had ever had a chance to spy upon and trap it. At
the grave Koch laid wreaths upon the coffin: “They are very
simple,” he said, “but they are of laurel, such as are given to
the brave.”
The funeral of this first of the martyred microbe hunters
over, Koch hurried back to Berlin with certain mysterious
boxes that held specimens, that he had painted with powerful
dyes, and these specimens had in them a curious microbe
shaped like a comma. Koch made his report to the Minister
of State: “I have found a germ,” he said, “in all cases of
cholera . . . but I haven’t proved yet that it is the cause.
Send me to India where cholera is always smoldering — what I
have found justifies your sending me there.”
So Koch sailed from Berlin for Calcutta, with the fate of
Thuillier hanging over him, drolly chaperoning fifty mice and
dreadfully annoyed by seasickness. I have often wondered
what his fellow-passengers took him for — probably they
guessed that he was some earnest little missionary or a serious
professor intent to delve into ancient Hindu lore.
Koch found his comma bacillus in the dead bodies of every
one of the forty carcasses into which he peered, and he un-
earthed the same microbe in the intestines of patients at the
moment the fatal disease hit them. But he never found this
142
KOCH
germ in any of the hundreds of healthy Hindus that he exam-
ined, nor in tiny animal, from mice to elephants.
Quickly Koch learned to grow the comma bacillus pure on
beef-broth jelly, and once he had it imprisoned in his tubes
he studied all the habits of this vicious little vegetable, how
it perished quickly when he dried it the least bit, how it could
sneak into a healthy man by way of the soiled linen of patients
that had died. He dredged this comma microbe up out of the
stinking water of the tanks around which clustered the miser-
able Hindu’s huts — sad hovels from which drifted the moans
of helpless ones that were dying of cholera.
At last Koch sailed back to Germany, and here he was re-
ceived like some returning victorious general. “Cholera never
rises spontaneously,” he told his audience of learned doctors;
“no healthy man can ever be attacked by cholera unless he
swallows the comma microbe, and this germ can only develop
from its like — it cannot be produced from any other thing, or
out of nothing. And it is only in the intestine of man, or in
highly polluted water like that of India that it can grow.”
It is thanks to these bold searchings of Robert Koch that
Europe and America no longer dread the devastating raids of
these puny but terrible little murderers from the Orient —
and their complete extermination from the world waits only
upon the civilization and sanitation of India. . . .
vm
From the German Emperor’s own hand Koch now received
the Order of the Crown, with Star, but in spite of that his
countrified hat continued to fit his stubbly head, and when ad-
mirers adored him he only said to them: “I have worked as
hard as I could ... if my success has been greater than that
of most ... the reason is that I came in my wanderings
through the medical field upon regions where the gold was still
lying by the wayside . . . and that is no great merit.”
The hunters who believed that microbes were the chief foes
THE DEATH FIGHTER
143
of man, these men were brave, but there was careless heroism
too among some of the ancient doctors and old-fogey sani-
tarians who thought that all this new stuff about microbes was
claptrap and nonsense. Old Professor Pettenkofer of Munich
was the leader of the skeptics who were not convinced by
Koch’s clear experiments, and when Koch came back from
India with those comma bacilli that he was sure were the au-
thors of cholera Pettenkofer wrote him something like this:
“Send me some of your so-called cholera germs, and I’ll show
you how harmless they are!”
Koch sent him on a tube that swarmed with wee virulent
comma microbes. And so Pettenkofer — to the great alarm of
all good microbe hunters — swallowed the entire contents of
the tube. There were enough billions of wiggling comma germs
in this tube to infect a regiment. Then he growled his scorn
through his magnificent beard, and said: “Now let us see il
I get cholera!” Mysteriously, nothing happened, and the
failure of the mad Pettenkofer to come down with cholera re-
mains to this day an enigma, without even the beginning of
an explanation.
Pettenkofer, who was foolhardy enough to try such a possi-
bly suicidal experiment, was also sufficiently cocksure to be-
lieve that his drinking of the cholera soup had settled the
question in his favor. “Germs are of no account in cholera!”
shouted the old doctor. “The important thing is the disposition
(whatever that means) of the individual!”
“There can be no cholera without the comma bacillus!”
said Koch in reply.
“But I have just swallowed millions of your alleged fatal
bacilli, and have not even had a cramp in my stomach!” came
back Pettenkofer in rebuttal.
As it is so often the case, alas, in violent scientific con-
troversies, both sides were partly right and partly wrong.
Every event of the past forty years has shown that Koch was
right when he said that people can never have cholera without
swallowing his comma bacillus. And the years that have gone
*44
KOCH
by have revealed that Pettenkofer’s experiment pointed out a
mystery behind the curtains of the unknown, and these ob-
scuring draperies have not now even begun to be lifted by
modern microbe hunters. Murderous germs are everywhere,
sneaking into all of us, yet they are able to assassinate only
some of us, and that question of the strange resistance of the
rest of us is still just as much an unsolved puzzle as it was in
those days of the roaring eighteen-eighties when men were
ready to risk dying to prove that they were right.
For, make no mistake, Pettenkofer walked within an inch
of death; other microbe hunters have since then swallowed
cultures of virulent cholera microbes by accident — and died
horribly.
But we come to the end of the great days of Robert Koch,
and the exploits of Louis Pasteur begin once more to push
Koch and all other microbe hunters into the background of
the world’s attention. Let us leave Koch while his ambitious
but well-meaning countrymen prepare, without knowing it, a
disaster for him, a tragedy that, alas, has partly tarnished
the splendor of his trapping of the microbes that murder ani-
mals and men with anthrax and cholera and tuberculosis. But
before you read the perfect and brilliant finale of the gorgeous
career of Pasteur, I beg leave to remove my hat and make'
bows of respect to Koch — the man who really proved that mi-
crobes are our most deadly enemies, who brought microbe
hunting near to being a science, the man who is now the partly
forgotten captain of an obscure heroic age.
CHAPTER V
PASTEUR
AND THE MAD DOG
I
Do not think for a moment that Pasteur allowed his fame and
name to be forgotten in the excitement kicked up by the sen-
sational proofs of Koch that microbes murder men. It is cer-
tain that less of a hound for sniffing out microbes, less of a
poet, less of a master at keeping people wide-eyed with their
mouths open, would have been shoved off into a fairly com-
plete oblivion by such events — but not Pasteur!
It was in the late eighteen-seventies — Koch had just swept
the German doctors off their feet by his fine discovery of the
spores of anthrax — that Pasteur who was only a chemist, had
the effrontery to dismiss with a grunt, a shrug, and a wave of
his hand, the ten thousand years of experience of doctors in
studying and fighting diseases. At this time, in spite of Sem-
melweis, the Austrian who had proved child-bed fever was
contagious, the Lying-In hospitals of Paris were pest-holes.
Out of every nineteen women who went hopeful into their
doors, one was sure to die of child-bed fever, to leave her
baby motherless. One of these places, where ten young moth-
ers perished in succession, was called the House of Crime.
Women hardly dared to trust themselves to the most expensive
physicians; they were beginning to boycott the hospitals.
Large numbers of them — with reason — no longer cared to risk
the grim danger of having babies. Even the doctors them-
selves — accustomed though they were helplessly but sympa-
thetically to preside at the demise of their patients — even the
PASTEUR
146
physicians themselves, I say, were scandalized at this dreadful
presence of death at the birth of new life.
One day, at the Academy of Medicine in Paris, a famous
physician was holding an oration, with plenty of long Greek
and elegant Latin words, on the cause — alas, completely un-
known to him — of child-bed fever. Suddenly one of his
learned and stately sentences was interrupted by a voice bel-
lowing from the rear of the hall:
“The thing that kills women with child-bed fever — it isn’t
anything like that! It is you doctors that carry deadly mi-
crobes from sick women to healthy ones . . . I ” It was Pas-
teur who said this; he was out of his seat; his eyes flamed ex-
citement.
“Possibly you are right, but I fear you will never find that
microbe ” The orator tried to start his speech again, but by
this time Pasteur was charging up the aisle, dragging his partly
paralyzed left leg behind him a little. He reached the black-
board, grabbed a piece of chalk and shouted to the annoyed
orator and the scandalized Academy:
“You say I will not find the microbe? Man, I have found
it! Here’s the way it looks!” And Pasteur scrawled a chain
of little circles on the blackboard. The meeting broke up in
confusion.
Pasteur was in his late fifties now, but he was still as im-
petuous and enthusiastic as he had been at twenty-five. He
had been a chemist and an expert on beet-sugar fermentations,
he had shown the vintners how to keep their wines from spoil-
ing, he had rushed from this job into the saving of sick silk-
worms, he had preached the slogan of Better Beer for France
and had really made the French beer better; but during all
these hectic years while he was doing the life work of a dozen
men Pasteur dreamed about the tracking down of microbes
that he knew must be the scourges of the human race, the au-
thors of disease.
Then suddenly he found Koch had done the trick ahead of
him. He must catch up with this Koch. “Microbes are in
AND THE MAD DOG 147
a way mine — I was the first to show how important they were,
twenty years ago, when Koch was a child . . you can
imagine Pasteur muttering. But there were difficulties in the
way of his catching up.
In the first place, Pasteur had never felt a pulse or told a
bilious man to stick out his tongue, it is doubtful if he could
have told a lung from a liver, and it is certain that he did not
know the first thing about how to hold a scalpel. As for those
cursed hospitals — phewl The smell of them gave him nasty
feelings at the pit of his stomach, and he wanted to stop his
ears and run away from the moans that floated down their
dingy corridors. But presently — it was ever the way with
this unconquerable man — he got around his medical ignorance.
Three physicians, Joubert at first, and then Roux and Cham-
ber land became his assistants; youngsters they were, these
three, radicals who were Bolshevik against ancient idiotic
medical doctrines. They sat worshiping Pasteur at his un-
popular lectures in the Academy of Medicine, believing every
one of his laughed-at prophecies of dreadful scourges caused
by sub-visible bugs. He took these boys into his laboratory
and in return they explained the machinery of animals’ insides
to Pasteur, they taught him the difference between the needle
and the plunger of a hypodermic syringe and convinced him
— he was very squeamish about such things — that animals
like guinea-pigs and rabbits hardly felt the prick of the syringe
needle when he injected them. Privately these three men
swore to be his slaves — and the priests of this new
science. . . .
Nothing is truer than that there is no one orthodox way of
hunting microbes, and the differences between the ways Koch
and Pasteur went at their work are the best illustrations of
this. Koch was as coldly logical as a text-book of geometry —
he searched out his bacillus of tuberculosis with systematic
experiments, and he thought of all the objections that doubters
might make before such doubters knew that there was any-
thing to have doubts about. Koch always recited his failures
PASTEUR
148
with just as much and no more enthusiasm than he did his tri-
umphs. There was something inhumanly just and right about
him and he looked at his own discoveries as if they had been
those of another man of whom he was a little over-critical.
But Pasteur 1 This man was a passionate groper whose head
was incessantly inventing right theories and wrong guesses —
shooting them out like a display of village fireworks going off
bewilderingly by accident.
Pasteur started hunting microbes of disease and punched
into a boil on the back of the neck of one of his assistants and
grew a germ from it and was sure it was the cause of boils;
he hurried from these experiments to the hospital to find his
chain microbes in the bodies of women dying with child-bed
fever; from here he rushed out into the country to discover
— but not to prove it precisely — that earthworms carry an-
thrax bacilli from the deep buried carcasses of cattle to the
surface of the fields. He was a strange genius who seemed
to need the energetic, gusto-ish doing of a dozen things at
the same time — more or less accurately — in order to discover
that grain of truth which lies at the bottom of most of his
work.
In this variety of simultaneous goings-on you can fairly
feel Pasteur fumbling at a way of getting ahead of Koch.
Koch had shown with beautiful clearness that germs cause dis-
ease, there is no doubt about that — but this isn’t the most im-
portant thing to do . . . this is nothing, this proof, the thing
to do is to find a way to prevent the germs from killing people,
to protect mankind from, death! “What impossible, what
absurd experiments didn’t we discuss,” said Roux long after
this distressing time when Pasteur was stumbling about in the
dark. “We would laugh at them ourselves, next day.”
To understand Pasteur, it is important to know his wild
stabs and his failures as well as his triumphs. He had not the
precise methods of growing microbes pure — it took the patience
of Koch to devise such things — and one day to his disgust,
Pasteur observed that a bottle of boiled urine in which he had
149
AND THE MAD DOG
planted anthrax bacilli was swarming with unbidden guests,
contaminating microbes of the air that had sner ::ed in. The
following morning he observed that there were no anthrax
germs left at all; they had been completely choked out by the
bacilli from the air.
At once Pasteur jumped to a fine idea: “If the harmless
bugs from the air choke out the anthrax bacilli in the bottle,
they will do it in the body too! It is a kind of dog-eat-dog!”
shouted Pasteur, and at once he put Roux and Chamberland
to work on the fantastic experiment of giving guinea-pigs
anthrax and then shooting doses of billions of harmless mi-
crobes into them — beneficent germs which were to chase the
anthrax bacilli round the body and devour them — they were
to be like the mongoose which kills cobras. . . .
Pasteur gravely announced: “That there were high hopes
for the cure of disease from this experiment,” but that is the
last you hear of it, for Pasteur was never a man to give the
world of science the benefit of studying his failures. But a
little later the Academy of Sciences sent him on a queer errand,
and on this mission he stumbled across a fact that gave him
the first clew to a genuine, a remarkable way of turning savage
microbes into friendly ones. It was an outlandish plan he
began to devise, to dream about, of turning living microbes
of disease against their own kind, so guarding animals and
men from invisible deaths. At this time there was a great to-do
about a cure for anthrax, invented by the horse doctor, Lou-
vrier, in the Jura mountains in the east of France. Louvrier
had cured hundreds of cows who were at death’s door, said
the influential men of the district: it was time that this treat-
ment received scientific approval.
n
Pasteur arrived there, escorted by his young assistants, and
found that this miraculous cure consisted first, in having sev-
eral farm hands rub the sick cow violently to make her as
IS0 PASTEUR
hot as possible; then long gashes were cut in the poor beast’s
skin and into these cuts Louvrier poured turpentine; finally
the now bellowing and deplorably maltreated cow was cov-
ered— excepting her face! — with an inch thick layer of un-
mentionable stuff soaked in hot vinegar. This ointment was
kept on the animal— who now doubtless wished she were dead
— by a cloth that covered her entire body.
Pasteur said to Louvrier: “Let us make an experiment. All
cows attacked by anthrax do not die, some of them just get
better by themselves; there is only one way to find out, Doctor
Louvrier, whether or no it is your treatment that saves them.”
So four good healthy cows were brought, and Pasteur in the
presence of Louvrier and a solemn commission of farmers ,
shot a powerful dose of virulent anthrax microbes into the
shoulder of each one of these beasts: this stuff would have
surely killed a sheep, it was enough to do to death a few dozen
guinea-pigs. The next day Pasteur and the commission and
Louvrier returned, and all the cows had large feverish swellings
on their shoulders, their breath came in snorts — they were in
a bad way, that was very evident.
“Now, Doctor,” said Pasteur, “choose two of these sick
cows — we’ll call them A and B. Give them your new cure,
and we’ll leave cows C and D without any treatment at all.”
So Louvrier assaulted poor A and B with his villainous treat-
ment. The result was a terrible blow to the sincere would-be
curer of cows, for one of the cows that Louvrier treated got
better — but the other perished; and one of the creatures that
had got no treatment at all, died — but the other got better.
“Even this experiment might have tricked us, Doctor,” said
Pasteur. “If you had given your treatment to cows A and D
instead of A and B — we all would have thought you had really
found a sovereign remedy for anthrax.”
Here were two cows left over, from the experiment, beasts
that had had a hard siege of anthrax and got better from it:
“What shall I do with these two cows?” pondered Pasteur.
“Well, I might try shooting a still more savage strain of anthrax
AND THE MAD DOG
I5i
bacilli into them — I have one family of anthrax germs in Paris
that would give even a rhinoceros a bad night.”
So Pasteur sent to Paris for his vicious cultivation, and in-
jected five drops into the shoulders of those two cows that had
got better. Then he waited, but nothing happened to the
beasts, not even a tiny swelling at the point where he had in-
jected millions of poisonous bacilli; the cows remained per-
fectly happy 1
Then Pasteur jumped to one of his quick conclusions:
“Once a cow has anthrax, but gets better from it, all the
anthrax microbes in the world cannot give her another attack
— she is immune.” This thought began playing and flitting
about in his head and made him wool-gather so that he did not
hear questions that Madame Pasteur asked him, nor see obvi-
ous things at which his eyes looked directly.
“How to give an animal a little attack of anthrax, a safe
little attack that won’t kill him, but will surely protect
him. . . . There must be a way to do that. ... I must find a
way.”
So it went with Pasteur for months and he kept saying to
Roux and Chamberland: “What mystery is there, like the
mystery of the non-recurrence of virulent maladies?” He
went about muttering to himself: “We must immunize — we
must immunize against microbes. . . .”
Meanwhile Pasteur and his faithful crew were training their
microscopes on stuff from men and animals dead of a dozen
different diseases; there was a kind of mixed-up fumbling in
this work between 1878 and 1880— -when one day fate, or
God, put a marvelous way to immunize right under Pasteur’s
lucky nose. (It is hard for me to give you this story exactly
straight because all of the various people who have written
about Pasteur tell it differently and Pasteur himself in his
scientific paper says nothing whatever about this remarkable
discovery having been a happy accident.) But here it is, as
well as I can do, with certain gaps that I have had to fill in
myself.
Roux and Chamberland nursed these terrible wee microbes
along carefully; day after day they dipped a clean platinum
needle into a bottle of chicken broth that teemed with germs
and then carefully shook the same still-wet needle into a fresh
flask of soup that held no microbe at all — so day after day
these transplantations went on — always with new myriads of
germs growing from the few that had come in on the moistened
needle. The benches of the laboratory became cluttered with
abandoned cultures, some of them weeks old. “We’ll have to
clean this mess up to-morrow,” thought Pasteur.
Then the god of good accidents whispered in his ear, and
Pasteur said to Roux: “We know the chicken cholera microbes
are still alive in this bottle . . . they’re several weeks old, it
is true . . . but just try shooting a few drops of this old
cultivation into some chickens. . . .”
Roux followed these directions and the chickens promptly
got sick, turned drowsy, lost their customary lively frivolous-
ness. But next morning, when Pasteur came into the labora-
tory looking for these birds, to put them on the post-mortem
board — he was sure they would be dead — he found them per-
fectly happy and gayl
“This is strange,” pondered Pasteur, “always before this
But at last one day Pasteur told the laboratory servant:
“Bring up some healthy birds, new chickens, and get them
ready for inoculation.”
“But we only have a couple of unused chickens left, Mr.
Pasteur — remember, you used the last ones before you went
away — you injected the old cultures into them, and they got
sick but didn’t die?”
Pasteur made a few appropriate remarks about servants
who neglected to keep a good supply of fresh chickens on hand.
“Well, all right, bring up what new chickens you have left —
and let’s have a couple of those used ones too — the ones that
had the cholera but got better. . . .”
The squawking birds were brought up. The assistant shot
the soup with its myriads of germs into the breast muscles of
the chickens — into the new ones, and into the ones that had
got better l Roux and Chamberland came into the laboratory
next morning — Pasteur was always there an hour or so ahead
of them — they heard the muffled voice of their master shouting
to them from the animal room below stairs:
“Roux, Chamberland, come down here — hurry!”
They found him pacing up and down before the chicken
cages. “Look!” said Pasteur. “The new birds we shot yester-
day — they’re dead all right, as they ought to be. . . . But
now see these chickens that recovered after we shot them with
the old cultures last month. . . . They got the same murder-
ous dose yesterday — but look at them — they have resisted the
virulent dose perfectly . . . they are gay . . . they are eat-
ing!”
Roux and Chamberland were puzzled for a moment.
Then Pasteur raved: “But don’t you see what this means?
PASTEUR
*54
Everything is found! Now I have found out how to make a
beast a little sick — just a little sick so that he will get better,
from a disease. ... All we have to do is to let our virulent
microbes grow old in their bottles . . . instead of planting
them into new ones every day. . . . When the microbes age,
they get tame . . . they give the chicken the disease . . . but
only a little of it . . . and when she gets better she can stand
all the vicious virulent microbes in the world. . . . This is our
chance — this is my most remarkable discovery — this is a
vaccine I’ve discovered, much more sure, more scientific than
the one for smallpox where no one has seen the germ. . . .
We’ll apply this to anthrax too ... to all virulent dis-
eases. . . . We will save lives ... !”
hi
A lesser man than Pasteur might have done this same acci-
dental experiment — for this was no test planned by the human
brain — a lesser man might have done it and would have spent
years trying to explain to himself the mystery of it, but Pas-
teur, stumbling on this chance protection of a couple of mis-
erable chickens, saw at once a new way of guarding living
things against virulent germs, of saving men from death. His
brain jumped to a new way of tricking the hitherto inexorable
God who ruled that men must be helpless before the sneaking
attacks of his sub-visible enemies. . . .
Pasteur was fifty-eight years old now, he was past his prime,
but with this chance discovery of the vaccine that saved
chickens from cholera, he started the six most hectic years of
his life, years of appalling arguments and unhoped-for tri-
umphs and terrible disappointments — into these years, in short,
he poured the energy and the events of the lives of a hundred
ordinary men.
Hurriedly Pasteur and Roux and Chamberland set out to
confirm the first chance observation they had made. They
let virulent chicken cholera microbes grow old in their bottles
AND THE MAD DOG
155
of broth; they inoculated these enfeebled bugs into dozens of
healthy chickens — which promptly got sick, but as quickly
recovered. Then triumphantly, a few days later, they watched
these birds — these vaccinated chickens — tolerate murderous in-
jections of millions of microbes, enough to kill a dozen new
birds who were not immune.
So it was that Pasteur, ingeniously, turned microbes against
themselves. He tamed them first, and then he strangely used
them for wonderful protective weapons against the assaults
of their own kind.
And now Pasteur, with his characteristic impetuousness —
after all it was only chickens he had learned to guard from
death so far — became more arrogant than ever with the old-
fashioned doctors who talked Latin words and wrote shot-gun
prescriptions. He went to a meeting of the Academy of Medi-
cine and with complaisance told the doctors how his chicken
vaccinations were a great advance on the immortal smallpox
discovery of Jenner: “In this case I have demonstrated a
thing that Jenner never could do in smallpox — and that is,
that the microbe that kills is the same one that guards the
animal from death!”
The old-fashioned blue-coated doctors were peeved at Pas-
teur’s appointing himself a god superior to the great Jenner;
Doctor Jules Guerin, the famous surgeon, became particu-
larly sarcastic about Pasteur making so much of mere fussings
with chickens — and the fight was on. Pasteur, in a fury got up
and shouted remarks about the utter nonsensicality of one of
Guerin’s pet operations, and there occurred a most scandalous
scene — it embarrasses me to have to tell about it — a strange
shambles in which Guerin, who was past eighty, rose from his
seat and was about to fall on the sixty-year-old Pasteur. The
old man aimed a wallop at Pasteur, but frantic friends jumped
in and prevented the impending fisticuffs of these two men
who thought they could settle the truth by kicks and blows
and mayhem.
Next day the ancient Guerin sent his seconds to Pasteur
PASTEUR
156
with a challenge to a duel, but Pasteur, evidently, did not care
to risk dying that way and he sent Guerin’s friends to the Sec-
retary of the Academy with this message: “I am ready, having
no right to act otherwise, to modify whatever the editors may
consider as going beyond the rights of criticism and legitimate
defense.” And so Pasteur once more proved himself to be a
human being — if not what is commonly called a man — by
backing out of the fight.
As I have told you before, Pasteur had a great deal of the
mystic in him. Often he bowed himself down before that mys-
terious Infinite — he worshiped the Infinite when he was not
clutching at it like a baby reaching for the moon; but fre-
quently, the moment one of his beautiful experiments had
knocked another little chunk off that surrounding Unknown,
he made the mistake of believing that all mysteries had dis-
solved away. It was so now — when he saw that he could
really protect chickens perfectly against a fatal illness by his
amazing trick of sticking a few of their own tamed assassins
into them. At once Pasteur guessed: “Maybe these fowl-
cholera microbes will guard chickens against other virulent
diseases!” and promptly he inoculated some hens with his new
vaccine of weakened fowl cholera germs and then injected
them with some certainly murderous anthrax bacilli — and the
chickens did not die!
Wildly excited he wrote to Dumas, his old professor, and
hinted that the new fowl-cholera vaccine might be a wonder-
ful Pan-Protector against all kinds of virulent maladies. “If
this is confirmed,” he wrote, “we can hope for the most im-
portant consequences, even in human maladies.”
Old Dumas, greatly thrilled, had this letter published in the
Reports of the Academy of Sciences, and there it stands, a sad
monument to Pasteur’s impetuousness, a blot on his record
of reporting nothing but facts. So far as I can find, Pasteur
never retracted this error, although he soon found that a vac-
cine made from one kind of bacillus does not protect an ani-
mal against all diseases, but only — and then not absolutely
AND THE MAD DOG
157
surely — against the one disease of which the microbe in the
vaccine is the cause.
But one of Pasteur’s most charming traits was his charac-
teristic of a scientific Phoenix, who rose triumphantly from the
ashes of his own mistakes. When his imagination carried him
into the clouds you find him presently landing on the ground
with a bump — making clever experiments again, digging for
good true hard facts. So it is not surprising to find him, with
Roux and Chamberland, in 1881, discovering a very pretty
way of taming vicious anthrax microbes and turning them into
a vaccine. By this time the quest after vaccines had become
so violent that Roux and Chamberland hardly had their Sun-
days off, and never went on vacations; they slept at the lab-
oratory to be near their tubes and microscopes and microbes.
And here, Pasteur directing them, they delicately weakened
anthrax bacilli so that some killed guinea-pigs, but not rabbits,
and others did mice to death, but were too weak to harm
guinea-pigs. They shot the weaker and then the stronger mi-
crobes into sheep, who got a little sick but then recovered, and
after that these sheep could stand, apparently, the assaults of
vicious anthrax germs that were able to kill even a cow.
At once Pasteur told this new triumph to the Academy of
Sciences — he had left off going to the Academy of Medicine
after his brawl with Guerin — and he held out purple hopes to
them that he would presently invent ingenious vaccines that
would wipe out all diseases from mumps to malaria. “What is
more easy,” he shouted, “than to find in these successive
viruses a vaccine capable of making sheep and cows and horses
a little sick with anthrax without letting them perish — and so
preserving them from subsequent maladies?” Some of Pas-
teur’s colleagues thought he was a little cocksure about this,
and they ventured to protest. Pasteur’s veins stood out on
his forehead, but he managed to keep his mouth shut until he
and Roux were on the way home, when he burst out, speaking
really of all people who failed to see the absolute truth of his
idea:
PASTEUR
*58
“I would not be surprised if such a man were to be caught
beating his wifel”
Make no mistake — science was no cool collecting of facts
for Pasteur; in him it set going the same kind of machinery
that stirs the human animal to tears at the death of a baby
and makes him sing when he hears his uncle has died and left
him five hundred thousand dollars.
But enemies were on Pasteur’s trail again. Just as he was
always stepping on the toes of physicians, so he had offended
the high and useful profession cf the horse doctors, and one
of the leading horse doctors, the editor of one of the most im-
portant journals of horse doctoring, his name was Doctor
Rossignol, cooked up a plot to lure Pasteur into a dangerous
public experiment and so destroy him. This Rossignol got up
with a great show of scientific fairness at the Agricultural So-
ciety of Melun and said:
“Pasteur claims that nothing is easier than to make a vac-
cine that will protect sheep and cows absolutely from anthrax.
If that is true, it would be a great thing for French farmers,
who are now losing twenty million francs a year from this
disease. Well, if Pasteur can really make such magic stuff,
he ought to be willing to prove to us that he has the goods.
Let us get Pasteur to consent to a grand public experiment; if
he is right, we farmers and veterinarians are the gainers — if
it fails, Pasteur will have to stop his eternal blabbing about
great discoveries that save sheep and worms and babies and
hippopotamuses!” Like this argued the sly Rossignol.
At once the Society raised a lot of francs to buy forty-eight
sheep and two goats and several cows and the distinguished
old Baron de la Rochette was sent to flatter Pasteur into this
dangerous experiment.
But Pasteur was not one bit suspicious. “Of course I am
willing to demonstrate to your society that my vaccine is a
life-saver — what will work in the laboratory on fourteen sheep
will work on sixty at Melun!”
That was the great thing about rasteur 1 When he prepared
AND THE MAD DOG
159
to take the rabbit out of the hat, to astonish the world, he was
absolutely sincere about it; he was a magnificent showman and
not below some small occasional hocus-pocus, but he was no
designing mountebank. And the public test was set for May
and June, that year.
Roux and Chamberland — who had begun to see animals that
were strange combinations of chickens and guinea-pigs in their
dreams, to drop important flasks, to lie awake injecting mil-
lions of imaginary guinea-pigs, these fagged-out boys had just
started off on a vacation to the country — when they received
telegrams that brought them back to their exciting treadmill:
COME BACK PARIS AT ONCE ABOUT TO MAKE
PUBLIC DEMONSTRATION THAT OUR VACCINE
WILL PROTECT SHEEP AGAINST ANTHRAX— L. PAS-
TEUR.
Something like that read these wires.
They hurried back. Pasteur said to them: “Before the
Agricultural Society of Melun, at the farm of Pouilly-le-Fort, I
am going to vaccinate twenty-four sheep, one goat and several
cattle — twenty-four other sheep, one goat and several
other cattle are going to be left without inoculation — then, at
the appointed time, I am going to inject all of the beasts with
the most deadly virulent culture of anthrax bacilli that we
have. The vaccinated animals will be perfectly protected —
the not-vaccinated ones will die in two days of course.” Pas-
teur sounded as confident as an astronomer predicting an
eclipse of the sun. . . .
“But, master, you know this work is so delicate — we cannot
be absolutely sure of our vaccines — they may kill some of the
sheep we try to protect ”
“WHAT WORKED WITH FOURTEEN SHEEP IN OUR
LABORATORY WILL WORK WITH FIFTY AT ME-
LUN!” Pasteur roared at them. For him just then, there
was no such thing as a mysterious, tricky nature, an unknown
full of failures and surprises — the misty Infinite was as simple
as two plus two makes four to him just then. So there was
i6o
PASTEUR
nothing for Roux and Chamberland to do but to roll up their
sleeves and get the vaccines ready.
The day for the first injections came at last. Their bottles
and syringes were ready, their flasks were carefully labeled —
“Be sure not to mix up the first and second vaccine, boys!”
shouted Pasteur, full of a gay confidence, as they left the Rue
d’Ulm for the train. As they came on the field at Pouilly-le-
Fort, and strode toward the sheds that held the forty-eight
sheep, two goats and several cattle, Pasteur marched into the
arena like a matador, and bowed severely to the crowd. There
were senators of the Republic there, and scientists and horse
doctors and dignitaries, and hundreds of farmers; and as Pas-
teur walked among them with his little limp — it was however
a sort of jaunty limp — they cheered him mightily, many of
them, and some of them snickered.
And there was a flock of newspaper men there, including the
now almost legendary de Blowitz, of the London Times.
The sheep, fine healthy beasts, were herded into a clear
space; Roux and Chamberland lighted their alcohol lamps
and gingerly unpacked their glass syringes and shot five drops
of the first vaccine — the anthrax bacilli that would kill mice
but leave guinea-pigs alive, into the thighs of twenty-four of
the sheep, one of the goats, and half of the cattle. The beasts
got up and shook themselves and were labeled by a little gouge
punched out of their ears. Then the audience repaired to a
shed where Pasteur harangued them for half an hour — telling
them simply but with a kind of dramatic portentousness of
these new vaccinations and the hopes they held out for suffer-
ing men.
Twelve days went by and the show was repeated. The
crowd was there once more and the second vaccine — the
stronger one whose bacilli had the power of killing guinea-pigs
but not rabbits — was injected, and the animals bore up beau-
tifully under it and scampered about as healthy sheep, goats
and cattle should do. The time for the fatal final test drew
near; the very air of the little laboratory became finicky;
AND THE MAD DOG 161
the taut workers snapped at each other across the Bunsen
flames. Pasteur was never so appallingly quiet — and the bottle
washers fairly jumped across the room to fill his growled or-
ders. Every day Thuillier, Pasteur’s new youngest assistant,
went out to the farm to put his thermometer carefully under
the tails of the inoculated animals to see if they had fever — but
thank God, every one of them was standing up beautifully
under the heavy dose of the vaccine that was not quite mur-
derous enough to kill rabbits.
While the heads of Roux and Chamberland turned several
hairs grayer, Pasteur kept his confidence, and he wrote, with
his old charmingly candid opinion of himself: “If success is
complete, this will be one of the finest examples of applied
science in this country, consecrating one of the greatest and
most fruitful discoveries.”
His friends shook their heads and lifted their shoulders and
murmured: “Napoleonic, my dear Pasteur,” and Pasteur did
not deny it.
iv
Then on the fateful thirty-first of May all of the forty-eight
sheep, two goats, and several cattle — those that were vacci-
nated and those to which nothing whatever had been done — all
of these received a surely fatal dose of virulent anthrax bugs,
Roux got down on his knees in the dirt, surrounded by his
alcohol lamps and bottles of deadly virus, and awed the crowd
by his cool flawless shooting of the poisonous stuff into the
more than sixty animals.
With his whole scientific reputation trusted to this one deli •
cate test, realizing at last that he had done the brave but terri
bly rash thing of letting a frivolous public judge his science
Pasteur rolled and tossed around in his bed and got up fifty
times that night. He said absolutely nothing when Madame
Pasteur tried to encourage him and told him, “Now now every-
thing will come out all right”: he sulked in and out of the lab-
162 PASTEUR
oratory; there is no record of it, but without a doubt he
prayed. . . .
Pasteur did not fancy going up in balloons and he would not
fight duels — but no one can question his absolute gameness
when he let the horse doctors get him into this dangerous test.
The crowd that came to judge Pasteur on the famous sec-
ond day of June, 1881, made the previous ones look like mere
assemblages at country baseball games. General Councilors
were here to-day as well as senators; magnificoes turned out
to see this show — tremendous dignitaries who only exhibited
themselves to the public at the weddings and funerals of kings
and princes. And the newspaper reporters clustered around
the famous de Blowitz.
At two o’clock Pasteur and his cohorts marched upon the
field and this time there were no snickers, but only a mighty
bellowing of hurrahs. Not one of the twenty-four vaccinated
sheep — though two days before millions of deadly germs had
taken residence under their hides — not one of these sheep, I
say, had so much as a trace of fever. They ate and frisked
about as if they had never been within a thousand miles of an
anthrax bacillus.
But the unprotected, the not vaccinated beasts — alas —
there they lay in a tragic row, twenty-two out of twenty-four
of them; and the remaining two were staggering about, at
grips with that last inexorable, always victorious enemy of all
living things. Ominous black blood oozed from their mouths
and noses.
“Seel There goes another one of those sheep that Pasteur
did not vaccinate 1” shouted an awed horse doctor.
v
The Bible does not go into details about what the great
wedding crowd thought of Jesus when he turned water into
wine, but Pasteur, that second of June, was the impresario of
a modern miracle as amazing as any of the marvels wrought
AND THE MAD DOG
163
by the Man of Galilee, and that day Pasteur’s whole audience
— who many of them had been snickering skeptics — bowed
down before this excitable little half-paralyzed man who could
so perfectly protect living creatures from the deadly stings
of sub-visible invaders. To me this beautiful experiment at
Pouilly-le-Fort is an utterly strange event in the history of
man’s fight against relentless nature. There is no record of
Prometheus bringing the precious fire to mankind amid ap-
plause; Galileo was actually clapped in prison for those search-
ings that have done more than any other to transform the
world. We do not even know the names of those completely
anonymous genuises who first built the wheel and invented
sails and thought to tame a horse.
vi
But here stood Louis Pasteur, while his twenty-four im-
mune sheep scampered about among the carcasses of the same
number of pitiful dead ones, here stood this man, I say, in a
gruesomely gorgeous stage-setting of an immortal drama, and
all the world was there to see and to record and to be converted
to his own faith in his passionate fight against needless death.
Now the experiment turned into the likeness of a revival.
Doctor Biot, a healer in horses who had been one of the most
sarcastic of the Pasteur-baiters, rushed up to him as the last
of the not-vaccinated sheep was dying, and cried: “Inoculate
me with your vaccines, Mr. Pasteur — just as you have done
to those sheep you have saved so wonderfully Then I
will submit to the injection of the murderous virus! All men
must be convinced of this marvelous discovery!”
“It is true,” said another humbled enemy, “that I have made
jokes about microbes, but I am a repentant sinner!”
“Well, allow me to remind you of the words of the Cospel,”
Pasteur answered him. “Joy shall be in heaven over one. sinner
that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons
that need no repentance.”
PASTEUR
164
The great de Blowitz cheered and rushed off to file his tele*
gram to the London Times and to the newspapers of the world:
“The experiment at Pouilly-le-Fort is a perfect, an unprec*
edented success.”
The world received this news and waited, confusedly be*
lieving that Pasteur was a kind of Messiah who was going to
lift from men the burden of all suffering. France went wild
and called him her greatest son and conferred on him the Grand
Cordon of the Legion of Honor. Agricultural societies, horse
doctors, poor farmers whose fields were cursed with the poi-
sonous virus of anthrax — all these sent telegrams begging him
for thousands of doses of the life-saving vaccine. And Pas-
teur, with Roux and Chamberland and Thuillier, responded
to them with a magnificent disregard of their own health — and
of science. For Pasteur, poet that he was, had more faith than
the wildest of his new converts in this experiment.
In answer to these telegrams Pasteur turned the little lab-
oratory in the Rue d’Ulm into a vaccine factory — huge kettles
bubbled and simmered with the broth in which the tame, the
life-saving, anthrax bacilli were to grow. Delicately — but so
frantically that it was not quite delicate enough — Roux and
Chamberland worked at weakening the murderous bacilli just
enough to make the sheep of France a little sick, but not too
sick from anthrax. Then all of them sweat at pouring
numerous gallons of this bacillus-swarming soup which was the
vaccine, into little bottles, a few ounces to each bottle, into
clean bottles that had to be absolutely free from all other
germs. And they had to do this subtle job without any proper
apparatus whatever. I marvel that Pasteur ever attempted it;
surely there never has been such blind confidence raised by
one clear — but Lordl it might be simply a lucky — experiment.
In moments snatched from this making of vaccine Roux and
Chamberland and Thuillier scurried up and down the land of
France 'and even to Hungary. They inoculated two hundred
sheep ir. this place and five hundred and seventy-six in that —
in less thin a year hundreds of thousands of beasts had got
AND THE MAD DOG
165
this life-saving stuff. These wandering vaccinators would drag
themselves back into the laboratory from their hard trips,
they would get back to Paris probably wanting to get a few
drinks or spend an evening with a pretty girl or loaf over a
pipe — but Pasteur could not stand the smell of tobacco smoke,
and as for wine and women, were not the sheep of France
literally baa-ing to be saved? So these young men who were
slaves of this battler whose one insane thought was “find-the-
microbe-kill-the-microbe” — these faithful fellows took off their
coats and peered at anthrax bacilli through the microscopes
until their eye rims got red and their eyelashes fell out. In
the middle of this work — with the farmers of France yelling
for more vaccine — they began to have strange troubles: con-
taminating germs that had no business there began to pop up
among the anthrax bacilli; all at once a weak vaccine that
should have just killed a mouse began to knock off large rab-
bits. . . . Then, just as the scientific desperadoes got these
messes straightened out, Pasteur would come in, nagging at
them, fuming, fussing because they took so long at their ex-
periments.
He wanted to try to find the deadly virus of hydrophobia.
And now at night the chittering of the guinea-pigs and the
scurrying fights of the buck-rabbits in their cages were
drowned by the eerie noise of mad dogs howling — sinister
howls that kept Roux and Chamberland and Thuillier from
sleep. . . . What would Pasteur ever have done — he surely
would never have got far in his fight with the messengers of
death — without those fellows Roux and Chamberland and
Thuillier?
Gradually, it was hardly a year after the miracle of Pouilly-
le-Fort, it began to be evident that Pasteur, though a most
original microbe hunter, was not an infallible God. Disturb-
ing letters began to pile up on his desk; complaints from Mont-
pothier and a dozen towns of France, and from Packisch and
Kapuvar in Hungary. Sheep were dying from anthrax — not
natural anthrax they had picked up in dangerous fields, but
i66
PASTEUR
anthrax they had got from those vaccines that were meant to
save them! From other places came sinister stories of how
the vaccine had failed to work — the vaccine had been paid for,
whole docks of sheep had been injected, the farmers had gone
to bed breathing Thank-God-For-Our-Great-Man-Pasteur, only
to wake up in the morning to find their fields littered with the
carcasses of dead sheep, and these sheep — which ought to
have been immune — had died from the lurking anthrax spores
that lay in their fields. . . .
Pasteur began to hate to open his letters; he wanted to stop
his ears against snickers that sounded from around corners,
and then — the worst thing that could possibly happen — came
a cold terribly exact scientific report from the laboratory of
that nasty little German Koch in Berlin, and this report ripped
the practicalness of the anthrax vaccine to tatters. Pasteur
knew that Koch was the most accurate microbe hunter in the
world.
There is no doubt that Pasteur lost some sleep from this
aftermath of his glorious discovery, but, God rest him, he was
a gallant man. It was not in him to admit, either to the public
or to himself, that his sweeping claims were wrong.
“Have not I said that my vaccines made sheep a little sick
with anthrax, but never killed them, and protected them per-
fectly? Well, I must stick to that,” you can hear him mutter
between his teeth.
What a searcher this Pasteur was, and yet how little of that
fine selfless candor of Socrates or Rabelais is to be found in
him. But he is not in any way to be blamed for that, for
those two last were only, in their way, looking for truth, while
Pasteur’s work carried him more and more into the frantic
business of saving lives, and in this matter truth is not of the
first importance. . . .
In 1882, while his desk was loaded with reports of disasters,
Pasteur went to Geneva, and there before the cream of dis-
ease-fighters of the world he gave a thrilling speech, subject:
“How to guard living creatures from virulent maladies by
AND THE MAD DOG
167
injecting them with weakened microbes.” Pasteur assured
them that: “The general principles have been found and one
cannot refuse to believe that the future is rich with the great-
est hopes.”
“We are all animated with a superior passion, the passion
for progress and for truth 1” he shouted — but unhappily he
said no word about those numerous occasions when his vac-
cine had killed sheep instead of protecting them.
At this meeting Robert Koch sat blinking at Pasteur behind
his gold-rimmed spectacles and smiling under his weedy beard
at such an unscientific inspirational address. Pasteur seemed
to feel something hanging over him, and he challenged Koch
to argue with him publicly — knowing that Koch was a much
better microbe hunter than an argufier. “I will content my-
self with replying to Mr. Pasteur’s address in a written paper,
in the near future,” said Koch — who coughed, and sat down.
In a little while this reply appeared. It was dreadful. In
this serio-comic answer Dr. Koch began by remarking that he
had obtained some of this precious so-calleu anthrax vaccine
from the agent of Mr. Pasteur.
Did Mr. Pasteur say that his first vaccine would kill mice,
but not guinea-pigs? Dr. Koch had tested it, and it wouldn’t
even kill mice. But some queer samples of it killed sheep!
Did Mr. Pasteur maintain that his second vaccine killed
guinea-pigs but not rabbits? Dr. Koch had carefully tested
this one too, and found that it often killed rabbits very
promptly — and sometimes sheep, poor beasts 1 which Mr. Pas-
teur claimed it would guard from death.
Did Mr. Pasteur really believe that his vaccines were really
pure cultivations containing nothing but anthrax microbes?
Dr. Koch had studied them carefully and found them to be
veritable menageries of hideous scum-forming bacilli and
strange cocci and other foreign creatures that had no business
there.
Finally, was Mr. Pasteur really burning so with a passion
for truth? Then why hadn’t he told of the bad results as well
PASTEUR
168
as the good ones, that had followed the wholesale use of his
vaccine?
“Such goings-on are perhaps suitable for the advertising of
a business house, but science should reject them vigorously,”
finished Koch, drily, devastatingly.
Then Pasteur went through the roof and answered Koch’s
cool facts in an amazing paper with arguments that would not
have fooled the jury of a country debating society. Did Koch
dare to make believe that Pasteur’s vaccines were full of con-
taminating microbes? “For twenty years before Koch’s
scientific birth in 1876, it has been my one occupation to iso-
late and grow microbes in a pure state, and therefore Koch’s
insinuation that I do not know how to make pure cultivations
cannot be taken seriously!” shouted Pasteur.
The French nation, even the great men of the nation, patri-
otically refused to believe that Koch had demoted their hero
from the rank of God of Science — what could you expect from
a German anyway? — and they promptly elected Pasteur to the
Acadimie Frangaise, the ultimate honor to bestow on a French-
man. And on the day of Pasteur’s admission this fiery yes-man
was welcomed to his place among the Immortal Forty by the
skeptical genius, Ernest Renan, the author who had changed
Jesus from a God into a good human being, a man who could
forgive everything because he understood everything. Renan
knew that even if Pasteur sometimes did suppress the truth,
he was still sufficiently marvelous. Renan was not a scientist
but he was wise enough to know that Pasteur had done a won-
derful thing when he showed that weak bugs may protect liv-
ing beings against virulent ones — even if they would not do
it one hundred times out of one hundred.
Regard these two fantastically opposite men facing each
other on this solemn day. Pasteur the go-getter, an energetic
fighter full of a mixture of faiths that interfered, sometimes,
with ultimate — and maybe ugly — truth. And talking to him
loftily sits the untroubled Renan with the massiveness of
Mount Everest, such a dreadful skeptic that he probably was
AND THE MAD DOG
169
never quite convinced that he was himself alive, so firmly doubt-
ing the value of doing anything that he had become one of the
fattest men in France.
Renan called Pasteur a genius and compared him to some
of the greatest men that ever lived and then gave the excited,
paralyzed, gray-haired, microbe hunter this mild admonition:
“Truth, Sir, is a great coquette; she will not be sought with
too much passion, but often is most amenable to indifference.
She escapes when apparently caught, but gives herself up if
patiently waited for; revealing herself after farewells have
been said, but inexorable when loved with too much fervor.”
Surely Renan was too wise to think that his lovely words
would ever change Pasteur one jot from the headlong untruth-
ful hunter after truth that he was. But just the same, these
words sum up the fundamental sadness of Pasteur’s life, they
tell of the crown of thorns that madmen wear whose dream it
is to change a world in the little seventy years they are allowed
to live.
vn
And now Pasteur began — God knows why — to stick little
hollow glass tubes into the gaping mouths of dogs writhing
mad with rabies. While two servants pried apart and held
open the jowls of a powerful bulldog, Pasteur stuck his beard
within a couple of inches of those fangs whose snap meant the
worst of deaths, and, sprinkled sometimes with a maybe fatal
spray, he sucked up the froth into his tube — to get a specimen
in which to hunt for the microbe of hydrophobia. I wish to
forget, now, everything that I have said about his showman-
ship, his unsearcherlike go-gettings. This business of his
gray eyes looking that bulldog in the mouth — this was no
grandstand stuff.
Why did Pasteur set out to trap the germ of rabies? That
is a mystery, because there were a dozen other serious dis-
eases, just then, whose microbes had not yet been found, dis-
PASTEUR
170
eases that killed many more people than rabies had ever put
to death, diseases that were not nearly so surely deadly to an
adventurous experimenter as rabies would be — if one of those
dogs should get loose. . . .
It must have been the artist, the poet in him that urged him
on to this most hard and dangerous hunting, for Pasteur him-
self said: “I have always been haunted by the cries of those
victims of the mad wolf that came down the street of Arbois
when I was a little boy. . . .” Pasteur knew the way the yells
of a mad dog curdle the blood of every one. He remembered
that less than a hundred years before in France, laws had to
be passed against the poisoning, the strangling, the shooting of
wretched people whom frightened fellow-townsmen just sus-
pected of having rabies. Doubtless he saw himself the de-
liverer of men from such crazy fear — such hopeless suffering.
And then, in this most magnificent and truest of all his
searchings, Pasteur started out, as he so often did, by mak-
ing mistakes. In the saliva of a little child dying from hydro-
phobia he discovered a strange motionless germ that he gave
the unscientific name of “microbe-like-an-eight.” He read
papers at the Academy that hinted about this figure-eight germ
having something to do with the mysterious cause of hydro-
phobia. But in a little while this trail proved to be a blind
one, for with Roux and Chamberland he found — after he had
settled down and got his teeth into this search — that this eight-
microbe could be found in the mouths of many healthy people
who had never been anywhere near a mad dog.
Presently, late in 1882, he ran on to his first clew. “Mad
dogs are scarce just now, old Bourrel the veterinarian brings
me very few of them, and people with hydrophobia are still
harder to get hold of — we’ve got to produce this rabies in ani-
mals in our laboratory and keep it going there — otherwise we
won’t be able to go on studying it steadily,” he pondered.
He was more than sixty, and he was tired.
Then one day, a lassoed mad dog was brought into the lab-
oratory; dangerously he was slid into a big cage with healthy
AND THE MAD DOG 171
dogs and allowed to bite them. Roux and Chamberland fished
froth out of the mouth of this mad beast and sucked it up into
syringes and injected this stuff into rabbits and guinea-pigs.
Then they waited eagerly to see this menagerie develop the
first signs of madness. Sometimes — alas — the experiment
worked, but other very irritating times it did not; four healthy
dogs had been bitten and six we<sks later they came in one
morning to find two of these creatures lashing about their
cages, howling — but for months after that the other two showed
no sign of rabies; there was no rime or reason to this business,
no regularity, confound it! this was not science! And it was
the same with the guinea-pigs and rabbits: two of the rabbits
might drag out their hind legs with a paralysis — then die in
dreadful convulsions, but the other four would go on chewing
their greens as if there were no mad-dog virus within a million
miles of them.
Then one day a little idea came to Pasteur, and he hurried
to tell it to Roux.
“This rabies virus that gets into people by bites, it settles
in their brains and spinal cords. ... All the symptoms of
hydrophobia show that it’s the nervous system that this virus
— this bug we can’t find — attacks. . . .
“That’s where we have to look for the unknown microbe
. . . that’s where we can grow it maybe, even without seeing
it . . . maybe we could use the living animal’s brain instead
of a bottle of soup ... a funny culture-bottle that would be,
but. . . .
“When we inject it under the skin — the virus may get lost in
the body before it can travel to the brain — if I could only stick
it right into a dog’s brain ... 1 ”
Roux listened to these dreamings of Pasteur, he listened
bright-eyed to these fantastic imaginings. . . . Another man
than Roux might have thought Pasteur completely crazy. . . .
The brain of a dog or rabbit instead of a bottle of broth, in-
deed! What nonsense! But not to Roux!
“But why not put the virus right into a dog’s brain, master,
173 PASTEUR
I can trephine a dog— I can drill a little hole in his skull—
without hurting him — without damaging his brain at all . . .
it would be easy . . said Roux.
Pasteur shut Roux up, furiously. He was no doctor, and ha
did not know that surgeons can do this operation on human
beings even, quite safely. “What! bore a hole right through
a dog’s skull — why, you’d hurt the poor beast terribly . . .
you would damage his brain . . . you would paralyze him . . .
Nol I will not permit it!”
So near was Pasteur, by reason of his tender-heartedness,
so close was he to failing completely in winning to the most
marvelous of his gifts to men. He quailed before the stern ex-
periment that his weird idea demanded. But Roux — the faith-
ful, the now almost forgotten Roux — saved him by disobeying
him.
For, a few days later when Pasteur left the laboratory to
go to some meeting or other, Roux took a healthy dog, put him
easily out of pain with a little chloroform, and bored a hole
in the beast’s head and exposed his palpitating, living brain.
Then up into a syringe he drew a little bit of the ground-up
brain of a dog just dead with rabies: “This stuff must be
swarming with those rabies microbes that are maybe too small
for us to see,” he pondered; and through the hole in the sleep-
ing dog’s skull went the needle of the syringe, and into the liv-
ing brain Roux slowly, gently shot the deadly rabid stuff. . . .
Next morning Roux told Pasteur about it “What!”
shouted Pasteur. “Where is the poor creature ... he must
be dying . . . paralyzed. . . .”
But Roux was already down the stairs, and in an instant ho
was back, his operated dog prancing in ahead of him, jumping
gayly against Pasteur, sniffing ’round among the old broth bot-
tles under the laboratory benches. Then Pasteur realized
Roux’s cleverness — and the new road of experiment that lay
before him, and though he was not fond of dogs, his joy made
him fuss over this one: “Good dog, excellent beast!” Pasteur
AND THE MAD DOG 173
said, and dreamed: “This beast will show that my idea will
work. . . .”
Sure enough, less than two weeks later the good creature
began to howl mournful cries and tear up his bed and gnaw at
his cage — and in a few days more he was dead, and this brute
died, as you will see, so that thousands of mankind might live.
Now Pasteur and Roux and Chamberland had a sure way,
that worked one hundred times out of one hundred, of giving
rabies to their dogs and guinea-pigs and rabbits. “We cannot
find the microbe — surely it must be too tiny for the strongest
microscope to show us — there’s no way to grow it in flasks of
soup . . . but we can keep it alive — this deadly virus — in the
brains of rabbits . . . that is the only way to grow it,” you
can hear Pasteur telling Roux and Chamberland.
Never was there a more fantastic experiment in all of microbe
hunting, or in any science, for that matter; never was there a
more unscientific feat of science than this struggling, by Pas-
teur and his boys, with a microbe they couldn’t see — a weird
bug of whose existence they only knew by its invisible growth
in the living brains and spinal cords of an endless succession
of rabbits and guinea-pigs and dogs. Their only knowledge
that there was such a thing as the microbe of rabies was the
convulsive death of the rabbits they injected, and the fearful
cries of their trephined dogs. . . .
Then Pasteur and his assistants started on their outlandish
— any wise man would say their impossible — adventure of tam-
ing this vicious virus that they could not see. There were little
interruptions; Roux went with Thuillier to fight the cholera in
Egypt and there, you will remember, Thuillier died; and Pas-
teur went out into the rural pig-sties of France to discover the
microbe and find a vaccine against a disease that was just then
murdering French swine. But Pasteur stopped getting en-
tangled in those vulgar arguments which were so often to his
discredit, and the three of them locked themselves in their
laboratory in the Rue d’Ulm with their poor paralyzed and
But Pasteur began inventing experiments that no god would
have attempted; his desk was strewn with hieroglyphic scrawls
of them. And at eleven in the morning, when the records of
the results of the day before had been carefully put down, he
would call Roux and Chamberland, and to them he would read
off some wild plan for groping after this unseen unreachable
virus — some fantastic plan for getting his fingers on it inside
the body of a rabbit — to weaken it.
“Try this experiment to-day 1” Pasteur would tell them.
“But that is technically impossible!” they protested.
“No matter — plan it any way you wish, provided you do it
well,” Pasteur replied. (He was, those days, like old Ludwig
van Beethoven writing unplayable horn parts for his sym-
phonies — and then miraculously discovering hornblowers to
PASTEUR
176
play those parts.) For, one way or another, the ingenious
Roux and Chamberland devised tricks to do those crazy ex-
periments. . . .
And at last they found a way of weakening the savage hydro-
phobia virus — by taking out a little section of the spinal cord
of a rabbit dead of rabies, and hanging this bit of deadly stuff
up to dry in a germ-proof bottle for fourteen days. This
shriveled bit of nervous tissue that had once been so deadly
they shot into the brains of healthy dogs — and those dogs did
not die. . . .
“The virus is dead — or better still very much weakened,”
said Pasteur, jumping at the latter conclusion with no sense or
reason. “Now we’ll try drying other pieces of virulent stuff for
twelve days — ten days — eight days — six days, and see if we
can’t just give our dogs a little rabies . . . then they ought to
be immune. . .
Savagely they fell to this long will 0’ the wisp of an experi-
ment. For fourteen days Pasteur walked up and down the
bottle and microscope and cage-strewn unearthly workshop and
grumbled and fretted and made scrawls in that everlasting
notebook of his. The first day the dogs were dosed with the
weakened — the almost extinct virus that had been dried for
fourteen days; the second day they received a shot of the
slightly stronger nerve stuff that had been thirteen days in its
bottle; and so on until the fourteenth day — when each beast
was injected with one-day-dried virus that would have surely
killed a not-inoculated animal.
For weeks they waited — hair graying again — for signs of
rabies in these animals, but none ever came. They were happy,
these ghoulish fighters of death! Their clumsy terrible four-
teen vaccinations had not hurt the dogs — but were they im-
mune?
Pasteur dreaded it — if this failed all of these years of work
had gone for nothing, and “I am getting old, old . . you can
hear him whispering to himself. But the test had to be made.
Would the dogs stand an injection of the most deadly rabid
AND THE MAD DOG 177
virus — right into their brains — a business that killed an ordi-
nary dog one hundred times out of one hundred?
Then one day Roux bored little holes through the skulls of
two vaccinated dogs — and two not vaccinated ones: and into
all four went a heavy dose of the most virulent virus. . . .
One month later, Pasteur and his men, at the end of three
years of work, knew that victory over hydrophobia was in their
hands. For, while the two vaccinated dogs romped and sniffed
about their cages with never a sign of anything ailing them —
the two that had not received the fourteen protective doses of
dried rabbit’s brain — these two had howled their last howls and
died of rabies.
Now immediately — the life-saver in this man was always
downing the mere searcher — Pasteur’s head buzzed with plans
to wipe hydrophobia from the earth, he had a hundred foolish
projects, and he walked in a brown world of thought, in a mist
of plans that Roux and Chamberland, and not even Madame
Pasteur could penetrate. It was 1884, and when Pasteur for-
got their wedding anniversary, the long-suffering lady wrote to
her daughter:
“Your father is absorbed in his thoughts, talks little, sleeps
little, rises at dawn, and, in one word, continues the life I began
with him this day thirty-five years ago.”
At first Pasteur thought of shooting his weakened rabies
virus into all the dogs of France in one stupendous Napoleonic
series of injections: “We must remember that no human being
is ever attacked with rabies except after being bitten by a rabid
dog. . . . Now if we wipe it out of dogs with our vaccine . . .”
he suggested to the famous veterinarian, Nocard, who laughed,
and shook his head.
“There are more than a hundred thousand dogs and hounds
and puppies in the city of Paris alone,” Nocard told him, “and
more than two million, five hundred thousand dogs in all of
France — and if each of these brutes had to get fourteen shots
of your vaccine fourteen days in a row . where would you
get the men? Where would you get the time? Where the
178 PASTEUR
devil would you get the rabbits? Where would you get sick
spinal cord enough to make one-thousandth enough vaccine?”
Then finally there dawned on Pasteur a simple way out of
his trouble: “It’s not the dogs we must give our fourteen doses
of vaccine,” he pondered, “it’s the human beings that have
been bitten by mad dogs. . . .”
“How easyl . .. . After a person has been bitten by a mad
dog, it is always weeks before the disease develops in him. . . .
The virus has to crawl all the way from the bite to the brain.
. . . While that is going on we can shoot in our fourteen doses
. . . and protect him!” and hurriedly Pasteur called Roux and
Chamberland together, to try it on the dogs first.
They put mad dogs in cages with healthy ones, and the mad
dogs bit the normal ones.
Roux injected virulent stuff from rabid rabbits into the
brains of other healthy dogs.
Then they gave these beasts, certain to die if they were
left alone — they shot the fourteen stronger and stronger doses
of vaccine into them. It was an unheard-of triumph! For
every one of these creatures lived — threw off perfectly, mys-
teriously, the attacks of their unseen assassins, and Pasteur —
who had had a bitter experience with his anthrax inoculations
— asked that all of his experiments be checked by a commis-
sion of the best medical men of France, and at the end of these
severe experiments the commission announced:
“Once a dog is made immune with the gradually more viru-
lent spinal cords of rabbits dead of rabies, nothing on earth
can give him the disease.”
From all over the world came letters, urgent telegrams, from
physicians, from poor fathers and mothers who were waiting
terror-smitten for their children, mangled by mad dogs, to die —
frantic messages poured in on Pasteur, begging him to send
them his vaccine to use on threatened humans. Even the mag-
nificent Emperor of Brazil condescended to write Pasteur, beg-
ging him . . .
And you may guess how Pasteur was worried! This was no
AND THE MAD DOG
179
affair like anthrax, where, if the vaccine was a little, just a
shade too strong, a few sheep would die. Here a slip meant
the lives of babies. . . . Never was any microbe hunter faced
with a worse riddle. “Not a single one of all my dogs has ever
died from the vaccine,” Pasteur pondered. “All of the bitten
ones have been perfectly protected by it. . . . It must work
the same way on humans — it must . . . but . . .”
And then sleep once more was not to be had by this poor
searcher who had made a too wonderful discovery. . . . Hor-
rid pictures of babies crying for the water their strangled
throats would not let them drink— children killed by his own
hands — such visions floated before him in the dark. . . .
For a moment the actor, the maker of grand theatric ges-
tures, rose in him again : “I am much inclined to begin on my-
self — inoculating myself with rabies, and then arresting the
consequences; for I am beginning to feel very sure of my re-
sults,” he wrote to his old friend, Jules Vergel.
At last, mercifully, the worried Mrs. Meister from Meissen-
gott in Alsace took the dreadful decision out of Pasteur’s un-
sure hands. This woman came crying into the laboratory,
leading her nine-year-old boy, Joseph, gashed in fourteen
places two days before by a mad dog. He was a pitifully whim-
pering, scared boy — hardly able to walk.
“Save my little boy — Mr. Pasteur,” this woman begged him.
Pasteur told the woman to come back at five in the evening,
and meanwhile he went to see the two physicians, Vulpian and
Grancher — admirers who had been in his laboratory, who had
seen the perfect way in which Pasteur could guard dogs from
rabies after they had been terribly bitten. That evening they
went with him to see the boy, and when Vulpian saw the angry
festering wounds he urged Pasteur to start his inoculations:
“Go ahead,” said Vulpian, “if you do nothing it is almost sure
that he will die.”
And that night of July 6, 1885, they made the first injection
of the weakened microbes of hydrophobia into a human being.
Then, day after day, the boy Meister went without a hitch
i8o PASTEUR
through his fourteen injections — which were only slight pricks
of the hypodermic needle into his skin.
And the boy went home to Alsace and had never a sign of
that dreadful disease.
Then all fears left Pasteur — it was very much like the case
of that first dog that Roux had injected years before, against
the master’s wishes. So it was now with human beings; once
little Meister came through unhurt, Pasteur shouted to the
world that he was prepared to guard the people of the world
from hydrophobia. This one case had completely chased his
fears, his doubts — those vivid but not very deep-lying doubts
of the artist that was in Louis Pasteur.
The tortured bitten people of the world began to pour into
the laboratory of the miracle-man of the Rue d’Ulm. Re-
search for a moment came to an end in the messy small suite
of rooms, while Pasteur and Roux and Chamberland sorted out
polyglot crowds of mangled ones, babbling in a score of tongues:
“Pasteur — save us!”
And this man who was no physician — who used to say with
proud irony: “I am only a chemist,” — this man of science who
all his life had wrangled bitterly with doctors, answered these
cries and saved them. He shot his complicated, illogical four-
teen doses of partly weakened germs of rabies — unknown mi-
crobes of rabies — into them and sent these people healthy back
to the four corners of the earth.
From Smolensk in Russia came nineteen peasants, moujiks
who had been set upon by a mad wolf nineteen days before,
and five of them were so terribly mangled they could not walk
at all, and had to be taken to the Hotel Dieu. Strange figures
in fur caps they came, saying: “Pasteur — Pasteur,” and this
was the only word of French they knew.
Then Paris went mad — as only Paris can — with excited con-
cern about these bitten Russians who must surely die — it was
so long since they had been attacked — and the town talked of
nothing else while Pasteur and his men started their injections.
The chances of getting hydrophobia from the bites of mad
AND THE MAD DOG 181
wolves are eight out of ten: out of these nineteen Russians,
fifteen were sure to die. . . .
“Maybe,” said every one, “they will all die — it is more than
two weeks since they were attacked, poor fellows; the malady
must have a terrible start, they have no chance. . . .” Such
was the gabble of the Boulevards.
Perhaps, indeed, it was too late. Pasteur could not eat noi
did he sleep at all. He took a terrible risk, and morning and
night, twice as quickly as he had ever made the fourteen in-
jections — twice a day to make up for lost time — he and his men
shot the vaccine into the arms of the Russians.
And at last a great shout of pride went up for this man Pas-
teur, went up from the Parisians, and all of France and all the
world raised a paean of thanks to him — for the vaccine marvel-
ously saved all but three of the doomed peasants. The moujiks
.returned to Russia and were welcomed with the kind of awe
that greets the return of hopeless sick ones who have been
healed at some miraculous shrine. And the Tsar of All the
Russias sent Pasteur the diamond cross of Ste. Anne, and a
hundred thousand francs to start the building of that house of
microbe hunters in the Rue Dutot in Paris — that laboratory
now called the Institut Pasteur. From all over the world — it
was the kind of burst of generosity that only great disasters
usually call out — from every country in the earth came money,
piling up into millions of francs for the building of a labora-
tory in which Pasteur might have everything needed to track
down other deadly microbes, to invent weapons against
them. . . .
The laboratory was built, but Pasteur’s own work was done;
his triumph was too much for him; it was a kind of trigger,
perhaps, that snapped the strain of forty years of never before
heard-of ceaseless searching. He died in 1895 in a little house
near the kennels where they now kept his rabid dogs, at Ville-
neuve l’Etang, just outside of Paris. His end was that of the
devout Catholic, the mystic he had always been. In one hand
he held a crucifix and in the other lay the hand of the most
182
PASTEUR
patient, obscure and important of his collaborators — Madame
Pasteur. Around him, too, were Roux and Chamberland and
those other searchers he had worn to tatters with his restless
energy, those faithful ones he had abused, whom he had above
all inspired; and these men who had risked their lives in the
carrying out of his wild forays against death would now have
died to save him, if they could.
That was the perfect end of this so human, so passionately
imperfect hunter of microbes and saver of lives.
But there is another end of his career that I like to think of
more — and that was the day, in 1892, of Pasteur’s seventieth
birthday — when a medal was given to him at a great meeting
held to honor him, at the Sorbonne in Paris. Lister was there,
and many other famous men from other nations, and in tier
upon tier, above these magnificoes who sat in the seats of honor,
were the young men of France — the students of the Sorbonne
and the colleges and the high schools. There was a great buzz
of young voices — all at once a hush, as Pasteur limped up the
aisle, leaning on the arm of the President of the French Re-
public. And then — it is the kind of business that is usually
pulled off to welcome generals and that kind of hero who has
directed the futile butchering of thousands of enemies — the
band of the Republican Guard blared out into a triumphal
march.
Lister, the prince of surgeons, rose from his seat and hugged
Pasteur and the gray-bearded important men and the boys in
the top galleries cried and shook the walls with the roar of
their cheering. At last the old microbe hunter gave his speech
— the voice of the fierce arguments was gone and his son had to
speak it for him — and his last words were a hymn of hope, not
so much for the saving of life as a kind of religious cry for a
new way of life for men. It was to the students, to the boys
of the high schools he was calling:
“. . . Do not let yourselves be tainted by a deprecating and
barren skepticism, do not let yourselves be discouraged by the
sadness of certain hours which pass over nations. Live in the
AND THE MAD DOG
183
serene peace of laboratories and libraries. Say to yourselves
first: What have I done for my instruction? and, as you grad-
ually advance, What have I done for my country? until the
time comes when you may have the immense happiness of
thinking that you have contributed in some way to the prog-
ress and good of humanity. . .
CHAPTER VI
ROUX AND BEHRING
MASSACRE THE GUINEA-PIGS
I
It was to save babies that they killed so many guinea-pigs!
Emile Roux, the fanatical helper of Pasteur, in 1888 took
up the tools his master had laid down, and started on searches
of his own. In a little while he discovered a strange poison
seeping from the bacillus of diphtheria — one ounce of the pure
essence of this stuff was enough to kill seventy-five thousand
big dogs. A few years later, while Robert Koch was bending
under the abuse and curses of sad ones who had been disap-
pointed by his supposed cure for consumption, Emil Behring,
the poetical pupil of Koch, spied out a strange virtue, an un-
known something in the blood of guinea-pigs. It could make
that powerful diphtheria poison completely harmless. . . .
These two Emils revived men’s hopes after Koch’s disaster,
and once more people believed for a time that microbes were
going to be turned from assassins into harmless little pets.
What experiments these two young men made to discover
this diphtheria antitoxin! They went at it frantic to save
lives; they groped at it among bizarre butcherings of countless
guinea-pigs; in the evenings their laboratories were shambles
like the battlefields of old days when soldiers were mangled by
spears and pierced by arrows. Roux dug ghoulishly into the
spleens of dead children — Behring bumped his nose in the
darkness of his ignorance against facts the gods themselves
could not have predicted. For each brilliant experiment these
two had to pay with a thousand failures.
184
MASSACRE THE GUINEA-PIGS 185
But they discovered the diphtheria antitoxin.
They never could have done it without the modest discovery
of Frederick Loeffler. He was that microbe hunter whose mus-
tache was so militaristic that he had to keep pulling it down to
see through his microscope; he sat working at Koch’s right
hand in that brave time when the little master was tracking
down the tubercle bacillus. It was in the early eighteen eigh-
ties, and diphtheria, which several times each hundred years
seems to have violent ups and downs of viciousness — diph-
theria was particularly murderous then. The wards of the hos-
pitals for sick children were melancholy with a forlorn wailing;
there were gurgling coughs foretelling suffocation; on the sad
rows of narrow beds were white pillows framing small faces
blue with the strangling grip of an unknown hand. Through
these rooms walked doctors trying to conceal their hopelessness
with cheerfulness; powerless they went from cot to cot — try-
ing now and again to give a choking child its breath by pushing
a tube into its membrane-plugged windpipe. . . .
Five out of ten of these cots sent their tenants to the
morgue.
Below in the dead house toiled Frederick Loeffler, boiling
knives, heating platinum wires red hot and with them lifting
grayish stuff from the still throats of those bodies the doctors
had failed to keep alive; and this stuff he put into slim tubes
capped with white fluffs of cotton, or he painted it with dyes,
which showed him, through his microscope, that there were
queer bacilli shaped like Indian clubs in those throats, microbes
which the dye painted with pretty blue dots and stripes and
bars. In nearly every throat he discovered these strange ba-
cilli; he hurried to show them to his master, Koch.
There is little doubt Koch led Loeffler by the hand in this
discovery. “There is no use to jump at conclusions,” you can
hear Koch telling him. “You must grow these microbes pure —
then you must inject the cultivations into animals. ... If
those beasts come down with a disease exactly like human
diphtheria, then . . .” How could Loeffler have gone wrong,
1 86
ROUX AND BEHRING
with that terribly pedantic, but careful, truth-hunting little czar
of microbe hunters squinting at him from behind those eternal
spectacles?
One dead child after another Loeffler examined; he poked
into every part of each pitiful body; he stained a hundred dif-
ferent slices of every organ; he tried — and quickly succeeded
— in growing those queer barred bacilli pure. But everywhere
he searched, in every part of each body, he found no microbes
— except in the membrane-cluttered throat. And always here,
in every child but one or two, he came on those Indian club-
shaped rods. “How can these few microbes, growing nowhere
in the body but the throat — how can these few germs, staying
in that one place, kill a child so quickly?” pondered Loeffler.
“But I must follow Herr Koch’s directions!” and he proceeded
to shoot the germs of his pure cultivations into the windpipes
of rabbits and beneath the skins of guinea-pigs. Quickly these
animals died — in two or three days, like a child, or even more
quickly — but the microbes, which Loeffler had shot into them
in millions, could only be found at the spot where he had in-
jected them. . . . And sometimes there were none to be found
even here, or at best a few feeble ones hardly strong enough,
you would think, to hurt a flea. . . .
“But how is it these few bacilli — sticking in one little corner
of the body — how can they topple over a beast a million times
larger than they are themselves?” asked Loeffler.
Never was there a more conscientious searcher than this
Loeffler, nor one with less of a wild imagination to liven — or to
spoil — his almost automatic exactness. He sat himself down;
he wrote a careful scientific paper; it was modest, it was cold,
it was not hopeful, it was a most unlawyer-like report reciting
all of the fors and againsts on the question of whether or no
this new bacillus was the cause of diphtheria. He leaned over
backward to be honest — he put last the facts that were against
it! “This microbe may be the cause,” you can hear him mum-
bling as he wrote, “but in a few children dead of diphtheria I
could not find these germs . . . none of my inoculated animals
MASSACRE THE GUINEA-PIGS 187
get paralysis as children do . . . what is most against me is
that I’ve discovered this same microbe — it was vicious against
guinea-pigs and rabbits too! — in the throat of a child with
never a sign of diphtheria.”
He even went so far as to underestimate the importance of
his exact fine searching, but at the end of his treatise he gave
a clew to the more imaginative Roux and Behring who came
after him. A strange man, this Loeffler! Without seeming to
be able to make a move to do it himself, he predicted what
others must find:
“This bacillus stays on a little patch of dead tissue in the
chroat of a baby; it lurks on a little point under a guinea-pig’s
skin; it never swarms in millions — yet it kills! How?
“It must make a poison — a toxin that leaks out of it, sneak-
ing from it to some vital spot in the body. Such a toxin must
be found, in the organs of a dead child, in the carcass of a
guinea-pig dead of the disease — yes — and in the broth where
the bacillus grows so well. . . . The man finding this poison
will prove what I have failed to demonstrate.” Such was the
dream Loeffler put into Roux’s head. . . .
n
Four years later Loeffler’s words came true — by what seemed
an utterly silly, but what was surely a most fantastical experi-
ment you would have thought could only result in drowning a
guinea-pig. What a hectic microbe hunting went on in Paris
just then! Pasteur, in a state of collapse after his triumph
of the dog bite vaccine, was feebly superintending the building
of his million-franc Institute in the Rue Dutot. The wild,
half-charlatan Metchnikoff had come out of Odessa in Russia
to belch quaint theories about how phagocytes gobble up ma-
lignant germs. Pasteurians were packing microscopes in
satchels and hurrying to Saigon in Indo-China and to Australia
to try to discover microbes of weird diseases that did not exist.
Hopefully frantic women were burying Pasteur — he was too
ROUX AND BEHRING
188
ti re d!— under letters begging him to save their children from
a dozen horrid diseases.
“If you will,” one woman wrote him, “you can surely find a
remedy for the horrible disease called diphtheria. Our chil-
dren, to whom we teach your name as a great benefactor, will
owe their lives to you! ”
Pasteur was absolutely done up, but Roux — and he was
helped by the intrepid Yersin who afterward brilliantly discov-
ered the germ of the black death — set out to try to find a way
to wipe diphtheria from the earth It wasn’t a science — it was
a crusade, this business. It was full of passion, of purpose; it
lacked skillful lying-in-wait, and those long planned artistic
ambushes you find in most discoveries. I will not say Emile
Roux began his searching because of this pitiful note from that
woman — but there is no doubt he worked to save rather than
to know. From the old palsied master down to the most ob-
scure bottle wiper, the men of this house in the Rue Dutot were
humanitarians; they were saviors — and that is noble! — but
this drove them sometimes into strange byways far off the
road where you find truth. . . . And in spite of this Roux
made a marvelous discovery.
Roux and Yersin went to the Hospital for Sick Children —
diphtheria was playing hell with Paris — and here they ran on
to the same bacillus Loeffler had found. They grew this mi-
crobe in flasks of broth, and did the regular accepted thing
first, shooting great quantities of this soup into an assorted
menagerie of unfortunate birds and quadrupeds who had to die
without the satisfaction of knowing they were martyrs. It
wasn’t particularly enlightened searching, this, but almost from
the tap of the gong, they stumbled on one of the proofs Loef-
fler had failed to find. Their diphtheria soup paralyzed rab-
bits! The stuff went into their veins; in a few days the de-
lighted experimenters watched these beasts drag their hind
legs limply after them; the palsy crept up their bodies to their
front legs and shoulders — they died in a clammy, dreadful
paralysis. . . .
MASSACRE THE GUINEA-PIGS
189
“It hits rabbits just the way it does children,” muttered
Roux, full of a will to believe “This bacillus must be the
true cause of diphtheria. ... I shall find the germ in these
rabbits’ bodies nowl” And he clawed tissues out of a dozen
corners of their carcasses; he made cultivations of their spleens
and hearts — but never a bacillus! Only a few days before he
had pumped a billion or so into them, each of them. Here they
were, drawn and quartered, carved up and searched from their
pink noses to the white under-side of their tails. And not a
bacillus. What had killed them then?
Then Loeffler’s prediction flashed over Roux: “It must be
the germs make a poison, in this broth, to paralyze and kill
these beasts . . .” he pondered.
For a while the searcher came uppermost in him. He for-
got about possible savings of babies; he concentrated on vast
butcheries of guinea-pigs and rabbits — he must prove that the
diphtheria germ drips a toxin out of its wee body. . . . To-
gether with Yersin he began a good unscientific fumbling at
experiments; they were in the dark; there were no precedents
nor any kind of knowledge to go by. No microbe hunter be-
fore them had ever separated a deadly poison (though Pasteur
had once made something of a try at it) from the bodies of
microbes. They were alone in the dark, Roux and Yersin —
but they lighted matches. . . . “The bacilli must pour out a
poison into the broth we grow them in — just as they pour it
from their membrane in a child’s throat into his blood!” Of
course that last was not proved.
Then Roux stopped arguing in a circle. He searched. He
worked with his hands. It was worse, this fumbling of his,
than trying to get a stalled motor to go when you know noth-
ing about internal combustion machinery. He took big glass
bottles and put pure microbeless soup into them, and sowed
pure cultivations of the diphtheria bacillus in this broth; into
the incubating oven went the large-bellied bottles “Now
we will try separating the germs from the soup in which they
grow,” said Roux, after the bottle had ripened for four days.
tgo ROUX AND BEHRING
They rigged up a strange apparatus — it was a filter, shaped like
a candle, only it was hollow, and made of fine porcelain that
would let tne soup through, but so tight-meshed that it would
hold the tiniest bacilli back. With tongue-protruding care to
keep themselves from being splashed with this deadly stuff,
they poured the microbe-teeming broth around the candles
held rigid in shiny glass cylinders. They fussed — maybe, or
at least I hope so, with the blessed relief of profanity — but
the broth wouldn’t run through the porcelain. But at last they
pushed it through with high air pressure — and finally they
breathed easy, arranging little flasks full of a clear, amber-
colored filtered fluid (it had never a germ in it) on their lab-
oratory bench
“This stuff should have the poison in it . . . the filter has
held back all the microbes — but this stuff should kill our ani-
mals,” muttered Roux. The laboratory buzzed with eager
animal-boys getting ready the rabbits and guinea-pigs. Into
the bellies of these beasts went the golden juice propelled from
the syringe by Roux’s deft hands. . . .
He became a murderer in his heart, this Emile Roux, and in
his head as he came down to the laboratory each morning
were half-mad wishes for the death of his beasts. “The stuff
should be hitting them by now,” you can hear him growling
to Yersin, but they looked in vain for the ruffled hair, the
dragging hind legs, the cold shivering bodies to tell them their
wish was coming true.
It was beastly 1 All of this fussing with the delicate filter
experiments — and the animals munched at the greens in their
cages, they hopped about, males sniffed at females and en-
gaged in those absurd scufflings with other males which guinea-
pigs and rabbits hold to be necessary to the propagation of
their kind. . . . Let these giants (who fed them well) inject
more of this stuff into their veins, their bellies — poison?
Imagination! It made them feel happy. . . .
Roux tried again. He shot bigger doses of his filtered soup
into the animals, other animals, still more animals. It was no
go, there was no poison.
MASSACRE THE GUINEA-PIGS
191
That is, for a merely sensible man there would have been
no poison in the filtered soup that had stood in the incubator
for four days. Hadn’t enough animals been wasted trying
it? But Roux (let all mothers and children and the gods car-
ing for insane searchers bless him!) was no reasonable man
just then. For a moment he had caught Pasteur’s madness,
his strange trick of knowing what all men thought wrong to be
right, his flair for good impossible experiments. “There is a
poison there!” you can hear that hawk-faced consumptive
Roux shout to himself, to the dusty, bottle-loaded shelves of
his laboratory, to the guinea-pigs who would have snickered —
if they could have — at his earnest futile efforts to murder
them. “There must be a poison in this soup where the diph-
theria germs have grown — else why should those rabbits have
died?”
Then — I have told scientific searchers about this and they
have held their noses at such an experiment — Roux nearly
drowned a guinea-pig. For weeks he had been injecting more
and more of his filtered soup, but now (it was like facing a
night on a park bench with your last dime on the two dice) he
injected thirty times as much! Not even Pasteur would have
risked such an outlandish dose — thirty-five cubic centimeters
Roux shot under the guinea-pig’s skin and you would expect
that much water would kill such a little beast. If he died it
would mean nothing. . . . But into the belly of a guinea-pig
and into the ear-vein of a rabbit went this ocean of filtered
juice — it was as if he had put a bucketful of it into the veins
of a middle-sized man.
But that was the way Roux carved his name on those tab-
lets which men while they are on earth must never allow to
crumble; for, though the rabbit and the guinea-pig stood the
mere bulk of the microbe-less broth very well, and appeared
perfectly chipper for a day or so afterwards, in forty-eight
hours their hair was on end, their breath began to come in
little hiccups. In five days they were dead, with exactly those
symptoms their brothers had. after injections pf the living
192
ROUX AND BEHRING
diphtheria bacilli. So it was that Emile Roux discovered the
diphtheria poison. . . .
By itself this weird experiment of the gigantic dose of
feebly poisonous soup would only have made microbe hunters
laugh. It was scandalous. “What! — if a great flask of diph-
theria microbes can make so little poison that it takes a good
part of a bottle of it to kill a small guinea-pig — how can a few
microbes in a child’s throat make enough to io that child to
death ? It is idiotic ! ”
But Roux had got his start. With this silly experiment as
an uncertain flashlight, he went tripping and stumbling through
the thickets, he bent his sallow bearded face (sometimes it was
like the face of some unearthly bird of prey) over a precise
long series of tests. Then suddenly he was out in the open.
Presently, it was not more than two months later, he hit on the
reason his poison had been so weak before — he simply hadn’t
left his germ-filled bottles in the incubator for long enough;
there hadn’t been time enough for them really to get down to
work to make their deadly stuff. So, instead of four days, he
left the microbes stewing at body temperature in their soup
for forty-two days, and when he ran that brew through the
filter — presto! With bright eyes he watched unbelievably tiny
amounts of it do dreadful things to his animals — he couldn’t
seem to cut down the dose to an amount small enough to keep
it from doing sad damage to his guinea-pigs. Exultant he
watched feeble drops of it do away with rabbits, murder sheep,
lay large dogs low. He played with this fatal fluid; he dried
it; he tried to get at the chemistry of it (but failed) ; he got
out a very concentrated essence of it though, and weighed it,
and made long calculations.
One ounce of that purified stuff was enough to kill six hun-
dred thousand guinea-pigs — or seventy-five thousand large
dogs! And the bodies of those guinea-pigs who had got a six
hundred thousandth of an ounce Qf this pure toxin — the tissues
of those bodies looked like the sad tissues of a baby dead of
diphtheria. . . .
MASSACRE THE GUINEA-PIGS
193
So it was Roux made Loeffler’s prophecy come true; it was
that way he discovered the fluid messenger of death which
trickles from the insignificart bodies of diphtheria bacilli. But
he stuck here; he had explained how a diphtheria germ mur-
ders babies but he had found no way to stop its maraudings.
There was that letter from the mother — but Roux’s researches
petered out into various directions to doctors how to grow
germs pure out of children’s throats at the bedside, and into
suggestions for useful gargles. . . . He hadn’t Pasteur’s tre-
mendous grim stick-to-itiveness, nor his resourceful brain.
in
But away in Berlin there toiled another femile — the Ger-
mans leave off the last “e” — Emil August Behring. He worked
in Koch’s laboratory, in the dilapidated building called the
“Triangel” in the Schumann street. Here great things were
stirring. Koch was there, no longer plain Doctor Koch of
Wollstein, but now a Herr Professor, an eminent Privy Coun-
cilor. But his hat still fitted him; he peered through his
spectacles, saying little; he was enormously respected, and
against his own judgment he was trying to convince himself
he had discovered a cure for tuberculosis. The authorities
(scientists have reason occasionally to curse all authorities no
matter how benevolent) were putting pressure on him. At
least so it is whispered now by veteran microbe hunters who
were there and remember those brave times.
“We have showered you with medals and microscopes and
guinea-pigs — take a chance now, and give us a big cure, for the
glory of the Fatherland, as Pasteur has done for the glory of
France!” It was ominous stuff like this Koch was always
hearing. He listened at last, and who can blame him, for
what man can remain at his proper business of finding out the
ways of microbes with Governments bawling for a place in the
sun — or with mothers calling? So Koch listened and pre-
pared his own disaster by telling the world about his “Tuber-
194
ROUX AND BEHRING
culin.” But at the same time he guided his youngsters in fine
jobs they were doing — and among these young men was Emil
August Behring. How Koch pointed the gun of his cold mar-
velous criticism at that poet’s searchings!
And what a house of microbe hunters it was, that dingy Tri-
angel! Its walls shook under the arguments and guttural cries
and incessant experiments of Koch’s young men. Paul Ehr-
lich was there, smoking myriads of cigars, smearing his clothes
and his hands and even his face with a prismatic array of
dyes, making bold experiments to find out how baby mice
inherit immunity to certain vegetable poisons from their
mothers. . . . Kitasato, the round-faced Japanese, was shoot-
ing lock-jaw bacilli into the tails of mice and solemnly am-
putating these infected tails — to see whether the creatures
would perish from the poisons the microbes had made while
the tails were still attached. . . . And there were many others
there, some forgotten and some whose names are now famous.
With a vengeance the Germans were setting out to beat the
French, to bury them under a vast confusion of experiments,
to save mankind first.
But particularly, Emil Behring was there. He was a little
over thirty; he was an army doctor; he had a little beard,
neater than Koch’s scraggly one, but with less signs of origin-
ality. Just the same Behring’s head, in spite of that prosaic
beard, was the head of a poet; and yet, though he was fond
of rhetoric, no one stuck closer to his laboratory bench than
Behring. He compared the grandeur of the Master’s discovery
of the tubercle bacillus to the rosy tip of the snow-capped peak
of his favorite mountain in Switzerland, while he probed by
careful experiments into why animals are immune to microbes.
He compared the stormy course of human pneumonia to the
rushing of a mountain stream, while he discovered a some-
thing in the blood of rats — this stuff would kill anthrax bacilli*
He had two scientific obsessions, which were also poetical:
wie was that blood is the most marvelous of the juices cir-
culating in living things (what an extraordinary mysterious sap
MASSACRE THE GUINEA-PIGS
195
it was, this blood!) — the other was the strange notion (not a
new one) that there must exist chemicals to wipe invading mi-
crobes out of animals and men — without hurting the men or
the animals.
“I will find a chemical to cure diphtheria!” he cried, and
inoculated herds of guinea-pigs with cultivations of virulent
diphtheria bacilli. They got sick, and as they got sicker he
shot various chemical compounds into them. He tried costly
salts of gold, he tried naphthylamine, he tested more than
thirty different strange or common substances. He believed
innocently because these things could kill microbes in a glass
tube without damaging the tube, they would also hit the diph-
theria bacilli under a guinea-pig’s hide without ruining the
guinea-pig. But alas, from the slaughter house of dead and
dying guinea-pigs his laboratory was, you would suppose he
would have seen there was little to choose between the deadly
microbes and his equally murderous cures. . . . Nevertheless,
being a poet, Behring did not have too great a reverence for
facts; the hecatombs of corpses went on piling up, but they
failed to shake his faith in some marvelous unknown remedy
for diphtheria hidden somewhere among the endless rows of
chemicals in existence. Then, in his enthusiastic — but random
— search he came upon the tri-chloride of iodine.
Under the skins of several guinea-pigs he shot a dose of
diphtheria bacilli sure to kill them. In a few hours these mi-
crobes began their work; the spot of the injection became
swollen, got ominously hot, the beasts began to droop— then,
six hours after the fatal dose of the bacilli, Behring shot in
his iodine tri-chloride. . . . “It is no good, once more,” he
muttered. The day passed with no improvement and the next
morning the beasts began to go into collapses. Solemnly he
put the guinea-pigs on their backs, then poked them with his
finger to see if they could still scramble back on their feet. . . .
“If the guinea-pig can still get up when you poke him, there
may be yet a chance for him,” explained Behring to his amazed
assistants. What a test that was — think of a doctor having a
ROUX AND BEHRING
196
test like this to see whether or no his patient would livel
And what an abominably crude test ! Less and less the iodine-
treated guinea-pigs moved when he poked them — there was
now no longer any hope. . . .
Then one morning Behring came into his laboratory to see
those guinea-pigs on their feet! Staggering about, and dread-
fully scraggly looking beasts they were, but they were getting
better from diphtheria, these creatures whose untreated com-
panions had died days before. . . .
“I have cured diphtheria!” whispered Behring.
In a fever he went at trying to cure more guinea-pigs with
this iodine stuff; sometimes the diphtheria bacilli killed these
poor beasts; sometimes the cure killed them; once in a while
one or two of them survived and crawled painfully back to
their feet. There was little certainty of this horrible cure and
no rime or reason. The guinea-pigs who survived, probably
wished they were dead, for while the tri-chloride was curing
them it was burning nasty holes in their hides too — they
squeaked pitifully when they bumped these gaping sores. It
was an appalling business!
Just the same, here were a few guinea-pigs, sure — except for
this iodine — to have died of diphtheria; and they were alive 1
I often ponder how terrible was the urge forcing men like
Behring to try to cure disease — they were not searchers for
truth, but rabid, experimenting healers rather; ready to kill an
animal or even a child maybe with one disease to cure him of
another. They stopped at nothing. . . . For, with no evidence
save these few dilapidated guinea-pigs, with no other proof of
the virtues of this blistering iodine tri-chloride, Behring pro-
ceeded to try it on babies sick with diphtheria.
And he reported: “I have not been encouraged by certain
carefully instituted tests of iodine tri-chloride on children sick
with diphtheria. . . .”
But here were still some of those feeble but cured guinea-
pigs, and Behring clutched at some good his murderous grop-
ings might do. The gods were kind to him. He pondered, and
MASSACRE THE GUINEA-PIGS
197
at last he asked himself: “Will these cured animals be im-
mune to diphtheria now?” He took these creatures and shot
an enormous dose of diphtheria bacilli into them. They stood
it! They never turned a hair at millions of bacilli, enough to
kill a dozen ordinary animals. They were immune!
Now Behring no longer trusted chemicals (think of the
beasts that had gone down to the incinerator!) but he still
had his fixed notion that blood was the most marvelous of the
saps coursing through living things. He worshiped blood;
his imagination gave it unheard-of excellences and strange
virtues. So — with more or less discomfort to his decrepit
cured guinea-pigs — he sucked a little blood with a syringe out
of an artery in their necks; he let the tubes holding this blood
stand until clear straw-colored serum rose over the red part
of the blood. With care he drew this serum off with a tiny
pipet — he mixed the serum with a quantity of virulent diph-
theria bacilli: “Surely there is something in the blood of these
creatures to make them so immune to diphtheria,” pondered
Behring; “undoubtedly there is something in this serum to kill
the diphtheria microbes. . . .”
He expected to see the germs shrivel up, to watch them die,
but when he looked, through his microscope, he saw dancing
masses of them — they were multiplying, “exuberantly multi-
plying,” he wrote in his notes with regret. But blood is won-
derful stuff. Some way it must be at the bottom of his guinea-
pig’s immunity. “After all,” muttered Behring, “this French-
man, Roux, has proved it isn’t the diphtheria germ but the
poison it makes — it is the poison kills animals, and chil-
dren. . . . Maybe these iodine-cured guinea-pigs are immune
to the poison too!”
He tried it. With sundry guttural gruntings, with a certain
poetic sloppiness, Behring got ready a soup which held poison
but had been freed of microbes. Huge doses of this stuff he
pumped from a syringe under the hides of his decreasing num-
ber of desolate cured guinea-pigs. Again, they were immune 1
Their sores went on healing, they grew fat. The poison
ROUX AND BEHRING
198
bothered them no more than had the bacilli which made it.
Here was something entirely new in microbe hunting, some-
thing Roux maybe dreamed of but couldn’t make come true.
Pasteur had guarded sheep against anthrax, and children from
the bites of mad dogs, but here was something incredible —
Behring, giving guinea-pigs diphtheria and then nearly killing
them with his frightful cure, had made them proof against the
microbe’s murderous toxin. He had made them immune to
the stuff of which one ounce was enough to kill seventy-five
thousand big dogs. . . .
“Surely it is in the blood I will find this antidote which pro-
tects the creatures!” cried Behring.
He must get some of their blood. There were hardly any
of the battered but diphtheria-proof guinea-pigs left now, but
he must have blood! He took one of the veterans, and cut
into its neck to find the artery; there was no artery left — his
numerous blood lettings had obliterated it. He poked about
(let us honor this animal!) and finally got a driblet of blood
out of a vessel in its leg. What a nervous time it was for
Behring, and I do not know whether it is Behring or his beasts
who is most to be pitied, for every morning he came down to
the laboratory wondering whether any of his priceless animals
were left alive. . . . But he had a few drops of serum now,
from a cured guinea-pig. He mixed this, in a glass tube, with
a large amount of the poisonous soup in which the diphtheria
microbes had grown.
Into new, non-immune guinea-pigs went this mixture — and
they did not die!
“How true are the words of Goethe! ” cried Behring. “Blood
is an entirely wonderful sap!”
Then, with Koch the master blinking at him, and with the
entire small band of maniacs in the laboratory breathless for
the result, Behring made his famous critical experiment. He
mixed diphtheria poison with the serum of a healthy guinea-
pig who was not immune, who had never had diphtheria or
MASSACRE THE GUINEA-PIGS
199
been cured from it either, and this serum did not hinder one
bit the murderous action of the poison. He shot this mixture
into new guinea-pigs; in three days they grew cold; when he
laid them on their backs and poked them with his finger they
did not budge. In a few hours they had coughed their last
sad hiccup and passed beyond. . . .
“It is only the serum of immune animals— of beasts who
have had diphtheria and have been cured of it — it is only such
serum kills the diphtheria poison 1 ” cried Behring. Healer that
he was, you can hear him muttering: “Now, maybe, I can make
larger animals immune too, and get big batches of their poison-
killing serum, then I’ll try that on children with diphtheria
. . . what saves guinea-pigs should cure babies!”
By this time nothing could discourage Behring. Like some
victorious general swept on by the momentum of his first
bloody success, he began shooting diphtheria microbes, and
iodine tri-chloride, and the poison of diphtheria microbes, into
rabbits, into sheep, into dogs. He tried to turn their living
bodies into factories for making the healing serum, the toxin-
killing serum. “Antitoxin” he called such serum. And he
succeeded, after those maimings and holocausts and mistakes,
always the necessary preludes to his triumphs. In a little
while he had sheep powerfully immune, and from them he got
plenty of blood. “Surely the antitoxin [he hadn’t the faint-
est notion what the chemistry of this mysterious stuff was]
certainly it will prevent diphtheria,” said Behring.
He injected little doses of the sheep serum into guinea-pigs;
the next day he pumped virulent diphtheria bacilli into these
same beasts. It was marvelous to watch them. There they
were, scampering about with never a sign of sickness, while
their companions (who had got no protecting dose of serum)
perished miserably in a couple of days. How good it was to
see them die, those unguarded beasts! For it was these crea-
tures told him how well the serum saved the other ones. Hun-
dreds of pretty experiments of this kind Behring made (there
aoo ROUX AND BEHRING
was little sloppiness now) and his helpers maybe pointed to
their foreheads, asking whether their chief would ever have
done saving one set of guinea-pigs and killing another set to
prove he had saved the first. But Behring had reasons. “We
made so many experiments because we wanted to show Herr
Koch how far we had come in our immunizing of laboratory
animals,” he wrote in one of his early reports.
There was only one fly in the ointment of his success — the
guarding action of the antitoxin serum didn’t last long. For
a few days after guinea-pigs had got their injections of serum
they stood big doses of the poison, but presently, in a week
or two weeks, it took less and less of the toxin to kill them.
Behring pulled at his beard: “This isn’t practical,” he mut-
tered, “you couldn’t go around giving all the children of Ger-
many a shot of sheep serum every few weeks!” And alas, his
eagerness for something to make the authorities wide-eyed,
led him away from his fine fussings with a way to prevent
diphtheria — it sent him a-whoring after the pound of cure. . . .
“Iodine tri-chloride is almost as bad for guinea-pigs as the
microbes are — but this antitoxin serum, it doesn’t give them
sores and ulcers ... I know it won’t hurt my animals . . .
I know it kills poison . . . now, if it would cure!”
Carefully he shot fatal doses of diphtheria bacilli into a lot
of guinea-pigs. Next day, they were seedy. The second day
their breath came anxiously. They stayed on their backs
with that fatal laziness. . . . Then Behring took half of this
lot of dying beasts, and into their bellies he injected a good
heavy dose of the antitoxin from his immune sheep. Mira-
cles! Nearly every one of them (but not all) began to breathe
more easily in a little while. Next day, when he put them on
their backs, they hopped nimbly back to their feet. They
stayed there. By the fourth day they were as good as new,
while their untreated companions, cold, dead, were being car-
ried out by the animal boy. . . . The serum cured!
The old laboratory of the Triangel was in a furor now, over
this triumphant finish of Behring’s sloppy stumbling Odyssey
MASSACRE THE GUINEA-PIGS
201
The hopes of everybody were purple — surely now he would
save children! While he was getting ready his serum for the
first fateful test on some baby near to death with diphtheria,
Behring sat down to write his classic report on how he could
cure beasts sure to die, by shooting into them a new, an un-
believable stuff their brother beasts had made in their own
bodies — at the risk of nearly dying themselves. “We have no
certain recipe for making animals immune,” wrote Behring;
“these experiments I have recorded do not include only my
successes.” Surely they did not, for Behring set down the
messings and the fiascoes along with the few lucky stabs that
gave him his sanguinary victory. . . . How could this potter-
ing poet have pulled off the discovery of the diphtheria anti-
toxin? But then, come to think of it, those first ancient name-
less men who invented sails to carry swift boats across the
water — they must have groped that way too. . . . How many
of the crazy craft of those anonymous geniuses turned turtle?
It is the way discoveries are made. . . .
Toward the end of the year 1891, babies lay dying of diph-
theria in the Bergmann clinic in the Brick Street in Berlin. On
the night of Christmas, a child desperately sick with diph-
theria cried and kicked a little as the needle of the first syringe
full of antitoxin slid under its tender skin.
The results seemed miraculous. A few children died; the
little son of a famous physician of Berlin passed out mysteri-
ously a few minutes after the serum went into him and there
was a great hullabaloo about that — but presently large chem-
ical factories in Germany took up the making of the antitoxin
in herds of sheep. Within three years twenty thousand babies
had been injected and like a rumor spread the news, and Biggs,
the eminent American Health Officer, then in Europe, was
carried away by the excitement. He cabled dramatically and
authoritatively to Dr. Park in New York:
DIPHTHERIA ANTITOXIN IS A SUCCESS; BEGIN
TO PRODUCE IT.
302
ROUX AND BEHRING
In the excitement of this cure, those sad ones, who had lost
dear ones through the first enthusiasm about the dangerous in-
jections of the consumption cure of Koch, forgot their sorrow
and forgave Koch because of his brilliant pupil Behring.
xv
But there were still criticisms and muttered complaints, and
this was natural, for the serum was no sure-fire, one hundred
per cent curative stuff for babies — any more than it was for
guinea-pigs. Then too, learned doctors pointed out that what
happened under the hide of a guinea-pig was not the same —
necessarily — as the savage thing going on in the throat of a
child. Thousands of children were getting the diphtheria
serum, but some children (maybe not so many as before per-
haps?) kept dying horribly in spite of it. Doctors ques-
tioned. . , . Some parents had their hopes dashed. . . .
Then Emile Roux came back into the battle. He discovered
brilliantly an easy way to make horses immune to the poison — ■
they did not die, they developed no horrid abscesses, and, best
of all, they furnished great gallon bottles full of the precious
antitoxin — powerful stuff this serum was; little bits of it de-
stroyed large doses of that poison fatal to so many big dogs.
Like Behring — perhaps he was even more passionately sure
than Behring — Roux believed in advance this antitoxin would
save suffering children from death. He thought nothing of
prevention, he forgot about his gargles. He hurried to and
fro between his workroom and the stables, carrying big-bellied
flasks, jabbing needles into those patient horse’s necks. Just
then, a particularly virulent breed (so Roux thought) of diph-
theria bacillus was crawling through the homes of Paris. At
the Hospital for Sick Children, fifty out of every hundred
children (at least the statistics said so) were being carried
blue-faced to the morgue. At the Hospital Trousseau as many
as sixty out of a hundred were dying (but it is not clear whether
the doctors there knew all these deaths to be from diphtheria).
MASSACRE THE GUINEA-PIGS
203
On the first of February, 1894, Roux of the narrow chest and
hatchet face and black skull cap, walked into the diphtheria
ward of the Hospital for sick children, carrying bottles of his
straw-colored, miracle-working stuff.
In his study in the Institute in the Rue Dutot with a gleam
in his eye that made his dear ones forget he was marked for
death, there sat a palsied man, who must know, before he died,
whether one of his boys had wiped out another pestilence.
Pasteur waited for news from Roux. . . . Then too, all over
Paris there were fathers and mothers of stricken ones, praying
for Roux to hurry — they had heard of this marvelous cure of
Doctor Behring. It could almost bring babies back to life,
folks said — and Roux could see these people holding out their
hands to him. . . .
He got ready his syringes and bottles with the same cold
steadiness the farmers had marveled at, long before, in those
great days of the anthrax vaccine tests at Pouilly-le-Fort. His
assistants, Martin and Chaillou, lighted the little alcohol lamp
and hurried to anticipate his slightest order. Roux looked at
the helpless doctors, then at the little lead-colored faces and
the hands that picked and clutched at the edges of the covers,
the bodies twisting to get a little breath. . . .
Roux looked at his syringes — did this serum really save
life?
“Yesl” shouted femile Roux, the human being.
“I don’t know — let us make an experiment,” whispered
femile Roux, the searcher for truth.
“But, to make an experiment, you will have to withhold the
serum from half at least of these children — you may not do
that.” So said £mile Roux, the man with a heart, and all
voices of all despairing parents were joined to the pleading
voice of this fCmile Roux.
“True, it is a terrible burden,” answered the searcher that
was Roux, “but just because this serum has cured rabbits, I
do not know it will cure babies. . . . And I must know. I
must find truth. Only by comparing the number of children
ROUX AND BEHRING
204
who die, not having been given this serum, with the number
who perish, having received it — only so can I ever know.”
“But if you find out the serum is good, if it turns out from
your experiment that the serum really cures— think of your
responsibility for the death of those children, those hundreds
of babies who did not get the antitoxin 1”
It was a dreadful choice. There was one more argument
the searcher that was Roux could have brought against the
man of sentiment, for he might have asked: “If we do not
find out surely, by experiment on these babies, the world may
be lulled into the belief it has a perfect remedy for diphtheria
— microbe hunters will stop looking for a remedy, and in the
years that follow, thousands of children will die who might
have been saved if hard scientific searching had gone on. . .
That would have been the final, the true answer of science to
sentiment. But it was not made, and who after all can blame
the pitying human heart of Roux for leaving the cruel road
that leads to truth? The syringes were ready, the serum
welled up into them as he gave a strong pull at the plungers.
He began his merciful and maybe life-saving injections, and
every one of the more than three hundred threatened children
who came into the hospital during the next five months re-
ceived good doses of the diphtheria antitoxin. Praise be, the
results were a great vindication for the human Roux, for
that summer, the experiment over, he told a congress of
eminent medical men and savants from all parts of the world:
“The general condition of the children receiving the serum
improves rapidly ... in the wards there are to be seen hardly
any more faces pale and lead-blue . . . instead, the demeanor
of the children is lively and gay!”
He went on to tell the Congress of Buda-Pesth how the
serum chased away the slimy gray membrane — that breeding
place where the bacilli made their terrible poison — out of the
babies’ throats. He related how their fevers were cooled by
this marvelous serum (it was like some breeze blowing from
a lake of northern water across the fiery pavements of a city).
MASSACRE THE GUINEA-PIGS 205
The most dignified congress of prominent and celebrated phy-
sicians cheered. It rose to its feet. . . .
And yet — and yet — twenty-six out of every hundred babies
Roux had treated — died, in spite of this marvelous serum. . . .
But it was an emotional time, remember, and Roux, and the
Congress of Buda-Pesth were not assembled to serve truth
but to discuss and to plan and to celebrate the saving of lives.
They cared little for figures then; they cared less for annoy-
ing objectors who carped about comparing figures; they were
swept away by Roux’s report of how the serum cooled fevered
brows. Then, Roux could have answered such annoying critics
(with the applause of his famous audience) : “What if twenty-
six out of a hundred did die — you must remember that for
years before this treatment fifty out of a hundred died!”
And yet — I, who believe in this antitoxin, I say this,
twenty years after — diphtheria is a disease having strange ups
and downs of viciousness. In some terrible decades it kills
its sixty out of a hundred; then some mysterious thing happens
and the virus seems to weaken and only ten children are taken
where sixty died before. So it was, in those brave days of
Roux and Behring, for in a certain hospital in England, in
those very days, the death rate from diphtheria had gone down
from forty in a hundred to twenty-nine in a hundred — before
the serum was ever used!
But the doctors at Buda-Pesth did not think of figures and
they carried home the tidings of the antitoxin to all corners of
the world, in a few years the antitoxin treatment of diphtheria
became orthodox, and now there is not one doctor out of a
thousand who will not swear that this antitoxin is a beautiful
cure. Probably they are right. Indeed, there is evidence
that when antitoxin is given on the first day of the disease, all
but a few babies are saved — and if there is delay, many are
lost. . . . Surely, any doctor should be called guilty, in the
light of what is known, who did not give the antitoxin to a
threatened child. I would be quick to call a doctor to give
it to one of my own children. Why not, indeed? Perhaps
206
ROUX AND BEHRING
the antitoxin cures. But it is not completely proved, and it is
too late now to prove it one way or another to the hilt, be-
cause, since all the world believes in the antitoxin, no man
can be found heartless enough or bold enough to do the ex-
periment which science demands.
Meanwhile the searchers, believing, are busy with other
things — and I can only hope, if another wave of the dreadful
diphtheria of the eighties sweeps over the world again, I can
only hope that Roux was right.
But even if the diphtheria antitoxin is not a sure cure, we
already know that the experiments of Roux and Behring have
not been in vain. It is a story still too recent, too much in the
newspapers to be a part of this history — but to-day, in New
York under the superb leadership of Dr. Park, and all over
America, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of babies and
school-children are being ingeniously and safely turned into
so many small factories for the making of antitoxin, so that
they will never get diphtheria at all. Under the skins of these
youngsters go wee doses of that terrible poison fatal to so many
big dogs — but it is a poison fantastically changed so that it is
harmless to a week-old baby!
There is every hope, if fathers and mothers can only be
convinced and allow their children to undergo three small safe
pricks of a syringe needle, that diphtheria will no longer be
the murderer that it has been for ages.
And for this men will thank those first crude searchings of
Loeffler and Roux and Behring.
CHAPTER VII
METCHNIKOFF
THE NICE PHAGOCYTES
I
Microbe hunting has always been a queer humpty-dumpty
business.
A janitor with no proper education was the first man tf
see microbes; a chemist put them on the map and made peo-
ple properly afraid of them; a country doctor turned the hunt-
ing of them into something that came near to being a science;
to save the lives of babies from the poison of one of the dead-
liest of them, a Frenchman and a German had to pile up
mountains of butchered guinea-pigs and rabbits. Microbe
hunting is a story of amazing stupidities, fine intuitions, in-
sane paradoxes. If that is the history of the hunting of mi-
crobes, it is the same with the story of the science, still in its
babyhood, of why we are immune to microbes. For Metchni-
koff, the always excited searcher who in a manner of speaking
founded that science — this Metchnikoff was not a sober scien-
tific investigator; he was more like some hysterical character
out of one of Dostoevski’s novels.
£lie Metchnikoff was a Jew, and was born in southern Rus-
sia in 1845, and before he was twenty years old, he said: “I
have zeal and ability, I am naturally talented — I am ambitious
to become a distinguished investigator 1”
He went to the University of Kharkoff, borrowed the then
rare microscope from one of his professors, and after peering
(more or less dimly) through it, this ambitious young man sat
himself down and wrote long scientific papers before he had
a 07
208
METCHNIKOFF
any idea at all of what science was. He bolted his classes for
months on end, not to play, but to read; not to read novels
mind you but to wallow through learned works on the “Crys-
tals of Proteic Substances” and to become passionate about
inflammatory pamphlets whose discovery by the police would
have sent him to the mines in Siberia. He sat up nights,
drinking gallons of tea and haranguing his young colleagues
(all of them forefathers of the present Bolsheviki) on atheism
until they nicknamed him “God-Is-Not.” Then, a few days
before the end of the term, he crammed up the neglected les-
sons of months; and his prodigious memory, which was more
like some weird phonograph record than any human brain,
made it possible for him to write home to his folks that he had
passed first and got a gold medal.
Metchnikoff was always trying to get ahead of himself. He
sent papers to scientific journals while he was still in his
teens; he wrote these papers frantically a few hours after he
had trained his microscope on some bug or beetle; the next
day he would look at them again, and find that what he had
been so certain of, was not quite the same now. Hastily he
wrote to the editor of the scientific journal: “Please do not
publish the manuscript I sent you yesterday. I find I have
made a mistake.” At other times he was furious because his
enthusiastic discoveries were turned down by the editors.
“The world does not appreciate me!” he cried, and he went
to his room, ready to die, dolefully whistling: “Were I small
as a snail, I would hide myself in my shell.”
But if Metchnikoff sobbed because his vivid talents were
underestimated by his professors, he was also irrepressible.
He forgot his contemplated suicides and his violent headaches
in his incessant interest in all living things, but he was con-
stantly spoiling his chances to do a good steady piece of scien-
tific work by getting into quarrels with his teachers. Finally
he told his mother (who had always spoiled him and believed
in him) : “I am especially interested in the study of proto-
plasm . . . but there is no science in Russia,” so he rushed
THE NICE PHAGOCYTES
205
off to the University of Wurzburg in Germany, only to find
that he had arrived there six weeks ahead of the opening of
school. He sought out some Russian students there, but they
gave him the cold shoulder — he was a Jew — then, tired of
life, he started back home, thinking of killing himself but
with a few books in his satchel — and one of these was the
just-published “Origin of Species” of Darwin. He read it, he
swallowed the Theory of Organic Evolution with one great
mental gulp, he became a bigoted supporter of it — from then
on evolution was his religion until he began founding new
scientific religions of his own.
He forgot his plans for suicide; he planned strange evolu-
tionary researches; he lay awake nights, seeing visions — huge
panoramas they were, of all beasts from cockroaches to ele-
phants, as the children of some one remote and infinitely tiny
ancestor. . . .
That conversion was Metchnikoff’s real start in life, for now
he set out (and kept at it for ten years), quarreling and ex-
postulating his way from one laboratory to another, from Rus-
sia through Germany to Italy, and from Italy to the island of
Heligoland. He worked at the evolution of worms. He ac-
cused the distinguished German zoologist Leuckart of stealing
his stuff; incurably clumsy with his fingers, he clawed desper-
ately into a lizard to find the story of evolution its insides
might tell him — and when he could not find what he wanted,
he threw what was left of the reptile across the laboratory.
Unlike Koch or Leeuwenhoek, who were great because they
knew how to ask questions of nature, Metchnikoff read books
on Evolution, was inspired, shouted “Yes!” and then by vast
sloppy experiments proceeded to try to force his beliefs down
nature’s throat. Strange to say, sometimes he was right, im-
portantly right as you will see. Up till now (it was in the late
eighteen seventies) he knew nothing about microbes, but all
the time his mania to prove the survival of the fittest was driv-
ing him toward his fantastic theory — partly true — of how man-
kind resists the assaults of germs
210
METCHNIKOFF
Metchnikoff’s first thirty-five years were a hubbub and a
perilously near disastrous groping toward this event — toward
that great notoriety that waited for him on the Island of Sicily
in the Mediterranean Sea. At twenty-three he had mar-
ried Ludmilla Feodorovitch, who was a consumptive and had
to be carried to the wedding in an invalid’s chair. Then fol-
lowed a pitiful four years for them. They dragged about
Europe, looking for a cure; Metchnikoff trying in odd mo-
ments snatched from an irritatedly tender nursing of his wife,
to do experiments on the development of green flies and
sponges and worms and scorpions — trying above all to make
some sensational discovery which might land him a well-paid
professorship. “The survivors are not the best but the most
cunning,” he whispered, as he published his scientific papers
and pulled his wires. . . .
Finally Ludmilla died; she had spent her last days solaced
by morphine, and now Metchnikoff, who had caught the habit
from her, wandered from her grave through Spain to Geneva,
taking larger and larger doses of the drug — meanwhile, his
eyes hurt him terribly, and what is a naturalist, a searcher,
without eyes?
“Why live?” he cried, and took a dose of morphine that he
knew must kill him, but the dose was too large, he became
nauseated and threw it up. “Why live?” he cried again and
took a hot bath and rushed out in the open air right after-
wards to try to catch his death of pneumonia. But it seems
that the wise witty gods who fashion searchers had other pur-
poses for him. That very night he stopped, agape at the spec-
tacle of a cloud of insects swirling round the flame of a lantern.
“These insects live only a few hours!” he cried to himself.
“How can the theory of the survival of the fittest be applied to
them?” So he plunged back into his experiments.
Metchnikoff’s grief was terrific but it did not last long.
He was appointed Professor at the University of Odessa, and
there he taught the Survival of the Fittest and became re-
spected for his learning, and grew in dignity, and in less than
THE NICE PHAGOCYTES
211
two years after the death of Ludmilla, he had met Olga, a
bright girl of fifteen, the daughter of a man of property. “His
appearance is not unlike that of the Christ — he is so pale and
seems so sad,” whispered Olga. Soon after they were mar-
ried.
From then on Metchnikoff’s life was much less disastrous;
he tried far less often to commit suicide; his hands began to
catch up with his precocious brain — he was learning to do ex-
periments. Never was there a man who tried more sincerely
to apply his religion (which was science) to every part of his
life. He took Olga in hand and taught her science and art,
and even the art and science of marriage! She worshiped the
profound certainties that science gave him, but said, long after-
wards: “The scientific methods which Metchnikoff applied to
everything might have been a grave mistake at this delicate
psychological moment. . .
n
It was in 1883, when the discoveries of Pasteur and Koch
had made everybody mad about microbes, that Metchnikoff
turned suddenly from a naturalist into a microbe hunter. He
had wrangled with the authorities of the University of Odessa,
and departed for the Island of Sicily with Olga and her crowd
of little brothers and sisters, and here he set up his amateur
laboratory in the parlor of their cottage looking across the
magic water to the blue Calabrian shore. His intuition told
him that microbes were now the thing in science and he
dreamed about making great discoveries of new microbes — he
was sincerely interested in them as well, but he knew nothing
about the subtle ways of hunting them, indeed he had hardly
seen a germ. He stamped about his parlor-laboratory, ex-
pounding biological theories to Olga, studying starfish and
sponges, telling the children fairy stories, doing everything in
short that was as far as possible removed from those thrilling
researches of Koch and Pasteur. . . .
212
METCHNIKOFF
Then, one day, he began to study the way sponges and star-
fishes digest their food. Long before he had spied out strange
cells inside these beasts, cells that were a part of their bodies,
but cells that were free-lances, as it were, moving from place
to place through the carcasses of which they formed a part,
sticking out one part of themselves and dragging the rest of
themselves after the part they had stuck out. Such were the
wandering cells, which moved by flowing, exactly like that
small animal, the ameba.
Metchnikoff sat down before his parlor table, and with that
impatient clumsiness of a man whose hands seem unable to
obey his brain, he got some little particles of carmine into the
insides of the larva of a starfish. This was an ingenious and
very original trick of Metchnikoff’s, because these larvae are
as transparent as a good glass window; so he could see, through
his lens, what went on inside the beast; and with excited de-
light he watched the crawling, flowing free-lance cells in this
starfish ooze toward his carmine particles — and eat them up!
Metchnikoff still imagined he was studying the digestion of
his starfish, but strange thoughts — that had nothing to do with
such a commonplace thing as digestion — little fog-wraiths of
new ideas began to flutter through his head. . . .
The next day Olga took the children to the circus to see
some extraordinary performing monkeys. Metchnikoff sat
alone in his parlor, tugging at his biblical beard, gazing with-
out seeing them at his bowls of starfish. Then — it was like
that blinding light that bowled Paul over on his way to Damas-
cus — in one moment, in the most fantastical, you would say
impossible flash of a second, Metchnikoff changed his whole
career.
“These wandering cells in the body of the larva of a star-
fish, these cells eat food, they gobble up carmine granules —
but they must eat up microbes too! Of course — the wandering
cells are what protect the starfish from microbes! Our wan-
dering cells, the white cells of our blood — they must be what
protects us from invading germs . . . they are the cause of
THE NICE PHAGOCYTES
213
immunity to diseases . . . they are what keep the human
race from being killed off by malignant bacilli!”
Without one single bit of evidence, without any research at
all, Metchnikoff jumped from the digestions of starfish to the
ills of men. . . .
“I suddenly became a pathologist,” he wrote in his diary
(and this was not much more strange than if a cornet player
should suddenly announce himself an astrophysicist!)
. . Feeling that there was in this idea something of surpass-
ing interest, I became so excited that I began striding up and
down the room, and even went to the seashore to collect my
thoughts.”
Now Koch, precise microbe hunter that he was, would hardly
have trusted Metchnikoff with the wiping of his microscope,
but his ignorance of germs was nothing to this wild Russian.
“I said to myself that, if my theory was true, a sliver put
into the body of a starfish larva . . . should soon be sur-
rounded by wandering cells. ...” And he remembered that
when men run splinters into their fingers, and neglect to pull
them out, those splinters are soon surrounded by pus — which
consists largely of the wandering white cells of the blood. He
rushed out into the garden back of the cottage, pulled some
rose thorns off a little shrub which he had decorated as a
Christmas tree for Olga’s brother and sisters; he dashed back
into his absurd laboratory and stuck these thorns into the body
of one of his water-clear young starfish. . . .
Up he got, at dawn the next morning, full of wild hopes, —
and he found his guess had come true. Around the rose-slivers
in the starfish were sluggish crawling masses of its wandering
cells! Nothing more was necessary (such a jumper at conclu-
sions was he) to stamp into his brain the fixed idea that he
now had the explanation of all immunity to diseases; he rushed
out that morning to tell famous European professors, who hap-
pened then to be in Messina, all about his great idea. “Here
is why animals can withstand the attacks of microbes,” he
said, and he talked with such enthusiastic eloquence about how
metchnikoff
3*4
the wandering cells of the starfish tried to eat the rose thorns
(and he could show it so prettily too) that even the most
eminent and pope-like Professor Doctor Virchow (who had
sniffed at Koch) believed him!
Metchnikoff was now a microbe hunter. . . .
m
With Olga and the children flapping along and keeping up
as best they could, Metchnikoff hurried to Vienna to proclaim
his theory that we are immune to germs because our bodies
have wandering cells to gobble germs up; he made a bee-line
for the laboratory of his friend, Professor Claus — who was a
zoologist, and knew nothing about microbes either, and so
was properly amazed:
“I would be greatly honored to have you publish your theory
in my Journal,” said Claus.
“But I must have a scientific name for these cells that devour
microbes — a Greek name — what would be a Greek name for
such cells?” cried Metchnikoff.
Claus and his learned colleagues scratched their heads and
peered into their dictionaries and at last they told him: “Phago-
cytes! Phagocyte is Greek for devouring cell — phagocytes
is what you must call them!”
Metchnikoff thanked them, tacked the word “phagocyte”
to the head of his mast, and set sail on the seas of his exciting
career as a microbe hunter with that word as a religion, an ex-
planation of everything, a slogan, a means of gaining a living
— and, though you may not believe it, that word did result in
something of a start at finding out how it is we are immune!
From then on he preached phagocytes, he defended their rep-
utations, he did some real research on them, he made enemies
about them, he doubtless helped to start the war of 1914 with
them, by the bad feeling they caused between France and
Germany.
3 e went from Vienna to Odessa, and there he gave a great
THE NICE PHAGOCYTES 215
scientific speech on “The Curative Forces of the Organism”
to the astonished doctors of the town. His delivery was
superb; his sincerity was undoubted — but there is no record
of whether or not he told the amazed doctors that he had not,
up till then, so much as seen one phagocyte gobble up a single
malignant microbe. Everybody — and this includes learned
doctors — will stop to watch a dog fight; so this idea of Metch-
nikoff’s, this story of our little white blood cells rushing to an
endless series of Thermopylses to man the pass against mur-
derous germs — this yarn excited them, convinced them. . . .
But Metchnikoff knew he would have to have real evidence,
and presently he found it, beautifully clear, in water fleas.
For a time he forgot speeches and began fishing water fleas
out of ponds and aquariums; here he was deucedly ingenious
again, for these small animals, like starfish larvae, were trans-
parent so that he could see through his lens what went on in-
side them. For once he grew patient, and searched, like the
real searcher that he so rarely was, for some disease that a
water flea perchance might have. This history has already
made it clear that microbe hunters usually find other things
than they set out to look for — but Metchnikoff just now had
different luck; he watched his water fleas in their aimless daily
life, and suddenly, through his lens he saw one of these beasts
swallow the sharp, needle-like spores of a dangerous yeast.
Down into the wee gullet went these needles, through the walls
•of the flea’s stomach they poked their sharp points, and into
the tiny beast’s body they glided. Then — how could the gods
favor such a wild man so! — Metchnikoff saw the wandering
cells of the water flea, the phagocytes of this creature, flow
towards those perilous needles, surround them, eat them, melt
them up, digest them. . . .
When — and this happened often too and so made his theory
perfect — the phagocytes failed to go out to battle against the
deadly yeast needles, these invaders budded rapidly into swarm-
ing yeasts, which in their turn ate the water flea, poisoned him
— and that meant good-by to himl
ai6
METCHNIKOFF
Here Metchnikoff had peeped prettily into a thrilling, deadly
struggle on a tiny scale, he had spied upon the up till now
completely mysterious way in which certain living creatures
defend themselves against their would-be assassins. His ob-
servations were true as steel, and you will have to grant they
were devilishly ingenious, for who would have thought to look
for the why of immunity in such an absurd beast as the water
flea? Now Metchnikoff needed nothing more to convince him
of the absolute and final rightness of his theory, he probed
no deeper into this struggle (which Koch would have spent
years over) but wrote a learned paper:
“The immunity of the water flea, due to the help of its
phagocytes, is an example of natural immunity . . . for, once
the wandering cells have not swallowed the yeast spore at the
moment of its penetration into the body, the yeast germinates
. . . secretes a poison which drives the phagocytes back not
only, but kills them by dissolving them completely.”
IV
Then Metchnikoff went to see if this same battle took place
in frogs and rabbits, and suddenly, in 1886, the Russian people
were thrilled by Pasteur’s saving of sixteen of their folk from
the bite of the mad wolf. The good people of Odessa and the
fanners of the Zemstvo round about gave thanks to God, hur-
rahs for Pasteur, and a mighty purse of roubles for a laboratory
to be started at once in Odessa. And Metchnikoff was appointed
Scientific Director of the new Institute — for had not this man
(they forgot for a moment he was Jewish) studied in all the
Universities of Europe, and had he not lectured learnedly to
the doctors of Odessa, telling about the phagocytes of the
blood, which gobble microbes?
“Who knows?” you can hear the people saying. “Maybe in
our new Institute, Professor Metchnikoff can train these little
phagocytes to gobble up all microbes?”
Metchnikoff accepted the position, but told the authorities,
217
shrewdly: “I am only a theoretician; I am overwhelmed with
researches — some one else will have to be trained to
vaccines, to do the practical work.”
Nobody in Odessa knew anything about microbe hunting
then, so Metchnikoff’s friend, Doctor Gamaleia, was sent to
the Pasteur Institute in Paris posthaste. The citizens were
anxious to begin to be prevented from having diseases; they
bawled for vaccines. So Gamaleia, after a little while in Paris,
where he watched Roux and Pasteur and learned a great deal
from them, but not quite enough — this Gamaleia came back
and started to make anthrax vaccines for the sheep of the
Zemstvo, and rabies vaccines for the people of the town.
“All should now go very well!” cried Metchnikoff (he knew
nothing of the nasty tricks virulent microbes can play) and
he retired to his theoretical fastnesses to grapple with rabbits
and dogs and monkeys, to see if their phagocytes would swal-
low the microbes of consumption and relapsing fever and
erysipelas. Scientific papers vomited from his laboratory, and
the searchers of Europe began to be excited by the discoveries
of this strange genius in the south of Russia. But he began
to have troubles with his theory, for dogs and rabbits and
monkeys — alas — are not transparent, like water fleas. . . .
Then the shambles began. Gamaleia and the other mem-
bers of Metchnikoff’s practical staff began to fight among
themselves and mix up vaccines; microbes spilled out of tubes;
the doctors of the town — naturally a little jealous of this new
form of healing — started to snoop into the laboratory, to ask
embarrassing questions, to start whispers going through the
town: “Who is this Professor Metchnikoff — he hasn’t even a
doctor’s certificate. He is only a naturalist, a mere bug-hunter
— how can he know anything about preventing diseases?”
“Where are those cures?” demanded the people. “Give us
our preventions!” shouted the farmers — who had gone down
into their socks for good roubles. Metchnikoff came out of
the fog of his theory of phagocytes for a moment, and tried to
satisfy them by sowing chicken cholera bacilli among the
2l8
METCHNIKOFF
meadow mice which were eating up the crops. But, alas, a
lying, inflammatory report appeared in the daily paper, scream-
ing that this Metchnikoff was sowing death — that chicken
cholera could change into human cholera. . . .
“I am overwhelmed with my researches,” muttered Metch-
nikoff. “I am a theoretician — my researches need a peaceful
shelter in which to be developed. . . .” So he asked for a
vacation, got it, packed his bag, and went to the Congress of
Vienna to tell everybody about phagocytes, and to look for a
quiet place in which to work. He must get away from that
dreadful need to prove that his theories were true by dishin g
out cures to impatient authorities and peasants who insisted
on getting their money’s worth out of research. From Vienna
he went to Paris to the Pasteur Institute, and there a great
triumph and surprise waited for him. He was introduced to
Pasteur, and at once Metchnikoff exploded into tremendous
explanations of his theory of phagocytes. He made a veri-
table movie of the battle between the wandering cells and
microbes. . . .
The old captain of the microbe hunters looked at Metchni-
koff out of tired gray eyes that now and then sparkled a little:
“I at once placed myself on your side, Professor Metchnikoff,”
said Pasteur, “for I have been struck by the struggle between
the divers microorganisms which I have had occasion to ob-
serve. I believe you are on the right road.”
Although the struggles Pasteur mentioned had nothing to
do with phagocytes gobbling up microbes, Metchnikoff — and
this is not unnatural — was filled with a proud joy. The great-
est of all microbe hunters really understood him, believed in
him. . . . Olga’s father had died, leaving them a modest in-
come, here in Paris his theory of phagocytes would have the
prestige of a great Institute back of it. “Is there a place for
me here?” he asked. “I wish only to work in one of your lab-
oratories in an honorary capacity,” begged Metchnikoff.
Pasteur knew how important it was to keep the plain people
thrilled about microbe hunting— it is the drama of science that
THE NICE PHAGOCYTES
219
they can understand — so Pasteur said: “You may not only
come to work in our laboratory, but you shall have an entire
laboratory to yourself!” Metchnikoff went back to Odessa,
getting a dreadful snubbing from Koch on the way, and
wondered whether it would not be best to give up his tidy
salary at the Russian Institute, to get away from these people
yelling for results. . . . But he began to take up his work
again, when suddenly something happened that left no doubt
in his mind as to what he had better do.
In response to the farmer’s complaints of “Where are your
vaccines, our flocks are perishing from anthrax!” Metchni-
koff had told Dr. Gamaleia to start giving sheep the anthrax
vaccine on a large scale. Then, one bright morning, while
the Director was with Olga in their summer home, in the coun-
try, a fearful telegram came to him from Gamaleia:
“MANY THOUSANDS OF SHEEP KILLED BY THE
ANTHRAX VACCINE.”
A few months later they were safely installed in the new
Pasteur Institute in Paris, and Olga (who enjoyed painting
and sculpture much better — but who would do anything for
her husband because he was a genius, and always kind to her)
this good wife, Olga, held his animals and washed his bottles
for Metchnikoff. From then on they marched, hand in hand,
over a road strewn with their picturesque mistakes, from one
triumph to always greater victories and notorieties.
Metchnikoff bounced into the austere Pasteur Institute and
started a circus thei which lasted for twenty years; it was as
if a skilled proprietor of a medicine show had become pastor
of a congregation of sober Quakers. He came to Paris and
found himself already notorious. His theory of immunity —
it would be better to call it an exciting romance, rather than a
denunciation of phagocytes, on principle, once a year, in an
important scientific journal. For a little while Metchnikoff
wavered; he nearly swooned, he couldn’t sleep nights, he
thought of going back to his soothing morphine; he even con-
templated suicide once more — oh! why could not those nasty
Germans see that he was right about phagocytes? Then he
recovered. Something seemed to snap in his brain, he became
courageous as a lion, he started a battle for his theory — it was
a grotesque, partly scientific wrangle— but, in spite of all its
silliness, it was an argument that laid the foundations of the
little that is known to-day about why we are immune to mi-
crobes.
“I have demonstrated that the serum of rats kills anthrax
germs — it is the blood of animals not their phagocytes, tha t
makes them immune to microbes,” shouted Emil Behring,
and all the bitter enemies of Metchnikoff sang Aye in the
chorus. The scientific papers published to show that blood
is the one important thing would fill three university libra-
ries.
“It is the phagocytes that eat up germs and so defend us,”
roared Metchnikoff in reply. And he published ingenious ex-
periments which proved anthrax bacilli grow exuberantly in
the blood of sheep which have been made immune by Pasteur’s
vaccine.
# Neither side would budge from this extreme, prejudiced posi-
tion. For twenty years both sides were so enraged they could
not stop to think that perhaps both our blood ond our phago*
cytes might work together to guard us from germs. That
221
THE NICE PHAGOCYTES
fight was a kind of magnificent but undignified shouting of
“You’re a liar — On the contrary, it’s you that’s the liar!”
which blinded Metchnikoff and his opponents to the idea that
it might be neither the blood nor the phagocytes which are at
the bottom of our resistance to some diseases. If they had
only stopped for a moment, wiped their brows and cleaned the
blood from their mental noses, to remember how little they
knew, how slowly they should go — considering what subtle
complicated stuff this blood and those phagocytes are — if they
had only remembered how foolish, in the darkness of their
ignorance, it was to cook up any explanation at all of why we
are immune! If Metchnikoff had only kept on, obscure in
Odessa, with his beautiful researches on the why of the wander-
ing cells of the water fleas eating up those terrible little
yeasts. ... If he had only been patient and tried to get to
the bottom of that!
But the stumbling strides of microbe hunters are not made
by any perfect logic, and that is the reason I may write a gro-
tesque, but not perfect story of their deeds.
In the grand days of Pasteur’s fight with anthrax and his
victory against rabies, he had worked like some subterranean
distiller of secret poisons, with only Roux and Chamberland
and one or two others to help him. In that dingy laboratory
Sn the Rue d’Ulm he had been very impolite, even nasty, to
all curious intruders and ambitious persons. He even chased
adoring pretty ladies away. But Metchnikoff!
Here was an entirely different sort of searcher. Metchnikoff
had an immensely impressive beard and a broad forehead that
crowned eyes which squinted vividly — and intelligently — from
behind his spectacles. His hair grew down over the back of
his neck in a way that showed you he was too deep in thoughts
to think of having it cut. He knew everything! He could
tell — and it was authentic — of countless biological mysteries;
he had seen the wandering cells of a tadpole turn it into a frog
by eating the tadpole’s tail, and he had built circles of fire
around scorpions to show that these unhappy creatures, failing
222
METCHNIKOFF
to find a way out, do not commit suicide by stinging themselves
to death. He told these horrors in a way to make you feel the
remorseless flowing and swallowing of the wandering cells —
you could hear the hissing of the doomed and baffled scor-
pion. . . .
He had brilliant ideas for experiments and was always try-
ing to carry out these ideas — intensely — but at any moment he
was ready to drop his science to praise the operas of Mozart
or whistle the symphonies of Beethoven, and sometimes he
seemed to be more learned about the dramas and the loves of
Goethe than about those phagocytes upon which his whole
fame rested. He refused to wear a high hat toward lesser men;
he would see any one and was ready to believe anything — he
even tried the remedies of patent medicine quacks on dying
guinea-pigs. And he was a kind man. When his friends were
sick he overwhelmed them with delicacies and advice and shed
sincere tears on their pillows — so that finally they nicknamed
him “Mamma Metchnikoff.” His views on the intimate in-
stincts and necessities of life were astoundingly unlike those of
any searcher I have ever heard of. “The truth is that artistic
genius and perhaps all kinds of genius are closely associated
with sexual activity ... so, for example, an orator speaks
better in the presence of a woman to whom he is devoted.”
He insisted that he could experiment best when pretty girls
were close by!
MetchnikofFs workshop in the Pasteur Institute was more
than a mere laboratory; it was a studio, it had the variegated
attractions of a country fair; it radiated the verve and gusto
of a three-ringed circus. Is it any wonder, then, that young
doctors, eager to learn to hunt microbes, flocked to him from
all over Europe? Their brains responded to this great searcher
who was also a hypnotist, and their fingers flew to perform the
ten thousand experiments, ideas for which belched out of
the mind of Metchnikoff like an incessant eruption of fire-
works.
“Mr. Saltykoffl” he would cry. “This student of Professor
THE NICE PHAGOCYTES
223
Pfeiffer in Germany claims that the serum of a guinea-pig will
keep other guinea-pigs from dying of hog-cholera. Will you be
so good as to perform an experiment to see if that is so?”
And the worshiping Saltykoff rushed off — knowing what the
master wanted to prove — to show that the German claims were
nonsense. For a hundred other intricate tests, for which his
own fingers were too impatient, Metchnikoff called upon
Blagovestchensky, or Hugenschmidt, or Wagner, or Gheorgiew-
ski, or the now almost forgotten Sawtchenko. Or when these
were all busy, then there was Olga to be lured away from her
paints and clay models — Olga could be depended upon to prove
the most delicate points. In that laboratory there were a hun-
dred hearts that beat as one and a hundred minds with but a
single thought — to write the epic of those tiny, roundish, color-
less, wandering cells of our blood, those cells, which, smelling
from afar the approach of a murderous microbe, swam up the
current of the blood, crawled strangely through the walls of
the blood vessels to do battle with the germs and so guard
us from death.
The great medical congresses of those brave days were ex-
citing debating societies about microbes, about immunity, and
it was in the weeks before a congress (Metchnikoff always
went to them) that his laboratory buzzed with an infernal
rushing to and fro. “We must hurry,” Metchnikoff exclaimed,
“to make all of the experiments necessary to support my argu-
ments!” The crowd of adoring assistants then slept two hours
less each night; Metchnikoff rolled up his sleeves, too, and
seized a syringe. Young rhinoceros beetles, green frogs, alli-
gators, or weird Mexican axolotls were brought from the ani-
mal house by the sweating helpers (sometimes the ponds were
dredged for perch and gudgeon). Then the mad philosopher,
his eyes alight, his broad face so red that it glowed like some
smoldering brush-fire under his beard, his mustaches full of
bacilli spattered into it by his excited and poetic gestures —
this Metchnikoff, I say, proceeded to inject swarms of microbes
into one or another of his uncomplaining, cold-blooded me*
224
METCHNIKOFF
nagerie “I multiply experiments to support my theory of
phagocytes!” he was wont to say.
VI
It is amazing, when you remember that his brain was always
inventing stories about nature, how often these stories turned
out to be true when they were put to the test of experiment.
A German hunter had claimed: “There is nothing to Metchni-
koff’s theory of phagocytes. Everybody knows that you can
see microbes inside of phagocytes — they have undoubtedly
been gobbled up by the phagocytes. But these wandering
cells are not defenders, they are mere scavengers — they will
only swallow dead microbes!” The London Congress of 1891
was drawing near; Metchnikoff shouted for some guinea-pigs,
vaccinated them with some cholera-like bacilli that his old
friend, the unfortunate Gamaleia, had discovered. Then, a
week or so later, the big-bearded philosopher shot some of
these living, dangerous bacilli into the bellies of vaccinated
beasts. Every few minutes, during the next hours, he ran
slender glass tubes into their abdomens, sucked out a few
drops of the fluid there, and put it before the more or less
dirty lens of his microscope, to see whether the phagocytes of
the immune beasts were eating up Gamaleia’s bacilli. Presto!
These roundish crawling cells were crammed full of the mi-
crobes!
“Now I shall prove that these microbes inside the phago-
cytes are still alive!” cried Metchnikoff. He killed the guinea-
pig, slashed it open, and sucked into another little glass tube
some of the grayish slime of wandering cells which had gathered
in the creature’s belly to make meals off the microbes. In a
little while — for they are very delicate when you try to keep
them alive outside the body — the phagocytes had died, burst
open, and the live bacilli they had swallowed galloped out of
them! Promptly, when Metchnikoff injected them, these mi-
THE NICE PHAGOCYTES
225
crobes that had been swallowed, murdered guinea-pigs who
were not immune.
By dozens of brilliant experiments of this kind, Metchnikoff
forced his opponents to admit that phagocytes, sometimes, can
eat vicious microbes. But the pitiful waste of this brainy
Metchnikoff’s life was that he was always doing experiments
to defend an idea, and not to find the hidden truths of nature.
His experiments were weird, they were often fantastically en-
tertaining, but they were so artificial — they were so far away
from the point of what it is that makes us immune. You
would think that his brain, which seemed to be able to hold
all knowledge, would have dreamed of subtle tests to find out
just how it is that one child can be exposed to consumption
and never get it, while some carefully and hygienically raised
young girl dies from consumption at twenty. There is the
riddle of immunity (and it is still completely a riddle! ). “Oh!
it is doubtless due to the fact that her phagocytes are not work-
ing!” Metchnikoff would have exclaimed, and then he might
rush off to flabbergast some opponent by proving that the
phagocytes of an alligator eat up typhoid fever bacilli — which
never bother alligators anyway.
The devotion of the workers in his laboratory was amazing.
They let him feed them virulent cholera bacilli (even one of
those pretty inspirational girls swallowed them! ) to prove that
the blood has nothing to do with our immunity to cholera.
For years — he himself said that it was an insanity of his — he
was fond of toying with the lives of his researching slaves, and
the only thing that excused him was his perfect readiness to
risk death along with them. He swallowed more tubes of
cholera bacilli than any of them. In the midst of this
dangerous business, one of the assistants, Jupille, became vio-
lently sick with real Asiatic cholera and Metchnikoff’s remorse
was immoderate. “I shall never survive the death of Jupille!”
he moaned, and Olga, that good wife, had to be on her guard
day and night to keep her famous husband from one of his
226
METCHNIKOFF
(always fruitless) attempts at suicide. At the end of these
strange experiments, Metchnikoff jabbed needles into the arms
of the survivors, drew blood from them, and triumphantly
found that this blood did not protect guinea-pigs from doses
of virulent cholera germs. How he hated the idea of blood
having any importance! “Human cholera gives us another
example,” he wrote, “of a malady whose cure cannot be ex-
plained by the preventive properties of the blood.”
When some more than ordinarily independent student would
come whispering to him that he had discovered a remarkable
something about blood, Metchnikoff became magnificent like
Moses coming down off Mt. Sinai — searchers for mere truth
had a bad time in that laboratory, and you can imagine the
great dauntless champion of phagocytes ordering a dissenter
from his theory to be burned, and then weeping inconsolably
over him afterwards. But, just the same, Metchnikoff — so
great was the number of experiments made by an always
changing crowd of eager experimenters in his laboratory —
this Metchnikoff was partly responsible for the discovery of
some of the most astounding virtues of blood. For, in the
midst of his triumphs, Jules Bordet came to work with the
master. This Bordet was the son of the schoolmaster of the
village of Soignies in Belgium. He was timid, he seemed insig-
nificant, he had careless ways and watery-blue, absent-minded
eyes — eyes that saw things nobody else was looking for. Bor-
det set to work there, and right in the shadow of the master's
beard, while the walls shook with the slogan “Phagocytes!”
— the Belgian pried into the mystery of how blood kills
germs; he laid the foundation for those astounding delicate
tests which tell whether blood is human blood, in murder cases.
It was here too, that Bordet began the work which led, years
later, to the famous blood test for syphilis — the Wassermann
reaction. Metchnikoff was often annoyed with Bordet, but
he was proud of him too, and whenever Bordet found anything
in blood that was harmful to microbes, and might help to make
people immune t<p them, Metchnikoff consoled himself by in-
THE NICE PHAGOCYTES
227
venting more or less accurate experiments which showed that
these microbe-killing things came from the phagocytes, after
all. Bordet did not remain long in Metchnikoff’s labora-
tory. . . .
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, when romantic
microbe hunting began to turn into a regular profession, re-
cruited from good steady law-abiding young doctors who were
not prophets or reckless searchers — in those days Metchni-
koff’s bitter trials with people who didn’t believe him began
to be less terrible. He received medals and prizes of money,
and even the Germans clapped their hands and were respect-
ful when he walked majestically into some congress. A thou-
sand searchers had spied phagocytes in the act of gobbling
harmful germs — and although that did not explain at all why
one man dies from an attack of pneumonia microbes, while
another breaks into a sweat and gets better — just the same
there is no doubt that pneumonia germs are sometimes eaten
and so got rid of by phagocytes. So Metchnikoff, after you
discount his amazing illogic, his intolerance, his bullheaded-
ness, really did discover a fact which may make life easier for
suffering mankind. Because, some day, a dreamer, an experi-
menting genius like the absent-minded Bordet may come along
— and he may solve the riddle of why phagocytes sometimes
gobble germs and sometimes do not — he might even teach
phagocytes always to eat them. . . .
VII
At last Metchnikoff began really to be happy. His op-
ponents were partly convinced, and partly they stopped argu-
ing with him because they found it was no use — he could al-
ways experiment more tirelessly than they, he could talk longer,
he could expostulate more loudly. So Metchnikoff, at the be-
ginning of the twentieth century, sat down to write a great
book on all that he had found out about why we are immune.
It was an enormous treatise you would think it would take
22g METCHNIKOFF
a lifetime to write. It was written in a style Flaubert might
have envied. He made every one of the ten thousand facts
in it vivid, and every one of them was twisted prettily to prove
his point. It is a strange novel with a myriad of heroes — the
wandering cells, the phagocytes of all the animals of the earth.
His fame made him take a real delight in being alive.
Twenty years before, detesting the human race, sorry for him-
self, and hating life, he had told Olga: “It is a crime to have
children— no human being should consciously reproduce him-
self.” But now that he had begun to take delight in existence,
the children of Sevres, the suburb where he lived, called him
“Grandpa Christmas” as he patted their heads and gave them
candy. “Life is good! ” he told himself. But how to hang onto
it, now that it was slipping away so fast? In only one way,
of course — by science!
“Disease is only an episode!” he wrote. “It is not enough
to cure (he had discovered no cures) ... it is necessary to
find out what the destiny of man is, and why he must grow old
and die when his desire to live is strongest.” Then Metchni-
koff abandoned work on his dead phagocytes and set out to
found fantastic sciences to explain man’s destiny, and to avoid
it. To one of these, the science of old age, he gave the sonor-
ous name “Gerontology,” and he gave the name “Thanatology”
to the science of death. What awful sciences they were;
the ideas were optimistic; the observations he made in
them were so inaccurate that old Leeuwenhoek would have
turned over in his grave had he known about them; the experi-
ments Metchnikoff made, to support these sciences, would have
caused Pasteur to foam with indignation that he had ever wel-
comed this outlandish Russian to his laboratory. And yet —
and yet — the way really to prevent one of the most hideous
microbic diseases came out of them. . . .
Metchnikoff dreaded the idea of dying but knew that he and
everybody else would have to — so he set out to devise a hope
(there was not one particle of science in this) for an easy death.
Somewhere in his vast hungry readings, he had run across the
THE NICE PHAGOCYTES
229
report of two old ladies who had become so old that they felt
no more desire for life — they wanted to die, just as all of us
want to go to sleep at the end of a hard day’s work. “Ha!”
cried Metchnikoff, “that shows that there is an instinct for
death just as there is an instinct for sleep! The thin g to do is
to find a way to live long enough in good health until we shall
really crave to die!”
Then he set out on a thorough search for more of such lucky
old ladies, he visited old ladies’ homes, he rushed about ques-
tioning old crones, with their teeth out, who were too deaf to
hear him. He went all the way from Paris to Rouen to inter-
view (on the strength of a newspaper rumor) a dame reported
to be a hundred and six. But, alas, all of the oldsters he talked
to were strong for life, he never found any one like the two
legendary old ladies. Just the same he cried: “There is a
death instinct!” Contrary facts never worried him.
He studied old age in animals; and people were always send-
ing him gray-haired dogs and dilapidated ancient cats; he
published a solemn research on why a suoerannuated parrot
lived to be seventy. He owned an ancient he-turtle, who lived
in his garden, and Metchnikoff was overjoyed when this ven-
erable beast — at the great age of 86 — mated with two lady
turtles and became the father of broods of little turtles. He
dreaded the passing of the delights of love, and exclaimed, re-
membering his turtle: “Senility is not so profoundly seated as
we suppose!”
But to push back old age? What is at the bottom of it? A
Scandinavian scientist, Edgren, had made a deep study of the
hardening of the arteries — that was the cause of old age, sug-
gested Edgren, and among the causes of the hardening of the
arteries were the drinking of alcohol, syphilis, and certain
other diseases.
“A man is as old as his arteries, that is true,” muttered
Metchnikoff, and he decided to study the riddle of how that
loathsome disease hardens the arteries. It was in 1903. He
had just received a prize of five thousand francs, and Roux —
230 METCHNIKOFF
who, though so different, so much more the searcher, had al-
ways stuck by this wild Metchnikoff — Roux had got the grand
Osiris prize of one hundred thousand francs. Never were there
two men so different in their ways of doing science, but they
were alike in caring little for money, and together they decided
to use all of these francs — and thirty thousand more which
Metchnikoff had wheedled out of some rich Russians — to study
that venereal plague, to attempt to give it to apes, to try to
discover its then mysterious virus, to prevent it, to cure it if
possible. And Metchnikoff wanted to study how syphilis hard-
ened the arteries.
So they bought apes with this money. French governors
in the Congo sent black boys to scour the jungles for them,
and presently large rooms at the Pasteur Institute were a-chat-
ter with chimpanzees and orang-outangs, and the cries of these
were drowned out by the shrieking of the sacred monkey of the
Hindoos, and the caterwaulings of the comical little Macacus
cynemolgus.
Almost at once Roux and Metchnikoff made an important
find; their experiments were ingenious and they had about
them a certain tautness and clearness that was strangely un-
Metchnikoffian. Their laboratory began to be the haunt of
unfortunate men who had just got syphilis; from one of these
they inoculated an ape — and the very first experiment was a
success. The chimpanzee developed the disease. From then
on, for more than four years they toiled, transmitting the dis-
eases from one ape to another, looking for the sneaking
slender microbe but not finding it, trying to find ways to
weaken the virus — as Pasteur had done with the unknown
germ of rabies — in order to discover a preventive vaccine.
Their monkeys died miserably of pneumonia and consumption,
they got loose and ran away. While Metchnikoff, not too
deftly, scratched the horrible virus into them, the apes bit
him and scratched him back — and then Metchnikoff did a
strange and clever experiment. He scratched a little syphilitic
virus into the ear of an ape, and twenty-four hours later he cut
THE NICE PHAGOCYTES
23 *
off that ear! The ape never showed one sign of the disease in
any other part of his body. . . .
“That means,” cried Metchnikoff, “that the germ lingers
for hours at the spot where it gets into the body — now, as in
men we know exactly where the virus gets in, maybe we can kill
it before it ever spreads — since in this disease we know just
when it gets in, too!”
So Metchnikoff, with Roux always being careful and insisting
upon good check experiments — so Metchnikoff, after all of his
theorizing about why we are immune, performed one of the
most profoundly practical of all the experiments of microbe
hunting. He sat himself down and invented the famous cal-
omel ointment — that now is chasing syphilis out of armies and
navies the world over. He took two apes, inoculated them
with the syphilitic virus fresh from a man, and then, one hour
later, he rubbed the grayish ointment into that scratched spot
on one of his apes. He watched the horrid signs of the dis-
ease appear on the unanointed beast, and saw all signs of the
disease stay away from the one that had gc; the calomel.
Then for the last time Metchnikoff’s strange insanity got
hold of him. He forgot bis vows and induced a young medical
student, Maisonneuve, to volunteer to be scratched with
syphilis from an infected man. Before a committee of the
most distinguished medical men of France, this brave Maison-
neuve stood up, and into six long scratches he watched the
dangerous virus go. It was a more severe inoculation than any
man would ever get in nature. The results of it might make
him a thing for loathing, might send him, insane, to his
death. ... For one hour Maisonneuve waited, then Metch-
nikoff, full of confidence, rubbed the calomel ointment into the
wounds — but not into those which had been made at the same
time on a chimpanzee and a monkey. It was a superb success,
for Maisonneuve showed never a sign of the ugly ulcer, while
the simians, thirty days afterwards, developed the disease—
there was no doubt about it.
Moralists — and there were many doctors among these, mind
METCHNIKOFF
432
you — raised a great clamor against these experiments of
Metchnikoff. “It will remove the penalty of immorality 1”
said they, “to spread abroad such an easy and a perfect means
of prevention 1” But Metchnikoff only answered: “It has been
objected that the attempt to prevent the spread of this dis-
ease is immoral. But since all means of moral prophylaxis
have not prevented the great spread of syphilis and the con-
tamination of innocents, the immoral thing is to restrain any
available means we have of combating this plague.”
vm
Meanwhile he was scheming and groping about and having
dreams about other things that might cause the arteries to
harden, and suddenly he invented another cause — surely no
one can say he discovered it! — “auto-intoxication, poisoning
from the wild, putrefying bacilli in our large intestines — that
is surely a cause of the hardening of the arteries, that is what
helps us to grow old too soon! ” he cried. He devised chemical
tests — what awful ones they were — that would show whether
the body was being poisoned from the intestine. “We would
live much longer,” he said, “if we had no large intestine, in-
deed, two people are on record, who had their large intestine
cut out, and live perfectly well without it.” Strange to say,
he did not advocate cutting the bowels out of every one, but
he set about thinking up ways of making things there uncom-
fortable for the “wild bacilli.”
His theory was a strange one, and caused laughter and jeers
and he began to get into trouble again. People wrote in, re-
minding him that elephants had enormous large intestines but
lived to be a hundred in spite of them; that the human race, in
spite of its large intestine, was one of the longest-lived species
on earth. He engaged in vast obscene arguments about why
evolution has allowed animals to keep a large intestine — then
suddenly he hit on his great remedy for auto-intoxication.
There were villages in Bulgaria where people were alleged to
THE NICE PHAGOCYTES
233
live to be more than a hundred. Metchnikoff didn’t go down
there to see — he believed it. These ancient people lived
principally upon sour milk, so went the story. “Ahl there’s
the explanation,” he muttered. He put the youngsters in his
laboratory to studying the microbe that made milk sour — and
in a little while the notorious Bulgarian bacillus made its bow
in the rank of patent medicines.
“This germ,” explained Metchnikoff, “by making the acid
of sour milk, will chase the wild poisonous bacilli out of the
intestine.” He began drinking huge draughts of sour milk
himself, and later, for years, he fed himself cultivations of the
Bulgarian bacillus. He wrote large books about his new theory
and a serious English journal acclaimed them to be the most
important scientific treatises since Darwin’s “Origin of
Species.” The Bulgarian bacillus became a rage, companies
were formed, and their directors grew rich off selling these
silly bacilli. Metchnikoff let them use his name (though Olga
insists he never made a franc from that) for the label.
For nearly twenty years Metchnikoff austerely lived to the
letter of his new theory. He neither drank alcoholic drinks
nor did he smoke. He permitted himself no debaucheries.
He was examined incessantly by the most renowned specialists
of the age. His rolls were sent to him in separate sterilized
paper bags so that they would be free from the wild, auto-
intoxicating bacilli. He constantly tested his various juices
and excretions. In those years he got down untold gallons of
sour milk and swallowed billions of the beneficent bacilli of
Bulgaria. . . .
And he died at the age of seventy-one.
CHAPTER VIII
THEOBALD SMITH
TICKS AND TEXAS FEVER
I
It was Theobald Smith who made mankind turn a corner.
He was the first, and remains the captain of American mi-
crobe hunters. He poked his nose — following the reasoning
of some plain farmers — around a sharp turn and came upon
amazing things; and now this history tells what Smith saw
and what the trail-breakers who came after him found.
“It is in the power of man to make parasitic maladies dis-
appear from the face of the globe 1” So promised Pasteur,
palsied but famous after his fight with the sicknesses of silk-
worms. He promised that, you remember, with a kind of en-
thusiastic vehemence, making folks think they might be rid
of plagues by a year after next at the latest. Men began to
hope and wait. . . . They cheered as Pasteur invented vac-
cines — marvelous these were but not what you would call
microbe-exterminators. Then Koch came, to astound men
by his perilous science of finding the tubercle bacillus, and,
though Koch promised little, men remembered Pasteups
prophecy and waited for consumption to vanish. . . . Years
went by while Roux and Behring battled bloodily to scotch
the poison of diphtheria; mothers crooned hopeful songs into
the ears of their children. . . . Some men giggled, but se-
cretly hoped a little too, that the mighty (albeit windy)
Metchnikoff might teach his phagocytes to eat up every germ
in the world. . . . Diseases were getting a bit milder maybe —
the reason is still mysterious — but they seemed in no hurry to
vanish, and men had to keep on waiting. . . .
234
TICKS AND TEXAS FEVER
235
Then arose a young man, Theobald Smith, at the opening
of the last ten years of the eighteen hundreds, to show why
northern cows get sick and die of Texas fever when they go
south, and to explain why southern cows, though healthy, go
north and trail along with them a mysterious death for
northern cattle. In 1893 Theobald Smith wrote his straight,
clear report of the answer to this riddle; there was certainly no
public horn-tooting about it and the report is now out of print
— but that report gave an idea to the swashbuckling David
Bruce; it gave hints to Patrick Manson; it set thoughts flick-
ering through the head of the brilliant but indignant Italian,
Grassi; that report gave confidence in his dangerous quest to
the American Walter Reed and that gang of officers and gallant
privates who refused extra pay for the job of being martyrs to
research.
What kind of man is this Theobald Smith (safe to say all
but a few thousand Americans have never even heard of him),
and how could his discoveries about a cow disease set such
dreams stirring — how could those farmer’s reasonings that he
proved, show microbe hunters a way to begin to realize the
poetic promise of Pasteur to men?
n
In 1884 Theobald Smith was in his middle twenties; he was
a Bachelor of Philosophy of Cornell University; he was a doc-
tor of medicine from the Albany Medical College. But he
detested the idea of going through life solemnly diagnosing
sicknesses he could not hope to cure, offering sympathy where
help was needed, trying to heal patients for whom there was
no hope — in brief, medicine seemed to him to be a mixed-up,
illogical business. He was all for biting into the unknown in
places where there was a chance of swallowing it — a little of
it — without having mental indigestion. In short, though a phy-
sician, he wanted to do science! In especial he was eager
— as what searcher was not in those piping days — about mi-
THEOBALD SMITH
236
crobes. At Cornell (it was before the days of jazz) he had
played psalms and Beethoven on the pipe organ; here too
(college activities had not yet engulfed mere learning) Theo-
bald Smith dug thoroughly into mathematics, into physical
science, into German, and particularly he became enthusiastic
about looking through microscopes. Maybe then he saw his
first microbe. . . .
But when he came to the medical school at Albany, he found
no excitement about possibly dastardly bacilli among the doc-
tors of the faculty; germs had not yet been set up as targets
for the healing shots of the medical profession; there was no
course in bacteriology there — nor, for that matter, in any medi-
cal school in America. But he wanted to do science! And,
caring nothing for the healthy drunkennesses and scientific
obscenities of the ordinary medical student, Theobald Smith
soothed himself with the microscopic study of the interiors of
cats. In his first published paper he made certain shrewd ob-
servations on peculiar twists of anatomy in the depths of the
bellies of cats — that was his bow as a searcher.
He graduated and wanted above everything to be an experi-
menter, but he had, before anything, to make a living. Just
then young American doctors were hurrying to Europe, eager
to look over Koch’s shoulder to learn ways to paint bacilli, to
breed them true, to shoot them under the skins of animals, and
to talk like real experts about them. Theobald Smith would
have liked to go but he had to find a job. And presently, while
those other well-off young Americans were getting in on the
ground floor of the new exciting science (afterward they told
how they had actually worked in the same room with those
great Germans! ) and when they were getting ready to land im-
portant professorships, Theobald Smith got his job. A humble
and surely not academically respectable job it was too! For
he was appointed one of the staff of the then feeble, strug-
gling, insignificant, financially rather ill-nourished, and in gen-
eral almost negligible Bureau of Animal Industry at Washing-
ton. Counting Smith, there were four members of the staff
TICKS AND TEXAS FEVER 237
of this Bureau. The Chief was a good man named Salmon.
He was enthusiastically interested in what germs might do to
cows and sincerely passionate about the importance of bacilli
to pigs — but he knew nothing of how to find the microbes
harassing these valuable creatures. Then there was Mr. Kil-
borne who rejoiced in the degree of Bachelor of Agriculture
and was something of a horse doctor (he now runs a hardware
store in New York, up-state). And finally, this staff to which
Smith came, was glorified by the ancient and redoubtable
Alexander, a darky ex-slave who sat about solemnly, and when
urged, got up to wash the dirty bottles or chaperon the guinea-
pigs.
In a little room lighted by a dormer window under the roof
in the attic of a government building, Smith set out to hunt
microbes. It was his proper business! Naturally he went at
it, as if he had been born with a syringe in his hand and a
platinum wire in his mouth. Though a university graduate, he
read German well, and of nights, with gulps, he gobbled up the
brave doings of Robert Koch; like a young duck taking to
the water he began to imitate Koch’s subtle ways of nursing
and waylaying hideous bacilli and those strange spirilla who
swim about like living corkscrews. ... “I owe everything to
Robert Koch!” he said, and thought of that far-off genius as
some country baseball slugger might think of Babe Ruth.
In his dingy attic he was tireless. It made no difference
that he was not strong — all day and part of the night he hunted
microbes. And he had musician’s fingers that helped him to
brew microbe soups with very few spillings. In off moments
he would swat the regiments of cockroaches who marched
without stopping into his attic from the lumber room close by.
In a remarkably short time he had taught himself everything
needful and began to make cautious discoveries — he invented
a queer new safe kind of vaccine, which contained no bacilli
but only their filtered formless protein stuff. The heat of his
attic was an intensification of the shimmering hell Washington
knows how to be, but he wiped the sweat from the end of his
THEOBALD SMITH
238
nose and set to work in the right, classic way of Koch — with
an astounding instinct he avoided the cruder methods of Pas-
teur.
in
You talk about freedom of science! You think a free choice
to dig in any part of the Unknown is needed by searchers? I
used to think so, and I have got into trouble with eminent au-
thorities for saying so — too loudly. Wrong! For Theobald
Smith, with little more freedom to start with than some low
government clerk — had to research into things Dr. Salmon
told him to research at, and Dr. Salmon was paid to direct
Smith to solve puzzles which were bothering the farmers and
stock-raisers. Such was science in the Bureau of Animal In-
dustry. Dr. Salmon and Bachelor Kilborne and Theobald
Smith — to say nothing of the indispensable Alexander — were
expected to rush out like firemen and squirt science on the
flaming epidemics threatening the pigs and heifers and bulls
and rams of the farmers of the land. Just then the stock-
raisers were seriously upset by a very weird disease, the Texas
fever.
Southern cattlemen bought northern cattle; they were un-
loaded from their box-cars and put to graze on the fields along
with perfectly healthy southern cows; everything would go
well for a month or so, and then, bang! an epidemic burst out
among northern cows. They stopped eating, they lost dozens
of pounds a day, their urine ran strangely red, they stood aim-
less with arched backs and sad eyes — and in a few days every
last one of the fine northern herd lay stiff-legged on the field.
The same thing happened when southern steers and heifers
were shipped North; they were put into northern fields, grazed
there awhile, were driven away perhaps; when northern cows
were turned into those fields where their southern sisters had
been, in thirty days or so they began to die — in ten days after
that a whole fine herd might be under the ground.
TICKS AND TEXAS FEVER
239
What was this strange death, brought from the South by
cattle never sick with it themselves, and left invisibly in am-
bush on the fields? Why did it take more than a month for
those fields to become dangerous? Why were they only dan-
gerous in the hot summer months?
The whole country was excited about it; there was bad
feeling between the meridional cowmen and their colleagues
of the North; New York City went into a panic when carloads
of stock shipped East for beef began to die in hundreds on the
trains. Something must be done! And the distinguished doc-
tors of the Metropolitan Health Board went to work to try to
find the microbe cause of the disease. . . .
Meanwhile certain wise old Western cattle growers had a
theory — it was just what you would call a plain hunch got from
smoking their pipes over disastrous losses of cows — they had
a notion that Texas fever was caused by an insect living on the
cattle and sucking blood; this bug they called a tick.
The learned doctors of the Metropolitan Board and all of
the distinguished horse doctors of the various state Experiment
Stations laughed. Ticks cause disease! Any insect cause dis-
ease! It was unheard of. It was against all science. It was
silly! . . A little thought should have satisfied any one
of the absurdity of this idea,” pronounced the noted authority,
Gamgee. This man was up to his nose in the study of Texas
fever, and never mentioned a tick; the scientists all over
gravely cut up the carcasses of cows and discovered bacilli
there (but never saw a tick). “It is the dung spreads it!”
said one. “You are wrong, it is the saliva!” said another.
There were as many theories as there were scientists. And the
cattle kept on dying.
IV
Then, in 1888, Dr. Salmon put Theobald Smith, with Kil-
borne to help him, and Alexander to clean up after them —
saying nothing about ticks Salmon put his entire staff to work
240
THEOBALD SMITH
on Texas fever. “Discover the germ!” he told Smith. That
year they had nothing but the spleens and livers of four dead
Texas fever cows to investigate; packed in pails of ice, from
Virginia and Maryland to his furnace-like attic came those
livers and spleens. Theobald Smith had what so many of
those mystified scientists and baffled horse doctors lacked —
horse sense. He turned his microscope on to different bits of
the first sample of spleen; he spied microbes in it; there was
a veritable menagerie of different species of them.
Then Smith sniffed at that bit of spleen. He wrinkled up
his nose — it smelled. It was spoiled.
At once he sent out messages, asking the stockmen to get
the insides out of their cattle right away after they died, to
pack them quickly in ice, to see they got to the laboratory'
more quickly. It was done, and in the next spleen he found no
microbes at all — but only a great quantity of mysteriously
broken up red corpuscles of the blood. “They look wrecked!”
he said. But he could find no microbes. He was still young,
and sarcastic, and impatient with any searcher who couldn’t
do close hard thinking. A man named Billings had claimed a
foolish common bacillus (which he found in every part of
every dead cow and in every corner of the barnyard — includ-
ing the manure pile — as well) was the cause of Texas fever.
Billings wrote a spread-eagle paper, saying: “The sun of
original research, in disease, seems to be rising in the West in-
stead of the East!”
“Somewhat pompous claims,” said Smith, and he blew away
all that pseudo-scientific rubbish in a few dry sentences. Smith
knew it was no good sitting in a laboratory, with no matter
how many guinea-pigs and what an array of fine syringes,
simply to peer at the spleens and livers of more or less odorifer-
ous cows. He was an experimenter; he must study the living
disease; be there while the cows kicked their last quivering
spasms; he must follow nature. He began to get ready for
the summer of 1889, when, one day, Kilborne told him of the
cattlemen’s ridiculous theory about the ticks.
TICKS AND TEXAS FEVER
241'
In a moment he pricked up his mental ears. “The farmers,
the ones who lose the stock, who see most of Texas fever, they
think that?”
Now, though Theobald Smith was born in a city, he liked
the smell of hay just cut and the brown furrows of fresh-
turned fields. There was something sage — something as near
as you can come to truth for him in a farmer’s clipped sentences
about the crops or the weather. Smith was learned in the
marvelous shorthand of mathematics; men of the soil don’t
know that stuff. He was absolutely at home among the scopes
and tubes and charts of shining laboratories — in short, this
young searcher was full of sophisticated wisdom that laughs
at common sayings, that often jeers at peasant platitudes.
But in spite of all of his learning (and this was an arbitrary
strange thing about him!) Theobald Smith did not confuse
fine buildings and complicated apparatus with clear thinking
— he seemed always to be distrusting what he got out of books
or what he saw in tubes. . . . He felt the dumbest yokel to
be profoundly right when that fellow took his corn-cob pipe
from his maybe unbrushed teeth to growl that April showers
brought May flowers.
He listened to Kilborne’s gossip about that idiotic theory of
ticks; Kilborne told him the cattlemen of the West were
pretty well agreed it was ticks. Well, pondered Smith, those
fellows were surely innocent of any fancy reasoning to corrupt
their brains, they reeked of the smell of steers and heifers,
they were almost, you might say, a part of their animals; and
they were the ones who had to lay awake nights knowing this
dreadful disease was turning their cattle’s blood to water, to
taking the bread from their children’s mouths. They had to
bury those poor wasted beasts. And these experienced farmers
one and all said: “No ticks — no Texas fever!”
Theobald Smith would follow the farmers. He would watcli
the disease as nearly as possible as those stockmen had watched
it. Here was a new kind of microbe hunting — following nature,
and changing her by just the smallest tricks. . . . The sum-
242 THEOBALD SMITH
mer of 1889 came, the days grew hot; the year before the cat-
tlemen had complained bitterly about their losses. It was
urgent to do something, even the government saw that. The
Department of Agriculture loosened up with a good appropria-
tion, and Dr. Salmon, the Director, directed that the work
begin — luckily he knew so little about experiments that his
direction never bothered Smith in the slightest.
v
With Kilborne, Theobald Smith now built an outlandish
laboratory, not between four walls but under the hot sky, and
the rooms of that place of science were nothing more than five
or six little dusty fenced off fields. On June 27 of 1889, seven
rather thin but perfectly healthy cows came off a little boat
which brought them from farms in North Carolina, from the
heart of the Texas fever country, where it was death for north-
ern cattle to go. And these seven cows were, one and all of
them, decorated, infested and plagued by several thousands of
ticks, assorted sizes of them, some so tiny they needed a
magnifying glass to be seen — and then there were splendid
female ticks half an inch long, puffed up with blood sucked
from their long-suffering hosts.
Into securely fenced Field No. 1, Smith and Kilborne drove
four of these tick-loaded southern cattle, and with them they
put six healthy northern beasts “Pretty soon the north-
erners will be getting the ticks on them too, they have never
been near Texas fever. . . . They are susceptible, and
then. . . ?” said Smith. “And now for a little trick to see if
it is the ticks we have to blame!”
So Theobald Smith did his first little trick — call it an experi-
ment if you wish — it was a stunt a shrewd cattleman might
have thought of if he hadn’t been too busy to try it; it was
an experiment all other American scientists considered it silly
to attempt. Smith and Kilborne set out to pick off, with their
hands, every single tick from the remaining three southern
TICKS AND TEXAS FEVER
243
cattle! The beasts kicked and switched their tails in these
strange experimenters’ faces; it was way over a hundred in
the sun, and the dust from the rampaging of the offended cows
hung in clouds around them and stuck to their sweaty fore-
heads. Buried away under the matted hair of the cattle hid
those ticks, and the little ones out in the open seemed to crawl
away under the hair when the cramped fingers of the searchers
went after them. And how those damned parasites stuck to
their cow-hosts — there were magnificent blood-gorged lady
ticks who mashed up into nasty messes when you tried to pull
them off — it was a miserable business!
But toward evening of that day they could find never a tick
on any of those three North Carolina cows, and into Field
No. 2 they put them, along with four healthy northern beasts.
“These northerners, perfectly fit for a fatal attack of Texas
fever, will be rubbing noses with the southerners, will be
nibbling the same grass, drinking from the same water, snif-
fing at the North Carolina cow’s excretions — but they’ll get no
ticks from them. Well — now to wait and see if it’s the ticks
who are to blame!”
July and the first of August were two months of hot but
strenuous waiting. Smith, with a Government bug-expert
named Cooper Curtice, kept himself busy with vast studies of
the lives and works and ways of ticks. They discovered how
a six-legged baby tick climbs up onto a cow, how it fastens it-
self to the cow’s hide, begins to suck blood, sheds its skin,
proudly acquires two more legs, sheds its skin again; they
found out the eight-legged females then marry (on the cow’s
back) each of them a little male, how the lady-ticks then have
great feasts of blood, grow to tick womanhood — and at last
drop off the cow to the ground to lay their two thousand or
more eggs; so, hardly more than twenty days after their
journey up the leg of the cow, their mission in life is done, and
they shrivel up and die — while strange doings begin in each
of those two thousand eggs. . . .
Meanwhile, every day — it was a relief to get out of that
244
THEOBALD SMITH
cockroachy attic even to those burning fields — Theobald Smith
journeyed out to his open air laboratory where Kilborne the
future hardware dealer was in command. He went to Field No. i
to see if ticks had got on to any of the northern cattle yet, to see
if they were getting hot, if their heads drooped; he crossed
aver to Field No. 2 to pick a few more ticks off those three
North Carolina cows — a few new ones always seemed to be
popping up, grown from ones too small to see that first day! —
it was nervous business, making sure those three cows stayed
clean of ticks. ... It was, to tell the truth, a perspiring and
not too interesting waiting until that day a little past the mid-
dle of August, when the first northern cow began to show ticks,
and presently to stand with her back arched, refusing to eat.
Then the ticks appeared on all the northerners; they burned
with fever, their blood turned to water, their ribs stuck out
and their flanks grew bony — and ticks? They seemed to be
alive with ticks!
But on Field No. 2, where there were no ticks, the northern
cows stayed as healthy as their North Carolina mates. . . .
Each day the fever of the northern beasts in Field No. 1
went higher — then one by one they died; the barns ran red
with the blood of the post mortems, and there were rushings
to and fro between the dead beasts on the field and the micro-
scopes in the attic — even Alexander, dimly sensing the mo-
mentous things afoot, even Alexander got busy. And Theo-
bald Smith looked at the thin blood of the dead cows. “It is
the blood the unknown Texas fever microbe attacks — some-
thing seems to get into the blood corpuscles of the cows and
burst them open — it is inside the blood cells I must look for
the germ,” pondered Smith. Now, though he distrusted the
reports of alleged microscope experts, he was nevertheless him-
self mighty sharp with this machine. He turned his most
powerful lens onto the blood of the first cow that died, and —
here was luck! — in the very first specimen he spied queer little
punched-out pear-shaped spaces in the otherwise solid discs
of the blood corpuscles. At first they simply looked like holes,
TICKS AND TEXAS FEVER 245
but he focussed up and down, and fussed, and looked at a dozen
thin bits of glass with blood between them. Presently these
spaces began to turn into queer pear-shaped living creatures
for him. In the blood of every beast dead of Texas fever he
found them — always inside the corpuscles, wrecking the
corpuscles, turning the blood to water. Never did he find them
in the blood of a healthy northern cow. . . . “It may be the
microbe of Texas fever,” he whispered, but like a good peasant
he did not jump to conclusions — he must look at the blood of
a hundred cows, sick and healthy, he must examine millions
of red blood cells to be sure. . . .
By now the hottest weather had passed, it was September,
and in Field No. 2, the northern cattle, all four of them, kept
on grazing and grew fat — there were no ticks there. And
Smith muttered: “We’ll see if it’s the ticks who are to blame 1 ”
and he took two of these unharmed northern beasts and led
them into Field No. 1, where so many beasts had died — in a
week a few of the little red-brown bugs were crawling up these
new cow’s legs. In a little more than two weeks one of these
cows was dead, and the other sick, of Texas fever.
But there never was a man who needed more experiences to
convince him of something he wanted to believe. He must
be sure! And there was still another simple trick he could try
— call it an experiment if you wish. From North Carolina,
from the fatal fields down there, came large cans and these
cans were filled with grass, that swarmed with ticks, crawling,
thirsty for the blood of cows. These cans Theobald Smith
took on to Field No. 3, where no southern cattle or their blood-
sucking parasites had ever been, and he plodded up and down
this field, and all over it he sowed his maybe fatal seed — of
ticks. Then four northern cattle were led by Kilborne on to
this field — and in a few weeks their blood ran thin, and one
died, and two of the remaining three had severe bouts of Texas
'ever but recovered.
246
THEOBALD SMITH
VI
So, first of all microbe hunters, Theobald Smith traced out
the exact path by which a sub-visible assassin goes from one
animal to another. In the field where there were southern
cattle and ticks, the northern cattle died of Texas fever; in the
field where there were southern cattle without ticks the northern
cows grew fat and remained happy; in the field where there
were no southern cattle but only ticks — there too, the northern
cattle came down with Texas fever. It must be the tick. By
such simple, two-plus-two-make-four — but ohl what endlessly
careful experiments, Theobald Smith proved those western
cowmen to have observed a great new fact of nature. ... He
chiseled that fact out of folk-shrewdness, just as the anonymous
invention of the wheel has been taken out of folk-inventiveness
and put to the uses of modern whirring dynamos. . . .
You would think he thought he had proved enough — those
experiments were so clear. You would think he would have
advised the government to start an exterminating war on ticks,
but that was not the kind of searcher Theobald Smith was. In-
stead, he waited for the heat of the summer of 1890 to come,
and then he started doing the same experiments over, and
some new ones too, all of them simple tricks, but each of them
necessary to nail down the fact that the tick was the real
criminal. “How do those bugs carry the disease from a south-
ern cow to a northern one?” he pondered. “We know now
one tick lives its whole life on just one cow — it doesn’t flit
from beast to beast like a fly. . . .” This was a knotty ques-
tion — too subtle for the crude science of the ranchers — and
Smith set himself to chew that knot. . . .
“It must be,” he meditated, “that ticks, when they have
sucked enough blood, and are ripe, drop off, and are crushed,
and leave the little pear-shaped microbes on the grass — to be
eaten by the northern cattle!”
So he took thousands of ticks, sent up in those cans from
TICKS AND TEXAS FEVER
247
North Carolina, and mixed them with hay, and fed them to a
susceptible northern cow kept carefully in a special stable.
But nothing happened; the cow seemed to relish her new food;
she got fat. He tried drenching another cow with mashed up
ticks made into a soup — but that cow too seemed to enjoy her
strange dose. She prospered on it.
It was no go — cows didn’t, apparently, get the microbe by
eating ticks; he was mixed up for a while. And other plaguey
questions kept him awake nights. Why was it that it took
thirty days or more, after the southern tick-loaded cows came
on the field, for such a field to become dangerous? Stockmen
knew this too; they knew they could mix just-arrived southern
cows with northern ones, and keep them together twenty days
or so, and then if they took the northern ones away — they
would never get Texas fever; but if you left them in that field a
little longer (even if the southern cows were taken away) bang!
would come the fatal epidemic into the herd of northerners.
That was a poser!
Then one day in this summer of 1890, by the most strange,
the most completely unforeseen of accidents, every jagged
piece of the puzzle fell into its proper place. The solution of
the riddle fairly clubbed Theobald Smith; it yelled at him; it
forced itself on him while he was busy doing other things. He
was at all kinds of experiments just then; he was bleeding
northern cows for gallons of blood to give them an anemia —
to make sure those funny little pear-shaped objects he had
found in the corpuscles of Texas fever cattle were microbes,
and not simply little changes in blood that might come from
anemia. He was learning to hatch nice clean young ticks
artificially in glass dishes in his laboratory; he was still labori-
ously picking ticks off southern cows — and sometimes he failed
to get them all off and the experiments went wrong — to prove
that tickless southern cows are harmless to northern ones; he
was discovering the strange fact that northern calves get only a
mild fever on a field fatal to their mothers. He fussed about
THEOBALD SMITH
248
finding every single effect a tick might have on a northern cow
— it might do other damages besides giving her Texas
fever „ . . ?
Then came that happy accident. He asked himself: “If I
should put good clean young ticks, hatched in glass dishes in
my attic, ticks who never have been on cattle or on a dangerous
field — if I should put such ticks on a northern cow and let
them suck their fill of her blood — could those ticks take out
enough blood to give the cow an anemia?” It seems to me to
have been an aimless question. His thoughts were a thousand
miles away from Texas fever. . . .
But he tried it. He took a good fat yearling heifer, put her
in a box-stall, and day after day put hundreds of clean baby
ticks on her, holding her while these varmints crawled away
beneath her hair to get a good grip on her hide. Then day
after day, while the ticks made their meals, he cut little gashes
in her skin to get a drop of blood to see if she was becoming
anemic. And one morning Theobald Smith came into her
stall — for the usual routine — he put his hand on that
heifer. . . . What was this? She felt hot! Very hot! Sus-
piciously too hot! She drooped her head, and would not eat
— and her blood which before had welled out from the gashes
thick and rich and red — that blood ran very thin and darkish.
He hurried back to his attic with samples of the blood between
little pieces of glass. . . . Under the microscope it went, and
sure enough! — here were twisted, jagged, wrecked blood
corpuscles instead of good even round ones with edges smooth
as a worn dime. And inside these broken cells — it was fan-
tastical, this business! — were the little pear-shaped mi-
crobes. . . . Here was the fact, stranger than any pipe-dream
— for these microbes must have come up from North Carolina
on old ticks, had gone out of the old ticks into the eggs they
had laid in the glass dishes, they had survived in the baby
ticks hatched out these eggs — and these babies had at last
shot them back, ready to kill, into their destined but com-
pletely accidental victim, that yearling heiferl
TICKS AND TEXAS FEVER 249
In a flash all those mysterious questions cleared up for Theo-
bald Smith.
It was not the old, blood-stuffed tick but its child, the baby
tick, who sneaked the assassin into the northern cows; it was
this little five- or ten-day-old bug who carried the murderer.
Now he saw why it was that fields took so long to become
dangerous — the mother ticks have to drop off the southern
cattle; it takes them some days to lay their eggs; these eggs take
twenty days or more to hatch; the tick babies have to scamper
about to find a cow’s leg to crawl up on — all that takes many
days, weeks. Never was there a simpler answer to a problem
which, without this strange chance, might not yet be
solved. . . .
So soon as he could hatch out other thousands of ticks in
warm glass dishes, Theobald Smith proceeded to confirm his
marvelous discovery; he proved it clean. For every northern
cow, on whom he stuck his regiments of incubator ticks, came
down with Texas fever. But he was a glutton for proofs, as
you have seen, and when the summer of 1890 waned and it
grew cold, he installed a coal-stove in a stable, hatched the
ticks in a heated place, put a cow in the hot stable, stuck the
little ticks diligently onto the hide of the cow, the stove in-
stead of the sun made them grow as they should — and the
cow got Texas fever in the winter, a thing which never happens
in nature!
For two more summers Smith and Kilborne tramped about
their fields, caulking up every seam in the ship of their re-
search, answering every argument, devising astounding simple
but admirably adequate answers to every objection the savant
horse doctors might make — before these critics ever had a
chance to make objections. They found strange facts about
immunity. They saw northern calves get mild attacks of
Texas fever, a couple of attacks in one summer maybe, and
then next year, more or less grown up, graze unconcerned on
fields absolutely murderous to a non-immune northern
cow. ... So they explained why southern cattle never die of
250
THEOBALD SMITH
Texas fever. This fell disease is everywhere that ticks are
in the South — and ticks are everywhere; ticks are biting south-
ern cattle and shooting the fatal queer pears into them all the
time; these cattle carry the microbes about with them in their
blood — but it doesn’t matter, for the little sickness in their
calfhood has made them immune.
Finally, after four of these stifling but triumphant summers,
Theobald Smith sat down, in 1893, to answer all the perplexing
questions about Texas fever — and to tell how the disease can
be absolutely wiped out (just then the ancient Pasteur who
had prophesied that about all disease was getting ready to die).
Never — and I do not forget the masterpieces of Leeuwenhoek
or Koch or any genius in the line of microbe hunters — never,
I say, has there been written a more simple but at the same
time more solid answer to an enigma of nature. A bright boy
could understand it; Isaac Newton would have taken off his
hat to it. He loved Beethoven, did young Smith, and for me
this “Investigation into the Nature, Causation, and Prevention
of Texas or Southern Cattle Fever” has the quality of that
Eighth Symphony of Beethoven’s sour later years. Absurdly
simple in their themes they both are, but unearthly varied and
complete in the working out of those themes — just as nature
is at once simple and infinitely complex. . . .
VII
And so, with this report, Theobald Smith made mankind
turn a corner, showed men an entirely new and fantastic way
a disease may be carried — by an insect. And only by that
insect. Wipe out that insect, dip all of your cattle to kill all
their ticks, keep your northern cattle in fields where there
are no ticks, and Texas fever will disappear from the earth.
To-day whole states are dipping their cattle and to-day Texas
fever which once threatened the great myriads of American
cattle is no longer a matter for concern. But that is only the
beginning of the beneficent deeds of this plain report, this
TICKS AND TEXAS FEVER
251
classic unappreciated and completely out of print. For pres-
ently, on the veldt and in the dangerous bush of southern
Africa, a burly Scotch surgeon-major swore at the bite of a
tsetse fly — and wondered what else besides merely annoying
one, these tsetse flies might do. And a little later in India,
and at the same time in Italy, an Englishman and an Italian
listened to the whining song of swarms of mosquitoes, and
dreamed and wondered and planned strange experiments
But those are the stories the next chapters will celebrate.
They tell of ancient plagues now in reach of mankind’s com-
plete control — they tell of a deadly yellow disease now almost
entirely abolished. They tell of men projecting pictures of
swarming human life and turreted cities of the future reaching
up and up, built on jungles now fit only for man-killing wild
beasts and lizards. It was this now nearly forgotten microbe
hunting of Theobald Smith that first gave men the right to
have visions of a world transformed.
CHAPTER IX
BRUCE
TRAIL OF THE TSETSE
I
“Young man!” — the face of the Director-General of the Brit*
ish Army Medical Service changed from an irritated red to an
indignant mauve-color — “young man, I will send you to India,
I will send you to Zanzibar, I will send you to Timbuctoo — I
will send you anywhere I please” — (the majestic old gentle-
man was shouting now, and his face was a positively furious
purple) “but you may be damned sure I shall not send you to
Natal! . . .” Reverberations. . . .
What could David Bruce do, but salute, and withdraw from
his Presence? He had schemed, he had begged, and pulled
wires, finally he had dared the anger of this Jupiter, so that he
might go hunt microbes in South Africa. It was in the early
eighteen nineties; Theobald Smith, in America, had just made
that revolutionary jump ahead in microbe hunting — he had
just shown how death may be carried by a tick, and only by a
tick, from one animal to another. And now this David Bruce,
physically as adventurous as Theobald Smith was mildly pro-
fessorial, wanted to turn that corner after Smith. . . . Africa
swarmed with mysterious viruses that made the continent a
hell to live in; in the olive-green mimosa thickets and the jungle
hummed and sizzled a hundred kinds of flies and ticks and
gnats. . . . What a place for discoveries, for swashbuckling
microscopings and lone-wolf bug-huntings Africa must be!
It was in the nature of David Bruce to do things his superiors
and elders didn’t want him to do. Just out of medical school
25*
TRAIL OF THE TSETSE
253
in Edinburgh, he had joined the British Army Medical Service,
not to fight, nor to save lives, nor (at that time) to get a chance
to hunt microbes — not for any such noble objects. He had
joined it because he wanted to marry. They hadn’t a shilling,
neither Bruce nor his sweetheart; their folks called them
thirteen kinds of romantic idiots — why couldn’t they wait un-
til David had established himself in a nice practice?
So Bruce joined the army, and married on a salary of one
thousand dollars a year.
In certain ways he was not a model soldier. He was dis-
obedient, and, what is much worse, tactless. Still a lieutenant,
he one day disapproved of the conduct of his colonel, and of-
fered to knock him down. ... If you could see him now, past
seventy, with shoulders of a longshoreman and a barrel-chest
sloping down to his burly equator, if you could hear him swear
through a mustache Hindenburg would be proud to own, you
would understand he could, had it been necessary, have put
that colonel on his back, and laughed at the court-martial that
would have been sure to follow. He was ordered to the Eng-
lish garrison on the Island of Malta in the Mediterranean;
with him went Mrs. Bruce — it was their honeymoon. Here
again he showed himself to be things soldiers seldom are. He
was energetic, as well as romantic. There was a mysterious
disease in the island. It was called Malta fever. It was an ill
that sent pains up and down the shin bones of soldiers and
made them curse the day they took the Queen’s shilling. Bruce
saw it was silly to sit patting the heads of these sufferers, and
futile to prescribe pills for them — he must find the cause of
Malta fever 1
So he got himself into a mess. In an abandoned shack he
set up a laboratory (little enough he knew about laboratories! )
and here he spent weeks learning how to make a culture
medium, out of beef broth and agar-agar, to grow the unknown
germ of Malta fever in. It ought to be simple to discover it.
His ignorance made him think that; and in his inexperience he
got the sticky agar-agar over hands and face; it stained
254
BRUCE
his uniform; the stuff set into obstinate jelly when he
tried to filter it; he spent weeks doing a job a modern lab-
oratory helper would accomplish in a couple of hours. He
said unmentionable things; he called Mrs. Bruce from the
tennis lawn, and demanded (surely any woman knew better
how to cook) that she help him. Out of his thousand dollars
a year he bought monkeys — improvidently — at one dollar and
seventy-five cents apiece. He tried to inject the blood of the
tortured soldiers into these creatures; but they wriggled out
of his hands and bit him and scratched him and were in gen-
eral infernally lively nuisances. He called to his wife: “Will
you hold this monkey for me?”
That was the way she became his assistant, and as you will
see, for thirty years she remained his right hand, going with
him into the most pestilential dirty holes any microbe hunter
has ever seen, sharing his poverty, beaming on his obscure
glories; she was so important to his tremendous but not notori-
ous conquests. . . .
They were such muddlers at first, it is hard to believe it,
but together these newly wed bacteriologists worked and dis-
covered the microbe of Malta fever — and were ordered from
Malta for their pains. “What was Bruce up to, anyway?” So
asked the high medical officers of the garrison. “Why wasn’t
he treating the suffering soldiers — what for was he sticking
himself away there in the hole he called his laboratory?” And
they denounced him as an idiot, a visionary, a good-for-nothing
monkey-tamer and dabbler with test-tubes. And just — he did
do this twenty years later — as he might have discovered how
the little bacillus of Malta fever sneaks from the udders of
goats into the blood of British Tommies, he was ordered away
to Egypt.
n
Then he was ordered back to England, to the Army Medical
School at Netley, to teach microbe hunting there — for hadn’t
TRAIL OF THE TSETSE
255
he discovered the germ of an important disease? Here he met
(at last God was good to him) His Excellency, the Honorable
Sir Walter Hely-Hutchinson, Governor of Natal and Zululand,
et cetera, et cetera. Together these two adventurers saw
visions and made plans. His Excellency knew nothing about
microbes and had perhaps never heard of Theobald Smith —
but he had a colonial administrator’s dream of Africa buzzing
with prosperity under the Union Jack. Bruce cared no fig for
expansion of the Empire, but he knew there must be viruses
sneaking from beast to beast and man to man on the stingers
of bugs and flies. He wanted (and so did Mrs. Bruce) to in-
vestigate strange diseases in impossible places.
It was then that he, only a brash captain, went to the majes-
tic Director-General, and I have just told how he was demol-
ished. But even Directors-General cannot remember the
uppish wishes of all of their pawns and puppets; directors may
propose, but adroit wire-pulling sometimes disposes, and pres-
ently in 1894, Surgeon-Major David Bruce and Mrs. Bruce
are in Natal, traveling by ox-team ten miles a day towards
Ubombo in Zululand. The temperature in the shade of their
double-tent often reached 106; swarms of tsetse flies escorted
them, harassed them, flopped on them with the speed of ex-
press trains and stung them like little adders; they were howled
at by hyenas and growled at by lions. . . . They spent part
of every night scratching tick bites. . . . But Bruce and his
wife, the two of them, were the First British Nagana Commis-
sion to Zululand. So they were happy.
They were commanded to find out everything about the dis-
ease called nagana — the pretty native name for an unknown
something that made great stretches of South Africa into a
desolate place, impossible to farm in, dangerous to hunt big
game in, suicidal to travel in. Nagana means “depressed and
low in spirits.” Nagana steals into fine horses and makes their
coats stare and their hair fall out; while the fat of these horses
melts away nagana grows watery pouches on their bellies and
causes a thin rheum to drip from their noses; a milky film
BRUCE
356
spreads over their eyes and they go blind; they droop, and at
last die — every last horse touched by the nagana dies. It was
She same with cattle. Farmers tried to improve their herds
hy importing new stock; cows sent to them fat and in prime
condition came miserably to their kraals — to die of nagana.
Fat droves of cattle, sent away to far-off slaughter-houses,
arrived there hairless, hidebound skeletons. There were
strange belts of country through which it was death for animals
to go. And the big game hunters! They would start into
these innocent-seeming thickets with their horses and pack-
mules; one by one — in certain regions mind you — their beasts
wilted under them. When these hunters tried to hoof it back,
sometimes they got home.
Bruce and Mrs. Bruce came at last to Ubombo — it was a
settlement on a high hill, looking east toward the Indian
Ocean across sixty miles of plain, and the olive-green of the
mimosa thickets of this plain was slashed with the vivid green
Of glades of glass. On the hill they set up their laboratory; it
consisted of a couple of microscopes, a few glass slides, some
knives and syringes and perhaps a few dozen test-tubes —
smart young medical students of to-day would stick up their
noses at such a kindergarten affair! Here they set to work,
with sick horses and cattle brought up from the plain below —
for Providence had so arranged it that beasts could live on
the barren hill of Ubombo, absolutely safe from nagana, but
just let a farmer lead them down into the juicy grass of that
fertile plain, and the chances were ten to one they would die
of nagana before they became fat on the grass. Bruce shaved
the ears of the horses and jabbed them with a scalpel, a drop of
blood welled out and Mrs. Bruce, dodging their kicks, touched
off the drops onto thin glass slides.
It was hot. Their sweat dimmed the lenses of their micro-
scopes; they rejoiced in necks cramped from hours of looking;
they joked about their red-rimmed eyes. They gave strange
nicknames to their sick cows and horses, they learned to talk
some Zulu. It was as if there were no Directors-General or
TRAIL OF THE TSETSE
257
superior officers in existence, and Bruce felt himself for the
first time a free searcher.
And very soon they made their first step ahead: in the blood
of one of their horses, sick to death, Bruce spied a violent un-
wonted dancing among the faintly yellow, piled-up blood
corpuscles; he slid his slide along the stage of his microscope,
till he came to an open space in the jungle of blood cells. . . .
There, suddenly, popped into view the cause of the commo-
tion — a curious little beast (much bigger than any ordinary
microbe though), a creature with a blunt rear-end and a long
slim lashing whip with which he
seemed to explore in front of him.
A creature shaped like a pana-
tella cigar, only it was flexible, al-
most tying itself in knots some-
times, and it had a transparent graceful fin running the length
of its body. Another of the beasts swam into the open space
under the lens, and another. What extraordinary creatures!
They didn’t go stupidly along like common microbes — they
acted like intelligent little dragons. Each one of them darted
from one round red blood cell to another; he would worry at it,
try to get inside it, tug at it and pull it, push it along ahead of
him — then suddenly off he would go in a straight line and bury
himself under a mass of the blood cells lining the shore of the
open space. . . .
“Trypanosomes — these are!” cried Bruce, and he hurried
to show them to his wife. In all animals sick with nagana
they found these finned beasts, in the blood they were, and in
the fluid of their puffy eyelids, and in the strange yellowish
jelly that replaced the fat under their skins. And never a one
of them could Bruce find in healthy dogs and horses and cows.
But as the sick cattle grew sicker, these vicious snakes swarmed
more and more thickly in their blood, until, when the animals
lay gasping, next to death, the microbes writhed in them in
quivering masses, so that you would swear their blood was
made up of nothing else. ... It was horrible!
BRUCE
258
But how did these trypanosomes get from a sick beast to a
healthy one? “Here on the hill we can keep healthy animals
in the same stables with the sick ones — and never a one of the
sound animals comes down . . . here on the hill no cow or
horse has ever been known to get naganal” muttered Bruce.
“Why? . .
He began to dream experiments, when the long arm of the
Authorities — maybe it was that dear old Director-General
remembering — found him again: Surgeon-Major Bruce was to
proceed to Pietermaritzburg for duty in the typhoid epidemic
raging there.
m
Only five weeks they had been at this work, when they
started back to Pietermaritzburg, ten miles a day by ox-team
through the jungle. He started treating soldiers for typhoid
fever, but as usual — thief that he was — he stole time to try
to find out something about typhoid fever, in a laboratory set
up, since there was no regular one, of all places — in the morgue.
There in the sickening vapors of the dead-house Bruce puttered
in snatched moments, got typhoid fever himself, nearly died,
and before he got thoroughly better was sent out as medical
officer to a filibustering expedition got up to “protect” a few
thousand square miles more of territory for the Queen. It
looked like the end for him, Hely-Hutchinson’s wires got tan-
gled — there seemed no chance ever to work at nagana again;
when the expedition had pierced a couple of hundred miles into
the jungle, all of the horses and mules of this benevolent little
army up and died, and what was left of the men had to try to
hoof it back. A few came out, and David Bruce was among
the lustiest of those gaunt hikers. . . .
Nearly a year had been wasted. But who can blame those
natural enemies of David Bruce, the High Authorities, for
keeping him from research? They looked at him; they se-
cretly trembled at his burliness and his mustaches and his
TRAIL OF THE TSETSE 239
air of the Berserker. This fellow was bom for a soldier! But
they were so busy, or forgot, and presently Hely-Hutchinson
did his dirty work again, and in September, 1895, Bruce and
his wife got back to Ubombo, to try to untangle the knot of
how nagana gets from a sick animal to a healthy one. And
here Bruce followed, for the first time, Theobald Smith around
that corner. . . . Like Theobald Smith, Bruce was a man t®
respect and to test folk-hunches and superstitions. He re-
spected the beliefs of folks, himself he had no fancy super-
scientific thoughts and never talked big words — yes, he re-
spected such hunches — but he must test them!
“It is the tsetse flies cause nagana,” said some experienced
Europeans. “Flies bite domestic animals and put some kind of
poison in them.”
“Nagana is caused by big game,” said the wise Zulu chiefs
and medicine men. “The discharges of the buffalo, the quagga,
and waterbuck, the koodoo — these contaminate the grass and
the watering places — so it is horses and cattle are hit by the
nagana.”
“But why do we always fail to get our horses safe through
the fly country — why is nagana called the fly disease?” asked
the Europeans.
“Why, it’s easy to get animals through the fly belt so long
as you don’t let them eat or drink! ” answered the Zulus.
Bruce listened, and then proceeded to try out both ideas.
He took good healthy horses, and tied heavy canvas bags
round their noses so they couldn’t eat nor drink; he led them
down the hill to the pleasant-looking midday hell in the mi-
mosa thickets; here he kept them for hours. While he watched
to see they didn’t slip their nose bags, swarms of pretty brown
and gold tsetses buzzed around them — flopped on to the
kicking horses and in twenty seconds swelled themselves up
into bright balloons of blood. . . . The world seemed made
of tsetse flies, and Bruce waved his arms. “They were
enough to drive one mad!” he told me, thirty years afterward.
*6o BRUCE
I can see him, talking to those pests in the language of a dock-
foreman, to the wonder of his Zulus. Day after day
this procession of Bruce, the Zulus, and the experimental
horses went down into the thorns, and each afternoon, as the
sun went down behind Ubombo, Bruce and his migrating ex-
periment grunted and sweated back up the hill.
Then, in a little more than fifteen days, to the delight of
Bruce and his wife, the first of those horses who had served
as a fly-restaurant turned up seedy in the morning and hung his
head. And in the blood of this horse appeared the vanguard
of the microscopic army of finned wee devils — that tussled so
intelligently with the red blood cells. . . .
So it was with every horse taken down into the mimosa —
and not one of them had eaten a blade of grass nor had one
swallow of water down there; one and all they died of the
nagana.
“Good, but it is not proved yet, one way or another,” said
Bruce. “Even if the horses didn’t eat or drink, they may
have inhaled those trypanosomes from the air — that’s the way
the greatest medical authorities think malaria is passed on
from one man to the next — though it sounds like rot to me.”
But for Bruce nothing was rot until experiment proved it rot.
“Here’s the way to see,” he cried. “Instead of taking the
horses down, I’ll bring the flies up!”
So he bought more healthy horses, kept them safe on the
hill, thousands of feet above the dangerous plain, then once
more he went down the hill — how that man loved to hunt,
even for such idiotic game as flies 1 — and with him he took a
decoy horse. The tsetses landed on the horse; Bruce and the
Zulus picked them off gently, hundreds of them, and stuck
them into an ingenious cage, made of muslin. Then back up
the hill, to clap the cage buzzing with flies on to the back of
a healthy horse. Through a clever glass window in one of the
cage-sides they watched the greedy brutes make their meal by
sticking their stingers through the muslin. And in less than a
month it was the same with these horses, who had never eaten,
TRAIL OF THE TSETSE 261
nor drunk, nor even inhaled the air of the plain — every one
died of the nagana.
How they worked, Bruce and his wifel They post-
mortemed dead horses; they named a sick horse “The Uni-
corn” and tried to keep him alive with arsenic. To find out
how long a tsetse fly can carry the trypanosomes on his stinger
they put cages of flies on sick dogs and then at intervals of
hours, and days, let them feed on healthy ones. They fed
dying heifers hot pails of coffee, mercifully they shot dogs
thinned by the nagana to sad bags of bones. Mrs. Bruce
sterilized silk threads, to dip in blood swarming with trypano-
somes, then sewed these threads under the hides of healthy
dogs — to find out how long such blood might remain
deadly. . . . There was now no doubt the tsetse flies, and
only the flies, could carry the nagana, and now Bruce asked:
“But where do the tsetses of the plain get the trypanosomes
they stick into cows and horses? In those fly belts there are
often no horses or cattle sick with nagana, for months. Surely
the flies [he was wrong here] can’t stay infected for months
— it must be they get them from the wild animals, the big
game!” That was a possibility after his heart. Here was a
chance to do something else than sit at a microscope. He
forgot instantly about the more patient, subtle jobs that de-
manded to be done — teasing jobs, for a little man, jobs
like tracing the life of the trypanosomes in the flies. . . .
“The microbes must be in game!” and he buckled on his
cartridge belt and loaded his guns. Into the thickets he went,
and shot Burchell’s zebras; he brought down koodoos and
slaughtered water-bucks. He slashed open the dead beasts and
from their hot hearts sucked up syringes full of blood, and
jogged back up the hill with them. He looked through his
microscopes for trypanosomes in these bloods — but didn’t find
them. But there was a streak of the dreamer in him. “They
may be there, too few to see,” he muttered, and to prove they
were there he shot great quantities of the blood from ten
different animals into healthy dogs. So he discovered that the
262
BRUCE
nagana microbes may lurk in game, waiting to be carried to
gentler beasts by the tsetse. So it was Bruce made the first
step towards the opening up of Africa.
IV
And Hely-Hutchinson saw how right he had been about
David Bruce. “ ’Ware the tsetse fly,” he told his farmers,
“kill the tsetse fly, clear the thickets in which it likes to
breed — drive out, exterminate the antelope from which it sucks
the trypanosomes.” So Bruce began ridding Africa of nagana.
Then came the Boer War. Bruce and Mrs. Bruce found
themselves besieged in Ladysmith with nine thousand other
Englishmen. There were thirty medical officers in the garrison
— but not one surgeon. With each whine and burst of the
shells from the Boer’s “Long Tom” the rows of the wounded
grew — there were moanings, and a horrid stench from legs
that should be amputated. . . . “Think of it! Not one of
those medicoes could handle a knife! Myself, I was only a
laboratory man,” said Bruce, “but I had cut up plenty of dogs
and guinea-pigs and monkeys — so why not soldiers? There
was one chap with a bashed-up knee . . . well, they chloro-
formed him, and while they were at that, I sat in the next room
reading Treve’s Surgery on how to take out a knee-joint.
Then I went in and did it — we saved his leg.” So Bruce be-
came Chief Surgeon, and fought and starved, nearly to death,
with the rest. What a boy that Bruce was! In 1924 in
Toronto, in a hospital as he lay propped up, a battered bronchi-
tic giant, telling me this story, his bright eye belied his skin
wrinkled and the color of old parchment — and there was no
doubt he was as proud of his slapdash surgery and his sulky
battles with the authorities, as of any of his discoveries in
microbe hunting. He chuckled through phlegm that gurgled
deep in his ancient air-tubes: “Those red-tape fellows — I al-
ways had to fight their red-tape — until at last I got too
str-r-rong for them!”
TRAIL OF THE TSETSE
263
v
Presently, two years after Ladysmith, he became stronger
than they — and they came asking him to hunt microbes. . . .
For death was abroad on the shores of Lake Victoria
Nyanza, in Central Africa, on the Equator. It crept, it
jumped, it kept popping up in new villages, it was in a way a
very merciful death — though slow — for it was without pain,
turning from a fitful fever into an unconquerable laziness
strange to see in the busy natives of the lake shore; it passed,
this death, from lethargy into a ridiculous sleepiness that made
the mouths of the negroes fall open while they ate; it went at
last from such a drowsiness into a delicious coma — no waking
from this! — and into a horrible unnatural coldness that merged
with the chill of the grave. Such was the African sleeping
sickness. In a few years it had killed hundreds of thousands of
the people of Uganda, it had sent brave missionaries to meet
their God, and English colonial administrators home to their
final slumber. It was turning the most generous soil on earth
back into an unproductive preserve for giraffes and hyenas.
The British Colonial Office was alarmed; shareholders began
to fear for their dividends; natives — those who were left — be-
gan to leave their villages of shaggy, high-pitched, thatch-
roofed huts. And the scientists and doctors?
Well, the scientists and doctors were working at it. Up till
now the wisest ones were as completely ignorant of what was
this sleeping death as the blackest trader in bananas was ig-
norant. No one could tell how it stole from a black father
to his neighbor’s dusky pickaninnies. But now the Royal So-
ciety sent out a commission made up of three searchers; they
sailed for Uganda and began researches with the blood and
spinal fluid of unhappy black men doomed with this drowsy
death.
They groped; they sweat in the tropic heat; they formed
different opinions: one was pretty sure a curious long worm
that he found in the black men’s blood was the cause of this
BRUCE
264
death; a second had no definite opinion that I know of; the
third, Castellani, thought at first that the wee villain back of
the sleeping death was a streptococcus — like the microbe that
causes sore throats.
That was way off the truth, but Castellani had the merit
of working with his hands, trying this, trying that, devising
ingenious ways of looking at the juices of those darkies. And
so one day — by one of those unpredictable stumbles that lie at
the bottom of so many discoveries — Castellani happened on
one of those nasty little old friends of David Bruce, a tryp-
anosome. From inside the backbone of a deadly drowsy
black man Castellani had got fluid — to look for streptococcus.
He put that fluid into a centrifuge — that works like a cream
separator — to try to whirl possible microbes down to the
bottom of the tube in the hope to find streptococcus. Down
the barrel of his microscope Castellani squinted at a drop of
the gray stuff from the bottom of the fluid and saw
A trypanosome, and this beast was very much the same type
of wiggler David Bruce had fished out of the blood of horses
dying of nagana. Castellani kept squinting, found more
trypanosomes, in the spinal juices and even in the blood of a
half a dozen doomed darkies. . . .
That was the beginning, for if Castellani had not seen them,
told Bruce about them, they might never have been found.
Meanwhile the smolder of the sleeping death broke into a
flare that threatened English power in Africa. And the Royal
Society sent the veteran David Bruce down there, with the
trained searcher Nabarro, with Staff-Sergeant Gibbons, who
could do anything from building roads to fixing a microscope.
Then of course Mrs. Bruce was along; she had the title of
Assistant — but Bruce paid her fare.
They came down to Uganda, met Castellani. He told Bruce
about the streptococcus — and the trypanosomes. Back to
the laboratory went these two; microscopes were unpacked, set
up; doomed darkies carried in. Heavy needles were jabbed
TRAIL OF THE TSETSE 265
into these sad people’s spines. Castellani, the young Nabarro,
and Mrs. Bruce bent over their microscopes to find the yes or
no of the discovery of Castellani. There they sat, in this small
room on the Equator, squinting down the barrels of their ma-
chines at a succession of gray nothingnesses.
A bellow from Bruce: “I’ve got onel” The rest crowd
round, squint in turn, exclaim as they watch the writhing tryp-
anosome poke his exploring whip about in the gray field of
the lens. Then they go back to their places — to shout dis-
covery in their turn. So it went, from breakfast till the swift
dusk of evening. In every single sample of spinal fluid from
each one of his more than forty sleeping-sickness patients,
Bruce and his companions found those trypanosomes.
“But they may be in healthy people’s spines too!” said
Bruce. Bruce knew that if he found them in healthy negroes,
all this excitement would be only a wild-goose chase — he must
prove they were to be found only in folks with sleeping sick-
ness. But to get fluid out of healthy people’s spines? Folks
dopey from the sleeping death didn’t mind it so much — but to
jab one of those big needles into the back of healthy wide-
awake colored people, who had no wish to be martyrs to
science. . . . Can you blame them? It is no picnic having
such a spear stuck into your spine. Then Bruce hit on a crafty
scheme. He went to the hospital, where there was a fine
array of patients with all kinds of diseases — but no sleeping
sickness — and then, flimflamming them into thinking the oper-
ation would do them good, this liar in the holy cause of microbe
hunting jabbed his needles into the smalls of the backs of
negroes with, broken legs and with headaches, into youngsters
who had just been circumcised, and into their brothers or
sisters who were suffering from yaws, or the itch; from all of
them he got spinal fluid.
And it was a great success. Not one of these folks — who
had no sleeping sickness — harbored a single trypanosome in
the fluid of their spines. Maybe the operation did do them
266
BRUCE
some good — but no matter, they had served their purpose.
The trypanosome, Castellani and Bruce now knew, was the
cause of sleeping sickness 1
Now — and this is rare in the dreamers who find fun-
damental facts in science — Bruce was a fiend for practical ap-
plications, not poetically like Pasteur, for Bruce wasn’t given to
such lofty soarings, nor was he practical in the dangerous
manner of the strange genius I tell of in the last chapter of
this story; but the moment he turned to the study of a new
plague, Bruce’s gray eyes would dart round, he would begin
asking himself questions: What is the natural home of the
virus of this disease? — How does it get from sick to healthy? —
What is its fountain and origin? — Is there anything peculiar
in the way this sleeping sickness has spread?
That was the way he went at it now. He had discovered
the trypanosome that was the cause. There were a thou-
sand pretty little researches to tempt the scholar in him,
but he brushed all these aside. Old crafty hand at search-
ing that he was, he fished round in his memories, and came
to nagana, and screwed up his eyes: “Is there anything
peculiar about the way sleeping sickness is located in this
country?” He pondered.
He sniffed around. With Mrs. Bruce he explored the high-
treed shores of the lake, the islands, the rivers, the jungle.
Then the common-sense eye which sees things a hundred
searchers might stumble over and go by — showed him the an-
swer. It was strange — suspiciously strange — that sleeping
sickness was only found in a very narrow strip of country —
along the water, only along the water, on the islands, up the
river — even by the Ripon Falls where Victoria Nyanza gives
herself up to the making of the Nile, there were cases of it,
but never inland. That must mean some insect, a blood-suck-
ing insect, which lives only near water, must carry the disease.
That was his guess, why, I cannot tell you. “Maybe it is a
tsetse fly, a special one living only near lake shores and river
banksl ”
TRAIL OF THE TSETSE 267
So Bruce went around asking everybody about tsetse flies
in Uganda. He inquired of local bug experts: no, they were
sure tsetse flies could not live at an altitude above three thou-
sand feet. He asked the native headmen, even the black Prime
Minister of Uganda: sorry, we have a blood-sucking fly, called
Kivu — but there are no tsetse flies in Uganda.
But there must be!
VI
And there were. One day, as they walked through the Bo-
tanical Garden at Entebbe, Bruce pushing his bulky body
between the rows of tropic plants ahead of his small wife —
there was a glad shriek from her. . . . “Why, David! There
are two tsetse — on your back!” That woman was a scientific
Diana. She swooped on those two tsetses, and caught them,
and gave them a practical pinch — just enough to kill them, and
then showed them to her husband. They had been perched,
ready to strike, within a few inches of his neck. Now they
knew they were on the trail.
Hard work began in the laboratory; already Bruce had
found an excellent experimental animal — the monkey, which
he could put into a beautiful fatal sleep, just like that of a
man, by injecting fluid from the spines of doomed negroes.
But now to catch tsetse flies. They armed themselves with
butterfly nets and the glass-windowed cages they had invented
in Zululand. Then these inseparable searchers climbed into
canoes; lusty crews of black boys shot them across the lake.
Along the banks they walked — it was charming in the shade
there — but listen! Yes, there was the buzz of the tsetse. . . .
They tried to avoid being bitten. They were bit — and stayed
awake nights wondering what would happen — they went back
to the laboratory and clapped the cages on the backs of
monkeys. It was a good time for them.
That is the secret of those fine discoveries Bruce made. It
was because he was a hunter. Not only with his mind — but
268
BRUCE
a bold everlastingly curious snouting hunter with his body too.
If he had sat back and listened to those missionaries, or stayed
listening to those bug experts — he would never have learned
that Kivu was the Uganda name for the tsetse. He would
never have found the tsetse. But he carried the fight to the
enemy — and as for Mrs. Bruce, that woman was better than a
third hand or two extra pairs of eyes for him.
Now they planned and did terrible experiments. Day after
day they caused tsetse flies to feed on patients near to death
(already too deep in sleep to be annoyed by the insects) ; they
interrupted the flies in the midst of their meal, and put the
angry, half-satisfied cages of them on the backs of monkeys.
With all the tenderness of high-priced nurses watching over
Park Avenue babies they saw to it that only their experimental
flies, and no chance flies from outside, got a meal off those
beasts. Other searchers might have rolled their thumbs
waiting to see what happened to the monkeys, but not
Bruce.
He proceeded to call in a strange gang of co-workers to help
him in one of the most amazing tests of all microbe hunting.
Bruce asked for an audience from the high-plumed gay-robed
potentate, Apolo Kagwa, Prime Minister of Uganda. He told
Apolo he had discovered the microbe of the sleeping death
which was killing so many thousands of his people. He in-
formed him many thousands more already had the parasite
in their blood, and were doomed. “But there is a way to stop
the ruin that faces your country, for I have reason to believe
it is the tsetse fly — the insect you call Kivu — and only this
insect, that carries the poisonous germ from a sick man to a
healthy one ”
The magnificent Apolo broke in: “But I cannot believe that
is so — Kivu has been on the Lake shore always, and my people
have only begun to be taken by the sleeping sickness during
the last few years ”
Bruce didn’t argue. He bluffed, as follows: “If you do not
believe me, give me a chance to prove it to you. Go down.
TRAIL OF THE TSETSE 269
Apolo Kagwa, to the Crocodile Point on the Lake shore where
Kivu swarms so. Sit on the shore there with your feet in the
water for five minutes. Don’t keep off the flies — and I’ll prom-
ise you’ll be a dead man in two years!”
The bluff was perfect: “What then, is to be done, Colonel
Bruce?” asked Apolo.
“Well, I must be dead sure I am right,” Bruce told him.
Then he showed Apolo a great map of Uganda. “If I’m right,
where there is sleeping sickness — there we will find tsetse
flies too. Where there are no tsetse — there should be no
sleeping sickness.”
So Bruce gave Apolo butterfly nets, and killing bottles, and
envelopes; he gave directions about the exact way to set down
all the facts, and he told how Apolo’s darky minions might
pinch the hies without getting stabbed themselves. “And then
we will put our findings down on this map — and see if I’m
right.”
Apolo was nothing if not intelligent, and efficient. He said
he would see what could be done. There were bows and ami-
able formalities. In a jiffy the black Prime Minister had called
for his head chief, the Sekibobo, and all the paraphernalia,
with rigid directions, went from the Sekibobo to the lesser
headmen, and from them down to the canoe men — the wheels
of that perfect feudal system were set going. . . .
Presently the envelopes began to pour in on Bruce and
called him away from his monkey experiments. They clut-
tered the laboratory, they called him from his peerings into the
intestines of tsetse flies where he looked for trypanosomes.
Rapidly, with perfectly recorded facts — most of them set down
by intelligent blacks and some by missionaries — the envelopes
came in. It was a kind of scientific co-working you would
have a hard time finding among white folks, even white medi-
cal men. Each envelope had a grubby assorted mess of biting
flies, they had a dirty time sorting them, but every time they
found a tsetse, a red-headed pin went into that spot on the
map — and if a report of “sleeping sickness present” came with
270 BRUCE
that fly, a black-headed pin joined it. From the impressive
Sekibobo down to the lowest fly-boy, Apolo’s men had done
their work with an automatic perfection. At last the red and
black dots on the map showed that where there were tsetses,
there was the sleeping death — and where there were no tsetses
— there was no single case of sleeping sickness!
The job looked finished. The unhappy monkeys bit by the
flies who had sucked the blood of dying negroes — these
monkeys’ mouths fell open while they tried to eat their be-
loved bananas; they went to sleep and died. Other monkeys
never bit by flies — but kept in the same cages, eating out of
the same dishes — those monkeys never showed a sign of the
disease. Here were experiments as clean, as pretty as the best
ones Theobald Smith Lad made. . . .
VII
But now for action! Whatever of the dreamer and labora-
tory experimenter there was in him — and there was much —
those creative parts of David Bruce went to sleep, or evapo-
rated out of him; he became the surgeon of Ladysmith
once more, and the rampageous shooter of lions and killer of
koodoos. ... To wipe out the sleeping sickness! That
seemed the most brilliantly simple job now. Not that there
weren’t countless thousands of blacks with trypanosomes in
their blood, and all these folks must die, of course; not that
there weren’t buzzing billions of tsetses singing their hellish
tune on the Lake shore — but here was the point: Those flies
lived only on the Lake shore! And if they had no more sleep-
ing-sickness blood to suck, then. . . . And Apolo Kagwa was
absolute Tsar of all Uganda . . . Apolo, Bruce knew, trusted
him, adored him. . . .
Now to wipe sleeping sickness from the earth!
To conference with Bruce once more came Apolo and the
Sekibobo and the lesser chiefs. Bruce told them the simple
logic of what was to be done.
TRAIL OF THE TSETSE
271
“Of course — that can be done,” said Apolo. He had seen
the map. He was convinced. He made a dignified wave of
the hand to his chiefs, and gave a few words of explanation.
So Bruce and Mrs. Bruce went back to England. Apolo gave
his order, and then the pitiful population of black men and
their families streamed inland out of the lake shore villages,
away — not to return for years, or ever — from those dear shady
places where they and the long line of their forefathers had
fished and played and bargained and begot their kind; canoes,
loaded with mats and earthen pots and pickaninnies set out
(not to return) from the thickly peopled island — and the weird
outlandish beating of the tom-toms no longer boomed across
the water.
“Not one of you,” commanded Apolo, “may live within
fifteen miles of the Lake shore — not one of you is to visit the
Lake again. Then the sleeping death will die out, for the fly
Kivu lives only by the water, and when you are gone she will
no longer have a single sick one from whom to suck the fatal
poison. When all of our people who are now sick have died,
you may go back — and it will be safe to live by the Lake shore
for always.”
Without a word — it is incredible to us law-abiding folks —
they obeyed their potentate.
The country around Lake Victoria Nyanza grew, in the
frantic way tropical green things grow, back into the primor-
dial jungle; crocodiles snoozed on the banks where big villages
had been. Hippopotami waddled onto the shore and sniffed
in the deserted huts. . . . The tribes of the lake, inland, were
happy, for no more of them came down with that fatal drowsi-
ness. So Bruce began to rid Africa of sleeping sickness.
It was a triumph — in a time of great victories in the fight of
men against death. The secret of the spread of malaria —
you will hear the not too savory story of it presently — had been
found in India and Italy. And as for yellow fever — it seemed
as if the yellow jack was to be put to sleep for good. Great
272
BRUCE
Eminences of the medical profession pointed in speeches amid
cheers to the deeds of medicine. . . . The British Empire rang
with hosannahs for David Bruce. He was promoted Colonel.
He was dubbed Knight Commander of the Bath. Lady Bruce?
Well, she was proud of him and stayed his assistant, obscurely.
And Bruce still paid, out of his miserable colonel’s salary, her
fare on those expeditions they were always making.
Africa looked safe for the black men, and open to the benev-
olent white men. But nature had other notions. She had
cards up her sleeve. She almost never lets herself be con-
quered at a swoop, Napoleonically — as Bruce and Apolo
(and who can blame them?) thought they had done. Nature
was not going to let her vast specimen cabinet be robbed so
easily of every last one of those pretty parasites, the trypano-
somes of sleeping sickness. A couple of years passed, and
suddenly the Kavirondo people, on the east shore of the Lake
where sleeping death had never been — these folks began to
go to sleep and not wake up. And there were disturbing re-
ports of hunters coming down with sleeping sickness, even in
those places that should have been safe, in the country from
which all human life had been moved away. The Royal So-
ciety sent out another Commission (Bruce was busy with that
affair of goat’s milk giving Malta fever) and one of these new
commissioners was a bright young microbe hunter, Tulloch.
He went on a picnic one day to a nice part of the shore whose
dark green was dotted with scarlet flowers. It must be safe
there now, they thought, but a tsetse buzzed, and in less than
a year Tulloch had drowsed into his last cold sleep. The Com-
mission went home. . . .
Bruce — you would think he would be looking by this time
for some swivel-chair button-pressing job — packed his kit-bag
and went back to Uganda, to see what he had left out of those
experiments that had looked so sure. He had gone off half-
cocked, with that Napoleonic plan of moving a nation, but
who can blame him? It had looked so simple, and how expect
TRAIL OF THE TSETSE 273
even the craftiest of the cheaters of Nature to find out, in a
year, every single nook where Nature hides the living poisons
to kill the presumptuous men who cheat herl Lady Bruce as
usual went with him, and they found new epidemics of sleep-
ing sickness flaring up in unwonted places. It was a miserable
discouraging business.
Bruce was a modest man, who had no foolish vanity to tell
him that his own theories were superior to brute facts. “My
plan has been a washout,” you can hear him grumbling. “Some-
where, aside from the human being, those tsetses must get the
trypanosomes — maybe it’s like the nagana — maybe they can
live in wild beasts’ blood too. . . .”
Now if Bruce had theories that were a little too simple he
was just the same an exceedingly crafty experimenter; if he
had a foolish faith in his experiments, he had the persistence
to claw his way out of the bogs of disappointment that his
simplicity and love of gorgeous deeds got him into. What a
stubborn man he was! For, when you think of the menagerie
of birds, beasts, fishes and reptiles Uganda is, you wonder why
he didn’t pack his bags and start back for England. But no.
Once more the canoe man paddled Bruce and his lady across to
that tangled shore, and they caught flies in places where for
three years no man had been. Strange experiments they made
in a heat to embarrass a salamander — one laborious complicated
record in his notes tells of two thousand, eight hundred and
seventy-six flies (which could never have bitten a human sleep-
ing-sickness patient) fed on five monkeys — and two of these
monkeys came down with the disease!
“The trypanosomes must be hiding in wild animals!” Bruce
cries. So they go to the dangerous Crocodile Point, and
catch wild pigs and African gray and purple herons; they
bleed sacred ibises and glossy ones; they stab and get blood
from plovers and kingfishers and cormorants — and even croco-
diles! Everywhere they look for those deadly, hiding, thou-
sandth-of-an-inch-long wigglers.
BRUCE
274
They caught tsetse flies on Crocodile Point. See the fan-
tastic picture of them there, gravely toiling at a job fit for a
hundred searchers to take ten years at. Bruce sits with his
wife on the sand in the middle of a ring of bare-backed pad-
dlers who squat round them. The tsetses buzz down onto the
paddlers’ backs. The fly-boys pounce on them, hand them to
Bruce, who snips off their heads, waves the buzzing devils away
from his own neck, determines the sex of each fly caught, dis-
sects out its intestine — and smears the blood in them on thin
glass slides. . . .
Washouts, most of these experiments; but one day, in the
blood of a native cow from the Island of Kome, not hurting
that cow at all, but ready to be sucked up by the tsetse for
stabbing under the skin of the first man it meets, Bruce found
the trypanosome of sleeping sickness. He sent out word, and
presently a lot of bulls and cows were driven up the hill to
Mpumu by order of Apolo Kagwa. Bruce, himself in the thick
of it, directed dusty fly-bi tings of these cattle — yes! there was
no doubt the sleeping-sickness virus could live in them. Then
there were scuffles in the hot pens with fresh-caught antelope;
they were thrown, they were tied, Bruce held dying monkeys
across their flanks, and let harmless tsetses, bred in the lab-
oratory, feed on the monkey and then on the buck. . . .
“The fly country around the Lake shore will have to be
cleared of antelope, too, as well as men — before the Kivu be-
come harmless,” Bruce said at last to Apolo.
And now the sleeping death really disappeared from the
shores of Lake Victoria Nyanza.
vra
The ten thousand smaller microbe hunters who work at
lesser jobs to-day, as well as the dozen towering ones whose
adventures this book tells, all of them have to take some risk
of death. But if the ten thousand smaller microbe hunters
of to-day could by some chemistry be changed into death-
TRAIL OF THE TSETSE
275
fighters like Bruce! There was something diabolical in the
risks he took, and something yet more devilish in the way he
could laugh — with a dry humor — and wish other microbe
hunters might have died to prove some of his own theories.
But he had a right to wish death for others
“Can young tsetse flies, bred in the laboratory, inherit the
sleeping-sickness trypanosome from their mothers? Surely
there was a chance of it (you remember that strange business
of Theobald Smith’s mother-ticks bequeathing the Texas
fever microbe to their children). But analogies are for philos-
ophers and lawyers. “Are artificially hatched young tsetses
dangerous?” asks Bruce. “No!” he can answer. “For two
members of the commission” [modestly he does not say which
two members] “allowed hundreds of tsetse flies, bred in the
laboratory, to bite them. And the result was negative.”
But no man knew what the result would be — before he tried.
And the deaths from sleeping sickness (according to the best
figures) are one hundred out of one hundred. . . .
How he enjoyed hearing of other men trying to kill them-
selves to find out! His last African foray was in 1911 — he
stayed until 1914. He was near sixty; his blacksmith’s
strength was beginning to crack from a nasty infection of his
air-tubes got from I know not what drenching rains or chills
of high tropic nights. But a new form of sleeping sickness —
terrible stuff that killed in a few months instead of years —
had just broken out in Nyassaland and Rhodesia. There was
a great scientific quarrel on. Was the trypanosome causing
this disease some new beast just out of the womb of Nature —
or was it nothing else than Bruce’s old parasite of nagana,
tired of butchering only cows, dogs and horses, and now learn-
ing to kill men?
Bruce went to work at it. A German in Portuguese East
Africa said: “This trypanosome is a new kind of bug! ” Bruce
retorted: “On the contrary, it is nothing but the nagana germ
hopping from cows to men.”
Then this German, his name was Taute, took the blood of ar
BRUCE
276
animal about to die from nagana, and shot five cubic centi-
meters of it — it held millions of trypanosomes — under his own
skin: to prove the nagana parasite does not kill men. And he
let scores of tsetse flies bite him, flies whose bellies and spit-
glands were crammed with the writhing microbes — he did these
things to prove his point!
Was Bruce shocked at this? Listen to him, then: “It is a
matter for some scientific regret that these experiments were
not successful — though we can ill spare our bold and some-
what rash colleague — for then the question would have been
answered. ... As it is, these negative experiments prove
nothing. It may be that only one man in a thousand would
become infected that way.”
Merciless Bruce! Poor Taute! He tried conscientiously to
kill himself — and Bruce says it is too bad he did not die. He
made the ultimate gesture — surely the God of searchers will
reward him; then Bruce (and he is right) criticizes the worth
of Taute’s lone desperate experiment!
Nyassaland was the last battlefield of Bruce against the
sleeping sickness, and it was his most hopeless one. For here
he found that the Glossina morsitans (that is the name of the
tsetse carrier of the sickness) does not make its home only on
the shores of lakes and rivers, but buzzes and bites from one
end of Nyassaland to the other; there is no way of running
away from it, no chance of moving nations out from under it
here. . . . Bruce stuck at it, he spent years at measurements
of the lengths of trypanosomes — monotonous enough this work
was to have driven a subway ticket chopper mad — he was
trying to find out whether the nagana and this new disease
were one and the same thing. He ended by not finding out,
and he finished with this regret: that it was at present impos-
sible to do the experiment to clinch the matter one way or the
other.
That experiment was the injection of the nagana trypano-
somes, not into one, or a hundred — but a thousand human be-
ings.
TRAIL OF THE TSETSE
277
IX
But there was grisly hope left in the old Viking. “At pres-
ent it is impossible/’ he said, while he believed that some-
where, somewhen, men may be found, in the mass, who will
be glad to die for truth. And as you will see, in a story of a
band of American buck-privates in another chapter, there are
beginnings of such spirit even now. But when great armies
of men so offer themselves, to fight death, just as they now de-
light to fight each other, it will be because they are led on by
captains such as David Bruce.
CHAPTER X
ROSS VS. GRASSI
MALARIA
I
The last ten years of the nineteenth century were as unfortu-
nate for ticks, bugs, and gnats as they were glorious for the
microbe hunters. Theobald Smith had started them off by
scotching the ticks that carried Texas fever; a little later and
six thousand miles away David Bruce, stumbling through the
African bush, got onto the trail of the tsetse fly, accused him,
convicted him. How melancholy and lean have been the
years, since then, for that murderous tick whose proper name
is Bo-ophilus bovis, and you may be sure that since those
searchings of David Bruce, the tsetses have had to bootleg for
the blood of black natives and white hunters, and missionaries.
And now alas for mosquitoes! Malaria must be wiped from
the earth. Malaria can be destroyed! Because, by the middle
of 1899, two wrangling and not too dignified microbe hunters
had proved that the mosquito — and only one particular kind
of mosquito — was the criminal in the malaria mystery.
Two men solved that puzzle. The one, Ronald Ross, was a
not particularly distinguished officer in the medical service of
India. The other, Battista Grassi, was a very distinguished
Italian authority on worms, white ants, and the doings of eels.
You cannot put one before the other in the order of their merit
— Ross would certainly have stopped short of solving the puz-
zle without Grassi. And Grassi might (though I am not so
sure of that!) have muddled for years if the searchings of
278
MALARIA
279
Ross had not given him hints. So there is no doubt they
helped each other, but unhappily for the Dignity of Science,
before the huzzahs of the rescued populations had died away,
Battista Grassi and Ronald Ross were in each other’s hair on
the question of who did how much. It was deplorable. To
listen to these two, you would think each would rather this
noble discovery had remained buried, than have the other get
a mite of credit for it. Indeed, the only consolation to be
got from this scientific brawl — aside from the saving of human
lives — is the knowledge that microbe hunters are men like
the rest of us, and not stuffed shirts or sacred cows, as certain
historians would have us believe. They sat there, Battista
Grassi and Ronald Ross, indignant co-workers in a glorious
job, in the midst of their triumph, with figurative torn collars
and metaphorica 1 scratched faces. Like two quarrelsome small
boys they sat there.
n
For the first thirty-five years of his life Ronald Ross tried
his best not to be a microbe hunter. He was born in the foot-
hills of the Himalayas in India, and knowing his father (if
you believe in eugenics) you might suspect that Ronald Ross
would do topsy-turvy things with his life. Father Ross was a
ferocious looking border-fighting English general with belliger-
ent side-whiskers, who was fond of battles but preferred to
paint landscapes. He shipped his son Ronald Ross back to
England before he was ten, and presently, before he was
twenty, Ronald was making a not too enthusiastic pass at
studying medicine, failing to pass his examinations because he
preferred composing music to the learning of Latin words and
the cultivation of the bedside manner. This was in the
eighteen-seventies, mind you, in the midst of the most spec-
tacular antics of Pasteur, but from the autobiography of
Ronald Ross, which is a strange mixture of cleverness and con-
tradiction, of frank abuse of himself and of high enthusiasm
280 ROSS VS. GRASSI
for himself, you can only conclude that this revolution in medi-
cine left Ronald Ross cold.
But he was, for all that, something of a chaser of moon-
beams, because, finding that his symphonies didn’t turn out to
be anything like those of Mozart, he tried literature, in the
grand manner. He neglected to write prescriptions while he
nursed his natural bent for epic drama. But publishers didn’t
care for these masterpieces, and when Ross printed them at
his own expense, the public failed to get excited about them.
Father Ross became indignant at this dabbling and threatened
to stop his allowance, so Ronald (he had spunk) got a job as
a ship’s doctor on the Anchor Line between London and New
York. On this vessel he observed the emotions and frailties
of human nature in the steerage, wrote poetry on the futility
of life, and got up his back medical work. Finally he passed
the examination for the Indian Medical Service, found the heat
of India detestable, but was glad there was little medical prac-
tice to attend to, because it left him time to compose now
totally forgotten epics and sagas and blood-and-thunder
romances. That was the beginning of the career of Ronald
Rossi
Not that there was no chance for him to hunt microbes in
India. Microbes? The very air was thick with them. The
water was a soup of them. All around him in Madras were
the stinking tanks breeding the Asiatic cholera; he saw men
die in thousands of the black plague; he heard their teeth rattle
with the ague of malaria, but he had no ears or eyes or nose
for all that — for now he forgot literature to become a mathe-
matician. He shut himself up inventing complicated equations.
He devised systems of the universe of a grandeur he thought
equal to Newton’s. He forgot about these to write another
novel. He took twenty-five-mile-a-day walking trips in spite of
the heat and then cursed India bitterly because it was so hot.
He was ordered off to Burma and to the Island of Moulmein,
and here he did remarkable surgical operations — “which cured
most of the cases” — though he had never presumed to be a
surgeon. He tried everything but impressed hardly anybody;
MALARIA
281
years passed, and, when the Indian Medical Service failed to
recognize his various abilities, Ronald Ross cried: “Why
work?”
He went back to England on his first furlough in 1888, and
there something happened to him, an event that is often an
antidote to cynicism and a regulator of confused multitudinous
ambitions. He met, he was smitten with, and presently he
married Miss Rosa Bloxam. Back in India — though he wrote
another novel called “Child of Ocean” and invented systems
of shorthand and devised phonetic spellings for the writing of
verse and was elected secretary of the Golf Club — he began
to fumble at his proper work. In short he began to turn a
microscope, with which he was no expert, on to the blood of
malarious Hindus. The bizarre, many-formed malaria mi-
crobe had been discovered long ago in 1880 by a French army
surgeon, Laveran, and Ronald Ross, who was as original as he
was energetic and never did anything the way anybody else
did it, tried to find this malaria germ by methods of his
own.
Of course, he failed again. He bribed, begged, and wheedled
drops of blood out of the fingers of hundreds of aguey East
Indians. He peered. He found nothing. “Laveran is cer-
tainly wrong! There is no germ of malaria!” said Ronald
Ross, and he wrote four papers trying to prove that malaria
was due to intestinal disturbances. That was his start in mi-
crobe hunting!
m
He went back to London in 1894, plotting to throw up medi-
cine and science. He was thirty-six. “Everything I had tried
had failed,” he wrote, but he consoled himself by imagining
himself a sad defiant lone wolf: “But my failure did not de-
press me ... it drove me aloft to peaks of solitude. . . .
Such a spirit was a selfish spirit but nevertheless a high one.
It desired nothing, it sought no praise ... it had no friends,
no fears, no loves, no hates.”
282
ROSS VS. GRASSI
But as you will see, Ronald Ross knew nothing of himself,
for when he got going at his proper work, there was never a
less calm and more desirous spirit than his. Nor a more en-
thusiastic one. And how he could hate!
When Ross returned to London he met Patrick Manson, an
eminent and mildly famous English doctor. Manson had got
himself medically notorious by discovering that mosquitoes can
suck worms out of the blood of Chinamen (he had practiced in
Shanghai); Manson had proved — this is remarkable! — that
these worms can even develop in the stomachs of mosquitoes.
Manson was obsessed by mosquitoes, he believed they were
among the peculiar creatures of God, he was convinced they
were important to the destinies of man, he was laughed at,
and the medical wiseacres of Harley Street called him a “path-
ological Jules Verne.” He was sneered at. And then he met
Ronald Ross — whom the world had sneered at. What a pair
of men these two were! Manson knew so little about mos-
quitoes that he believed they could only suck blood once in
their lives, and Ross talked vaguely about mosquitoes and
gnats not knowing that mosquitoes were gnats. And yet
Manson took Ross to his office, and there he set Ross right
about the malaria microbe of Laveran that Ross did not believe
in. He showed Ronald Ross the pale malaria parasites, pep-
pered with a blackish pigment. Together they watched these
germs, fished out of the blood of sailors just back from the equa-
tor, turn into little squads of spheres inside the red blood cells,
then burst out the blood cells. “That happens just when the
man has his chill,” explained Manson. Ross was amazed at
the mysterious transformations and cavortings of the malaria
germs in the blood. After those spheres had galloped out of
the corpuscles, they turned suddenly into crescent shapes, then
those crescents would shoot out two, three, four, sometimes six
long whips, which lashed and curled about and made the beast
look like a microscopic octopus.
“That, Ross, is the parasite of malaria — you never find it in
MALARIA 283
people without malaria — but the thing that bothers me is:
How does it get from one man to another?”
Of course that didn’t really bother Patrick Manson at all.
Every cell in that man’s brain had in it a picture of a mos-
quito or the memory of a mosquito or a speculation about a
mosquito. He was a mild man, not a terrific worker himself,
but intensely prejudiced on this subject of mosquitoes. And he
appreciated Ronald Ross’s energy of a dynamo, he knew
Ronald Ross adored him, and he remembered Ross was pres-
ently returning to India. So one day, as they walked along
Oxford Street, Patrick Manson took his jump: “Do you know,
Ross,” he said, “I have formed the theory that mosquitoes
carry malaria . . . ?” Ronald Ross did not sneer or laugh.
Then the old doctor from Shanghai poured his fantastic
theory over this young man whom he wanted to make his
hands: “The mosquitoes suck the blood of people sick with
malaria . . . the blood has those crescents in it . . . they
get into the mosquito’s stomach and shoot out those whips . . .
the whips shake themselves free and get into the mosquito’s
carcass. . . . The whips turn into some tough form like the
spore of an anthrax bacillus. . . . The mosquitoes die . . .
they fall into water . . . people drink a soup of dead mos-
quitoes. . . .”
This, mind you, was a story, a romance, a purely trumped-up
guess on the part of Patrick Manson. But it was a passionate
guess, and by this time you have learned, maybe, that one
guess, guessed enthusiastically enough — one guess in a billion
may lead to something in this strange game of microbe hunt-
ing. So this pair walked down Oxford Street. And Ross?
Well, he talked about gnats and mosquitoes and did not know
that mosquitoes were gnats. But Ross listened to Manson.
. . . Mosquitoes carry malaria? That was an ancient super-
stition — but here was Doctor Manson, thinking about nothing
else. Mosquitoes carry malaria? Well, Ross’s books had not
sold; his mathematics were ignored. . . . But here was a
a84 ROSS VS. GRASSI
chance, a gamble! If Ronald Ross could prove mosquitoes
were to blame for malarial Why, a third of all the people
in the hospitals in India were in bed with malaria. More
than a million a year died, directly or indirectly, because of
malaria, in India alone! But if mosquitoes were really to
blame — it would be easy! — malaria could be absolutely wiped
out. . . . And if he, Ronald Ross, were the man to prove
that!
“It is my duty to solve the problem,” Ross said. Fictioneer
that he was, he called it: “The Great Problem.” And he threw
himself at Manson’s feet. “I am only your hands — it is your
problem!” he assured the doctor from China.
“Before you go, you should find out something about mos-
quitoes,” advised Manson, who himself didn’t know whether
there were ten different kinds of mosquitoes, or ten thousand,
who thought mosquitoes could live only three days after they
had bitten. So Ross (who didn’t know mosquitoes were gnats)
looked all over London for books about mosquitoes — and
couldn’t find any. Too little of a scholar, then, to think of
looking in the library of the British Museum, Ross was sub-
limely ignorant, but maybe that was best, for he had nothing
to unlearn. Never has such a green searcher started on such a
complicated quest. . . .
He left his wife and children in England, and on the twenty-
eighth of March, 1895, he set sail for India, with Patrick Man-
son’s blessing, and full of his advice. Manson had outlined
experiments — but how did one go about doing an experiment?
But mosquitoes carry malaria! On with the mosquito hunt!
On the ship Ross pestered the passengers, begging them to let
him prick their fingers for a drop of blood. . . . He looked for
mosquitoes, but they were not among the discomforts of the
ship, so he dissected cockroaches — and he made an exciting
discovery of a new kind of microbe in an unfortunate flying
fish that had flopped on the deck. He was ordered to Secun-
derabad, a desolate military station that sat between hot little
lakes in a huge plain dotted with horrid heaps of rocks, and
here began to work with mosquitoes. He had to take care of
patients too, he was only a doctor and the Indian Government
— who can blame them? — would not for a moment recognize
Ronald Ross as an official authentic microbe hunter or mos-
quito expert. He was alone. Everybody was against him from
his colonel who thought him an insane upstart to the black-
skinned boys who feared him for a dangerous nuisance (he
was always wanting to prick their fingers!). The other doc-
tors! They did not even believe in the malaria parasite.
When they challenged him to show them the germs in the
patient’s blood, Ross went to the fray full of confidence, drag-
ging after him a miserable Hindu whose blood was rotten with
malaria microbes, but when the fatal test was made — curse it!
— that wretched Hindu suddenly felt fit as a fiddle. His mi-
crobes had departed from him. The doctors roared with
laughter. But Ronald Ross kept at it.
He started out to follow Manson’s orders. He captured
mosquitoes, any kind of mosquito, he couldn’t for the life of
him have told you what kind they were. He let the pests loose
under nets over beds on which lay naked and foolishly super-
stitious dark-skinned people of a caste so low that they had
no proper right to have emotions. The blood of these people
was charmingly full of malaria microbes. The mosquitoes
hummed under the nets — and wouldn’t bite. Curse it! They
could not be made to bite! “They are stubborn as mules,”
wrote Ross, in agony, to Patrick Manson. But he kept at it.
He cajoled the mosquitoes. He pestered the patients. He
put them in the hot sun “to bring their flavor out.” The mos-
quitoes kept on humming and remained sniffish. But, eureka!
At last he hit on the idea of pouring water over the nets, soak-
ing the nets — also the patients, but that was no matter — and
finally the mosquitoes got to work and sucked their fill of Hindu
blood. Ronald Ross caught them then, put them gingerly in
bottles, then day after day killed them and peeped into their
stomachs to see if those malaria microbes they had sucked in
with the blood might be growing. They didn’t grow!
286
ROSS VS. GRASSI
He bungled. He was like any tyro searcher — only his in-
nate hastiness made him worse — and he was constantly mak-
ing momentous discoveries that turned out not to be discoveries
at all. But his bunglings had fire in them. To read his letters
to Patrick Manson, you would think he had made himself
miraculously small and crawled under the lens into that blood
among the objects he was learning to spy upon. And what
was best, everything was a story to him, no, more than a story,
a melodrama. Manson had told him to watch those strange
whips that grew out of the crescent malaria germs and made
them look like octopuses. In vast excitement he wrote a long
letter to Manson, telling of a strange fight between a whip
that had shaken itself free, and a white blood cell — a phago-
cyte. He was a vivid man, was Ronald Ross. “He [Ross called
that whip “he”] kept poking the phagocyte in the ribs (!) in
different parts of his body, until the phagocyte finally turned
and ran off howling . . . the fight between the whip and the
phagocyte was wonderful. ... I shall write a novel on it in
the style of the ‘Three Musketeers.’ ” That was the way he
kept himself at it and got himself past the first ambushes and
disappointments of his ignorance and inexperience. He col-
lected malarious Hindus as a terrier collects rats. He loved
them if they were shot full of malaria, he detested them when
they got better. He gloried in the wretched Abdul Wahab, a
dreadful case. He pounced on Abdul and dragged him from
pillar to post. He put fleas on him. He tortured him with
mosquitoes. He failed. He kept at it. He wrote to Manson:
“Please send me advice. . . .” He missed important truths
that lay right under his nose — that yelled to be discovered.
But he was beginning to know just exactly what a malaria
parasite looked like — he could spot its weird black grains of
pigment, and tell them apart from all of the unknown tiny blobs
and bubbles and balloons that drifted before his eyes under
his lens. And the insides of the stomachs of mosquitoes? They
were becoming as familiar as the insides of his nasty hot
quarters 1
MALARIA
287
What an incredible pair of searchers they were! Away in
London Patrick Manson kept answering Ross’s tangled tor-
tured letters, felt his way and gathered hope from his mixed-up
accounts of unimportant experiments. “Let mosquitoes bite
people sick with malaria,” wrote Manson, “then put those mos-
quitoes in a bottle of water and let them lay eggs and hatch
out grubs. Then give that mosquito-water to people to
drink. . . .”
So Ross fed some of this malaria-mosquito soup to Lutch-
man, his servant, and almost danced with excitement as the
man’s temperature went up — but it was a false alarm, it wasn’t
malaria, worse luck. ... So dragged the dreary days, the
months, the years, feeding people mashed-up mosquitoes and
writing to Manson: “I have a sort of feeling it will succeed —
I feel a kind of religious excitement over it!” But it never
succeeded. But he kept at it. He intrigued to get to places
where he might find more malaria; he discovered strange new
mosquitoes and from their bellies he dredged up unheard-of
parasites — that had nothing to do with malaria. He tried
everything. He was illogical. He was anti-scientific. He was
like Edison combing the world to get proper stuff out of which
to make phonograph needles. “There is only one method of
solution,” he wrote, “that is, by incessant trial and exclusion.”
He wrote that, while the simple method lay right under his
hand, unfelt.
He wrote shrieking poems called “Wraths.” He was or-
dered to Bangalore to try to stop the cholera epidemic, and
didn’t stop it. He became passionate about the Indian author-
ities. “I wish I might rub their noses in the filth and disease
which they so impotently let fester in Hindustan,” Ronald
Ross cried. But who can blame him? It was hot there. “I
was now forty years old,” he wrote, “but, though I was well
known in India, both for my sanitary work at Bangalore and
for my researches on malaria I received no advancement at all
for my pains.”
288
ROSS VS. GRASSI
IV
So passed two years, until, in June of 1897 Ronald Ross
came back to Secunderabad, to the steamy hospital of Begum-
pett. The monsoon bringing its cool rain should have already
broken, but it had not. A hellish wind blew gritty clouds of
dust into the laboratory of Ronald Ross. He wanted to throw
his microscope out of the window. Its one remaining eyepiece
was cracked, and its metal work was rusted with his sweat.
There was the punka, the blessed punka, but he could not
start the punka going because it blew his dead mosquitoes
away, and in the evening when the choking wind had died, the
dust still hid the sun in a dreadful haze. Ronald Ross wrote:
What ails the solitude?
Is this the judgment day?
The sky is red as blood
The very rocks decay.
And that relieved him and released him, just as another man
might escape by whiskey or by playing bottle-pool, and on
the sixteenth of August he decided to begin his work all over,
to start, in short, where he had begun in 1895 — “only much
more thoroughly this time.” So he stripped his malaria patient
— it was the famous Husein Khan. Under the mosquito net
went Husein, for Ronald Ross had found a new kind of mos-
quito with which to plague this Husein Khan, and in his un-
scientific classification Ross called this mosquito, simply, a
brown mosquito. (For the purposes of historical accuracy,
and to be fair to Battista Grassi, I must state that it is not
clear where these brown mosquitoes came from. In the early
part of his report Ronald Ross says he raised them from the
grubs — but a moment later, speaking of a closely related mos-
quito, he says: “I have failed in finding their grubs also.”)
It is no wonder — though lamentable for the purposes of his-
tory — that Ronald Ross was mixed up, considering his lone-
wolf work and that hot wind and his perpetual failures! Any-
malaria
289
way, he took those brown mosquitoes (which may have bitten
other beasts, who knows) and loosed them out of their bottles
under the net. They sucked the blood of Husein Khan, at a
few cents per suck per mosquito, and then once more, one
day after another, Ross peeped at the stomachs of those in-
sects.
On the nineteenth of August he had only three of the brown
beasts left. He cut one of them up. Hopelessly he began to
look at the walls of its stomach, with its pretty, regular cells
arranged like stones in a paved road. Mechanically he peered
down the tube of his microscope, when suddenly something
queer forced itself up into the front of his attention.
What was this? In the midst of the even pavement of the
cells of the stomach wall lay a funny circular thing, about a
twenty-five-hundredth of an inch its diameter was — here was
another! But, curse it! It was hot — he stopped looking. . . .
The next day it was the same. Here, in the wall of the
stomach of the next to the last mosquito, four days after it had
sucked the blood of the unhappy malarious Husein Khan, here
were those same circular outlines — clear — much more distinct
than the outlines of the cells of the stom-
ach, and in each one of these circles was
“a cluster of small granules, black as jet!”
Here was another of those fantastic things,
and another — he counted twelve in all.
He yawned. It was hot. That black pigment looked a lot like
the black pigment inside of malaria microbes in the blood of
human bodies — but it was hot. Ross yawned, and went home
for a nap.
And as he awoke — so he says in his memoirs — a thought
struck him: “Those circles in the wall of the stomach of the
mosquito — those circles with their dots of black pigment, they
can’t be anything else than the malaria parasite, growing
there. . . . That black pigment is just like the specks of black
pigment in the microbes in the blood of Husein Khan. . . .
The longer I wait to kill my mosquitoes after they have sucked
290
ROSS VS. GRASSI
his blood, the bigger those circles should grow ... if they are
alive, they must grow!”
Ross fidgeted about — and how he could fidget! — waiting for
the next day, that would be the fifth day after his little flock
of mosquitoes had fed on Husein under the net. That was the
day for the cutting up of the last mosquito of the flock. Came
the twenty-first of August. “I killed my last mosquito,” Ronald
Ross wrote to Manson, “and rushed at his stomach!”
Yes! Here they were again, those circle cells, one . . . two
, . . six . . . twenty of them. . . . They were full of the
same jet-black dots. . . . Sure enough! They were bigger
than the circles in the mosquito of the day before. . . . They
were really growing! They must be the malaria parasites grow-
ing! (Though there was no absolutely necessary reason they
must be.) But they must be! Those circles with their black
dots in the bellies of three measly mosquitoes now kicked
Ronald Ross up to heights of exultation. He must write
verses!
I have found thy secret deeds
Oh, million-murdering death.
I know that this little thing
A million men will save —
Oh, death, where is thy sting?
Thy victory, oh, grave?”
At least that is what Ronald Ross, in those memoirs of
his, says he wrote on the night of the day of his first little
success. But to Manson, telling the finest details about the
circles with their jet-black dots, he only said:
“The hunt is up again. It may be a false scent, but it smells
promising.”
And in a scientific paper, sent off to England to the British
Medical Journal, Ronald Ross wrote gravely like any cool
searcher. He wrote admitting he had not taken pains to study
his brown mosquitoes carefully. He admitted the jet-black
MALARIA
291
dots might not be malaria parasites at all, but only pigment
coming from the blood in the mosquito’s gullet. There cer-
tainly was need for this caution, for he was not sure where his
brown mosquitoes came from: some of them might have
sneaked in through a hole in the net — and those intruders
might have bitten a bird or beast before they fed on his Hindu
patient. It was a most mixed-up business. But he could write
poems about saving the lives of a million men!
Such a man was Ronald Ross, mad poet shaking his fist in
the face of the malignant Indian sun, celebrating uncertain
discoveries with triumphant verses, spreading nets with maybe
no holes in them. . . . But you must give him this: he had
been lifted up. And, as you will see, it was to the everlasting
honor of Ronald Ross that he was exalted by this seemingly
so piffling experiment. He clawed his way — and this is one
of the major humors of human life! — with unskilled but en-
thusiastic fingers toward the uncovering of a murderous fact
and a complicated fact. A fact you would swear it would take
the sure intelligence of some god to uncover.
Then came one of those deplorable interludes. The High
Authorities of the Indian Medical Service failed to appreciate
him. They sent him off to active duty at doctoring, mere doc-
toring. Ronald Ross rained telegrams on his Principal Medical
Officer. He implored Manson way off there in England. In
vain. They packed him off up north, where there were few
mosquitoes, where the few he did catch would not bite — it was
so cold, where the natives (they were Bhils) were so supersti-
tious and savage they would not let him prick their fingers. All
he could do was fish trout and treat cases of itch. How he
raved!
v
But Patrick Manson did not fail him, and presently Ross
came down from the north, to Calcutta, to a good laboratory,
to assistants, to mosquitoes, to as many — for that city was a
292
ROSS VS. GRASSI
fin«» mala ria pest-hole 1 — Hindus with malaria, crescents in their
blood as any searcher could possibly want. He advertised for
helpers. An assorted lot of dark-skinned men came, and of
these he chose two. The first, Mahomed Bux, Ronald Ross
hired because he had the appearance of a scoundrel, and (said
Ross) scoundrels are much more likely to be intelligent. The
second assistant Ross chose was Purboona. All we know of
that man is that he had the booming name of Purboona, and
Purboona lost his chance to become immortal because he
vamoosed after his first pay day.
So Ross and Mr. Mahomed Bux set to work to try to find
once more the black-dotted circles in the stomachs of mos-
quitoes. Mr. Mahomed Bux sleuth-footed it about, among the
sewers, the drains, the stinking tanks of Calcutta, catching
gray mosquitoes and brindled mosquitoes and brown and green
dappled-winged ones. They tried all kinds of mosquitoes
(within the limits of Ronald Ross’s feeble knowledge of the
existing kinds). And Mr. Mahomed Bux? He was a howling
success. The mosquitoes seemed to like him, they would bite
Hindus for this wizard of a Mahomed when Ross could not
make them bite at all — Mahomed whispered things to his mos-
quitoes. . . . And a rascal? No. Mr. Mahomed Bux had
just one little weakness — he faithfully got thoroughly drunk
once a week on Ganja. But the experiments? They turned
out as miserably as Mahomed turned out beautifully, and it
was easy for Ross to wonder whether the heat was causing him
to see things last year at Begumpett.
Then the God of Gropers came to help Ronald Ross. Birds
have malaria. The malaria microbe of birds looks very like
the malaria microbe of men. Why not try birds?
So Mr. Mahomed Bux went forth once more and cunningly
snared live sparrows and larks and crows. They put them in
cages, on beds, with mosquito bar over the cages, and
Mahomed slept, with one eye open, on the floor between the
beds to keep away the cats.
On St. Patrick’s day of the year 1898, Ronald Ross let loose
MALARIA
*93
ten gray mosquitoes into a cage containing three larks, and
the blood of those larks teemed with the germs of malaria.
The ten mosquitoes bit those larks, and filled themselves with
lark’s blood.
Three days later Ronald Ross could shout: “The microbe
of the malaria of birds grows in the wall of the stomach of the
gray mosquito— just as the human microbe grew in the wall of
the stomach of the brown spot-winged mosquito.”
Then he wrote to Patrick Manson. This lunatic Ross be-
came for a moment himself a malaria microbe! That night
he wrote these strange words to Patrick Manson:
“I find that I exist constantly in three out of four mosquitoes
fed on bird-malaria parasites, and that I increase regularly in
size from about a seven-thousandth of an inch after about
thirty hours to about one seven-hundredth of an inch after
about eighty-five hours. ... I find myself in large numbers
in about one out of two mosquitoes fed on two crows with
blood parasites. . . .”
He thought he was himself a circle with those jet-black
dots. . . .
“What an ass I have been not to follow your advice before
and work with birds!” Ross wrote to Manson. Heaven knows
what Ronald Ross would have discovered without that per-
sistent Patrick Manson.
You would think that such a man as Ross, wild as the mad-
dest of hatters, topsy-turvy as the dream of a hasheesh-eater,
you would swear, I say, that he could do no accurate experi-
ments. Wrong! For presently he was up to his ears in an
experiment Pasteur would have been proud to do.
Mr. Mahomed Bux brought in three sparrows, and one of
these sparrows was perfectly healthy, with no malaria microbes
in its blood; the second had a few; but the third sparrow was
very sick — his blood swarmed with the black-dotted germs.
Ross took these three birds and put each one in a separate
cage, mosquito-proof. Then the artful Mahomed took a brood
of she-mosquitoes, clean, raised from the grubs, free of all
*94
ROSS VS. GRASSI
suspicion of malaria. He divided this flock up into three little
flocks, he whispered Hindustani words of encouragement to
them. Into each cage, with its sparrow, he let loose a flock of
these mosquitoes.
Marvelous 1 Not a mosquito who sucked the blood of the
healthy sparrow showed those dotted circles in her stomach.
The insects who had bitten the mildly sick bird had a few.
And Ronald Ross, peeping through his lens at the stomachs
of the mosquitoes who had bitten the very sick sparrow —
found their gullets fairly polka-dotted with the jet-black pig-
mented circles!
Day after day Ross killed and cut up one after another of
the last set of mosquitoes. Day after day, he watched those
circles swelling, growing — there was no doubt about it now;
they began to look like warts sticking out of the wall of the
stomach. And he watched weird things happening in those
warts. Little bright colored grains multiplied in them, “like
bullets in a bag.” Were these young malaria microbes? Then
where did they go from here? How did they get into new
healthy birds? Did they, indeed, get from mosquitoes into
other birds?
Excitedly Ronald Ross wrote to Patrick Manson: “Well,
the theory is proved, the mosquito theory is a fact.” Which
of course it wasn’t, but that was the way Ronald Ross en-
couraged himself. There was another regrettable interlude,
in which the unseen hand of his incurable restless dissatisfac-
tion took him by the throat, and dragged him away up north
to Darjeeling, to the hills that make giant’s steps up to the
white Himalayas, but of this interlude we shall not speak, for
it was lamentable, this restlessness of Ronald Ross, with the
final simple experiment fairly yelling to be done. . . .
But by the beginning of June he was back at his birds in
Calcutta — it was more than ioo degrees in his laboratory—
and he was asking: “Where do the malaria microbes go from
the circles that grow into those big warts in the stomach wall
of the mosquito?”
MALARIA
295
They went, those microbes, to the spit-gland of those mos-
quitoes!
Squinting through his lens at a wart on the wall of the
stomach of a she-mosquito, seven days after she had made a
meal from the blood of a malarious bird, Ronald Ross saw that
wart burst open! He saw a great regiment of weird spindle-
shaped threads march out of that wart. He watched them
swarm through the whole body of that she-mosquito. He
pawed around in countless she-mosquitoes who had fed on
malarious birds. He watched other circles grow into warts,
get ripe, burst, shoot out those spindles. He pried through
his lens at the “million things that go to make up a mosquito”
— he hadn’t the faintest notion what to call most of them —
until one day, strangest of acts of malignant nature, he saw
those regiments of spindle-threads, which had teemed in the
body of the mosquito, march to her spit-gland.
In that spit-gland, feebly, lazily moving in it, but swarming
in such myriads that they made it quiver, almost, under his
lens, were those regiments and armies of spindle-shaped
threads, hopeful valiant young microbes of malaria, ready to
march up the tube to the mosquito’s stinger. . . .
“It’s by the bite mosquitoes carry malaria then,” Ross
whispered — he whispered it because that was contrary to the
theory of his scientific father, Patrick Manson. “It is all non-
sense that birds — or people either — get malaria by drinking
dead mosquitoes, or by inhaling the dust of mosquitoes. . . .”
Ronald Ross had always been loyal to Patrick Manson. But
now! Never has there been a finer instance of wrong theories
leading a microbe hunter to unsuspected facts. But now!
Ronald Ross needed no help. He was a searcher.
“It’s by the bite!” shouted Ronald Ross, so, on the twenty-
fifth day of June in 1898, Mr. Mahomed Bux brought in three
perfectly healthy sparrows — fine sparrows with not a single
microbe of malaria in their blood. That night, and night after
night after that night, with Ronald Ross watching, Mr. Ma-
homed Bux let into the cage with those healthy sparrows a
ROSS VS. GRASSI
296
flock of poisonous she-mosquitoes who had fed on sick
birds. . . . And Ronald Ross, fidgety as a father waiting news
of his first-born child, biting his mustache, sweating, and
sweating more yet because he used up so much of himself
cursing at his sweat — Ross watched those messengers of death
bite the healthy sparrows. . . .
On the ninth of July Ross wrote to Patrick Manson: “All
three birds, perfectly healthy before, are now simply swarm-
ing with proteosoma.” (Proteosoma are the malarial parasites
of birds.)
Now Ronald Ross did anything but live remotely on his
mountain top. He wrote this to Manson, he wired it to Man-
son, he wrote it to Paris to old Alphonse Laveran, the discoverer
of the malaria microbe; he sent papers to one scientific journal
and two medical journals about it; he told everybody in Cal-
cutta about it; he bragged about it — in short, this Ronald Ross
was like a boy who had just made his first kite finding that the
kite could really fly. He went wild — and then (it is too badl)
he collapsed. Patrick Manson went to Edinburgh and told the
doctors of the great medical congress about the miracle of the
sojourn and the growing and the meanderings of the malaria mi-
crobes in the bodies of gray she-mosquitoes: he described how
his protege, Ronald Ross, alone, obscure, laughed at, but
tenacious, had tracked the germ of malaria from the blood of
a bird through the belly and body of she-mosquitoes to their
dangerous position in her stinger, ready to be shot into the next
bird she bit.
The learned doctors gaped. Then Patrick Manson read
out a telegram from Ronald Ross. It was the final proof: the
bite of a malarial mosquito had given a healthy bird malaria!
The congress — this is the custom of congresses — permitted it-
self a dignified furore, and passed a resolution congratulating
this unknown Major Ronald Ross on his “Great and Epoch-
Making Discovery.” The congress — it is the habit of con-
gresses — believed that what is true for birds goes for men too.
The congress — men in the mass are ever uncritical — though’
MALARIA
297
that this meant malaria would be wiped out from to-morrow
on and forever — for what is simpler than to kill mosquitoes?
So that congress permitted itself a furore.
But Patrick Manson was not so sure: “One can object that
the facts determined for birds do not hold, necessarily, for
men.” He was right. There was the rub. This was what
Ronald Ross seemed to forget: that nature is everlastingly
full of surprises and annoying exceptions, and if there are laws
and rules for the movements of the planets, there may be ab-
solutely no apparent rime and less reason for the meanderings
of the microbes of malaria. . . . Searchers, the best of them,
still do no more than scratch the surface of the most amazing
mysteries, all they can do (yet!) to find truth about microbes
is to hunt, hunt endlessly. . . . There are no laws!
So Patrick Manson was stern with Ronald Ross. This nerv-
ous man, feeling he could stand this cursed India not one mo-
ment longer, must stand it months longer, years longer! He
had made a brilliant beginning, but only a beginning. He
must keep on, if not for science, or for himself, then for Eng-
land! For England! And in October Manson wrote him: “I
hear Koch has failed with the mosquito in Italy, so you have
time to grab the discovery for England.”
But Ronald Ross — alas — could not grab that discovery of
human malaria, not for science, nor humanity, nor for Eng-
land — nor (what was worst) for himself. He had come to the
end of his rope. And among all microbe hunters, there is for
me no more tortured man than this same Ronald Ross. There
have been searchers who have failed — they have kept on hunt-
ing with the naturalness of ducks swimming; there have been
searchers who have succeeded gloriously — but they were
hunters born, and they kept on hunting in spite of the seduc-
tions of glory. But Ross! Here was a man who could only
do patient experiments — with a tragic impatience, in agony,
against the clamoring of his instincts that yelled against the
priceless loneliness that is the one condition for all true search-
ing. He had visions of himself at the head of important com-
ROSS VS. GRASSI
298
mittees, and you can feel his dreams of medals and banquets
and the hosannahs of multitudes. . . .
He must grab the discovery for England. He tried gray
mosquitoes and green and brown and dappled-winged mos-
quitoes on Hindus rotten with malaria — but it was no go!
He became sleepless and lost eleven pounds. He forgot things.
He could not repeat even those first crude experiments at
Secunderababad.
And yet — all honor to Ronald Ross. He did marvelous
things in spite of himself. It was his travail that helped the
learned, the expert, the indignant Battista Grassi to do those
clean superb experiments that must end in wiping malaria from
the earth.
VI
You might know Giovanni Battista Grassi would be the man
to do what Ronald Ross had not quite succeeded in bringing
off. He had been educated for a doctor, at Pavia where that
glittering Spallanzani had held forth amid applause a hundred
years before. Grassi had been educated for a doctor (Heaven
knows why) because he had no sooner got his license than he
set himself up in business as a searcher in zoology. With a
certain amount of sniffishness he always insisted: “I am a zo-
ologo — not a medico!” Deliberate as a glacier, precise as a
ship’s chronometer, he started finding answers to the puzzles
of nature. Correct answers! His works were pronounced
classics right after he published them — but it was his habit
not to publish them for years after he started to do them. He
made known the secret comings and goings of the Society of
the White Ants — not only this, but he discovered microbes that
plagued and preyed upon these white ants. He knew more
than any man in the world about eels — and you may believe
it took a searcher with the insight of a Spallanzani to trace out
the weird and romantic changes that eels undergo to fulfill
their destiny as eels. Grassi was not strong. He had abomi-
MALARIA
299
nable eyesight. He was full of an argumentative petulance.
He was a contradictory combination of a man too modest to
want his picture in the papers but bawling at the same time for
the last jot and tittle of credit for everything that he did. And
he did everything. Already, when he was only twenty-nine, be-
fore Ross had dreamt of becoming a searcher, Battista Grass!
was a professor, and had published his famous monograph
upon the Chaetognatha (I do not know what they are!).
Before Ronald Ross knew that anybody had ever thought of
mosquitoes carrying malaria, Grassi had had the idea, had
taken a whirl at experiments on it, but had used the wrong
mosquito, and failed. But that failure started ideas stewing
in his head while he worked at other things — and how he
worked! Grassi detested people who didn’t work. “Man-
kind,” he said, “is composed of those who work, those who pre-
tend to work, and those who do neither.” He was ready to ad-
mit that he belonged in the first class, and it is entirely cer-
tain that he did belong there.
In 1898, the year of the triumph of Ronald Ross, Grassi,
knowing nothing of Ross, never having heard of Ross, went
back at malaria again. “Malaria is the worst problem Italy
has to face! It desolates our richest farms! It attacks mil-
lions in our lush lowlands! Why don’t you solve that prob-
lem?” So the politicians, to Battista Grassi. Then too, the
air was full of whispers of the possibility that I don’t know
how many different diseases might be carried from man to
man by insects. There was that famous work of Theobald
Smith, and Grassi had an immense respect for Theobald Smith.
But what probably finally set Grassi working at malaria —
you must remember he was a very patriotic and jealous man
— was the arrival of Robert Koch. Dean of the microbe
hunters of the world, Tsar of Science (his crown was only a
little battered) Koch had come to Italy to prove that mosqui-
toes carry malaria from man to man.
Koch was an extremely grumpy, quiet, and restless man
now; sad because of the affair of his consumption cure (which
300
ROSS VS. GRASSI
had killed a considerable number of people) ; restless after the
scandal of his divorce from Emmy Fraatz. So Koch went
from one end of the world to the other, offering to conquer
plagues but not quite succeeding, trying to find happiness and
not quite reaching it. His touch faltered a little. . . . And
now Koch met Battista Grassi, and Grassi said to Robert
Koch:
“There are places in Italy where mosquitoes are absolutely
pestiferous — but there is no malaria at all in those places! ”
“Well— what of it?”
“Right off, that would make you think mosquitoes had
nothing to do with malaria,” said Battista Grassi.
“So?”. . . Koch was enough to throw cold water on any
logic!
“Yes — but here is the point,” persisted Grassi, “I have not
found a single place where there is malaria — where there aren’t
mosquitoes too!”
“What of that?”
“This of that!” shouted Battista Grassi. “Either malaria
Is carried by one special particular blood-sucking mosquito,
out of the twenty or forty kinds of mosquitoes in Italy — or it
isn’t carried by mosquitoes at all!”
“Hrrrm-p,” said Koch.
So Grassi made no hit with Robert Koch, and so Koch and
Grassi went their two ways, Grassi muttering to himself:
“Mosquitoes — without malaria . . . but never malaria — with-
out mosquitoes! That means one special kind of mosquito!
I must discover the suspect. . .
That was the homely reasoning of Battista Grassi. He com-
pared himself to a village policeman trying to discover the
criminal in a village murder. “You wouldn’t examine the whole
population of a thousand people one by one!” muttered Grassi.
“You would try to locate the suspicious rogues first. . . .”
His lectures for the year 1898 at the University of Rome
over, he was a conscientious man who always gave more lec-
tures than the law demanded, he needed a rest, and on the
MALARIA
301
of July he took it. Armed with sundry fat test-tubes and a
notebook, he sallied out from Rome to those low hot places
and marshy desolations where no man but an idiot would go
for a vacation. Unlike Ross, this Grassi was a mosquito ex-
pert besides everything else that he was. His eyes — so red-
rimmed and weak — were exceedingly sharp at spotting every
difference between the thirty-odd different kinds of mosquitoes
that he met. He went around with the fat test-tube in his
hand, his ear cocked for buzzes. The buzz dies away as the
mosquito lights. She has lit in an impossible place. Or she
has lit in a disgusting place. No matter, Battista Grassi is up
behind her, pounces on her, claps his fat test-tube over her,
puts a grubby thumb over the mouth of the test-tube, paws
over his prize and pulls her apart, scrawls little cramped pot-
hooks in his notebook. That was Battista Grassi, up and
down and around the nastiest places in Italy all that summer.
So it was he cleared a dozen or twenty different mosquitoes
of the suspicion of the crime of malaria — he was always finding
these beasts in places where there was no malaria. He ruled
out two dozen different kinds of gray mosquitoes and brindled
mosquitoes, that he found anywhere — in saloons and bedrooms
and the sacristies of cathedrals, biting babies and nuns and
drunkards. “You are innocent!” shouted Battista Grassi at
these mosquitoes. “For where you are none of these nuns or
babies or drunkards suffers from malaria! ”
You will grant this was a most outlandish microbe hunting
of Grassi’s. He went around making a nuisance of himself.
He insinuated himself into the already sufficiently annoyed
families of those hot malarious towns. He snooped annoyingly
into the affairs of these annoyed families: “Is there malaria in
your house? . . . Has there ever been malaria in your house?
. . . How many have never had malaria in your house . . .
how many mosquito bites did your sick baby have last
week? . . . What kind of mosquitoes bit him?” He was ut-
terly without a sense of humor. And he was annoying.
“No,” the indignant head of the house might tell him, “we
302
ROSS VS GRASSI
suffer from malaria — but we are not bothered by mosquitoes!”
Battista Grassi would never take his word for that. He snouted
into pails and old crocks in the back yards. He peered beneath
tables and behind sacred images and under beds. He even dis-
covered mosquitoes hiding in shoes under those beds. . . .
So it was — it is most fantastical — that Battista Grassi went
more than two-thirds of the way to solving this puzzle of how
malaria gets from sick men to healthy ones before he had ever
made a single experiment in his laboratory! For, everywhere
where there was malaria, there were mosquitoes. And such
mosquitoes! They were certainly a very special definite sort
of blood-sucking mosquito Grassi found.
“Zan-za-ro-ne, we call that kind of mosquito,” the house-
holders told him.
Always, where the “zan-za-ro-ne” buzzed, there Grassi found
deep flushed faces on rumpled beds, or faces with chattering
teeth going towards those beds. Always where that special and
definite mosquito sang at twilight, Grassi found fields waiting
for some one to till them, and from the houses of the little vil-
lages that sat in these fields, he saw processions emerging, and
long black boxes. . . .
There was no mistaking this mosquito, zanzarone, once you
had spotted her; she was a frivolous gnat that flew up from the
marshes towards the lights of the towns; she was an elegant
mosquito proud of four dark spots on her light brown wings;
she was not a too dignified insect who sat in an odd way with
the tail-end of her body sticking up in the air [that was one
way he could spot her, for the Culex mosquitoes drooped their
tails] ; she was a brave blood-sucker who thought: “The bigger
they are the more blood I get out of them!” So zanzarone
preferred horses to men and men to rabbits. That was zanza-
rone, and the naturalists had given her the name Anopheles
claviger many years before. Anopheles clavigert This be-
came the slogan of Battista Grassi. You can see him, shuf-
fling along behind lovers in the dusk, making fists of his fingers
to keep himself from pouncing on the zanzarone who made
MALARIA
303
meals off their regardless necks. . . . You can see this Grassi,
sitting in a stagecoach with no springs, oblivious to bumps,
deaf to the chatter of his fellow-passengers, with absent eyes
counting the Anopheles claviger he had discovered — with de-
light — riding on the ceiling of the wagon in which he journeyed
from one utterly terrible little malarious village to another still
more cursed.
“I’ll try them on myself!” Grassi cried. He went up north
to his home in Rovellasca. He taught boys how to spot the
anopheles mosquito. The boys brought boxes full of these she-
zanzarone from towns where malaria rages. Grassi took these
boxes to his bedroom, put on his night shirt, opened the boxes,
crawled into bed — but curse it! not one of the zanzarone bit
him. Instead they flew out of his room and bit Grassi’s
mother, “fortunately without ill effect 1”
Then Grassi went back to Rome to his lectures, and on Sep-
tember 28th of 1898, before ever he had done a single serious
experiment, he read his paper before the famous and ancient
Academy of the Lincei: “It is the anopheles mosquito that
carries malaria if any mosquito carries malaria . . .” And
he told them he was suspicious of two other brands of mos-
quitoes — but that was absolutely all, out of the thirty or forty
different tribes that infected the low places of Italy.
Then came an exciting autumn for Battista Grassi and an
entertaining autumn for the wits of Rome, and a most im-
portant autumn for mankind. Besides all that it was a most
itchy autumn for Mr. Sola, who for six years had been a patient
304 ROSS VS. GRASSI
of Dr. BastianeUi in the Hospital of the Holy Spirit, high up
on the top floor of this hospital that sat on a high hill of Rome.
Here zanzarone never came. Here nobody ever got malaria.
Here was the place for experiments. And here was Mr. Sola,
who had never had malaria, every twist and turn of whose
health Dr. BastianeUi knew, who told Battista Grassi that he
would not mind being shut up with three different brands of
hungry she-mosquitoes every night for a month.
Grassi and Bignami and BastianeUi started off, strangely
enough, with those two minor mosquito suspects — those two
culexes that Grassi had discovered always hanging around
malarious places along with the zanzarone. . . . They tortured
Mr. Sola each night with hundreds of these mosquitoes. They
shut poor Mr. Sola up in that room with those devils and turned
off the light. , . .
Nothing happened. Sola was a tough man. Sola showed not
a sign of malaria.
(It is not clear why Grassi did not start off by loosing his
zanzarone at this Mr. Sola.)
Maybe it was because Robert Koch had laughed publicly
at this idea of the zanzarone — Grassi does admit that discour-
aged him.
But, one fine morning, Grassi hurried out of Rome to Mo-
letta and came back with a couple of little bottles in which
buzzed ten fine female anopheles mosquitoes. That night Mr.
Sola had a particularly itchy time of it. Ten days later this
stoical old gentleman shook horribly with a chill, his body tem-
perature shot up into a high fever — and his blood swarmed
with the microbes of malaria.
“The rest of the history of Sola’s case has no interest for us,”
wrote Grassi, “but it is now certain that mosquitoes can carry
malaria, to a place where there are no mosquitoes in nature, to
a place where no case of malaria has ever occurred, to a man
who has never had malaria — Mr. Sola!”
Over the country went Grassi once more, chasing zanzarone,
hoarding zanzarone: in his laboratory he tenderly raised zan-
MALARIA
303
zarone on winter-melons and sugar-water; and in the top of
the hospital of the Holy Spirit, in those high mosquito-proof
rooms, Grassi and Bastianelli (to say nothing of another as-
sistant, Bignami) loosed zanzarone into the bedrooms of peo-
ple who had never had malaria — and so gave them malaria.
It was an itchy autumn and an exciting one. The news-
papers became sarcastic and hinted that the blood of these
poor human experimental animals would be on the heads of
these three conspirators. But Grassi said: to the devil with
the newspapers, he cheered when his human animals got sick,
he gave them doses of quinine as soon as he was sure his zan-
zarone had given them malaria, and then “their histories had
no further interest for him.”
By now Grassi had read of those experiments of Ronald
Ross with birds. “Pretty crude stuff!” thought this expert
Grassi, but when he came to look for those strange doings of
the circles and warts and spindle-shaped threads in the stom-
achs and saliva-glands of his she-anopheles, he found that
Ronald Ross was exactly right! The microbe of human
malaria in the body of his zanzarone did exactly the same
thin gs the microbe of bird malaria had done in the bodies of
those mosquitoes Ronald Ross hadn’t known the names of.
Grassi didn’t waste too much time praising Ronald Ross, who,
Heaven knows, deserved praise, needed praise, and above all
wanted praise. Not Grassi!
“By following my own way I have discovered that a special
mosquito carried human malaria!” he cried, and then he set
out — “It is with great regret I do this,” he explained — to de-
molish Robert Koch. Koch had been fumbling and muddling.
Koch thought malaria went from man to man just as Texas
fever traveled from cow to cow. Koch believed baby mos-
quitoes inherited malaria from their mothers, bit people, and
so infected them. And Koch had sniffed at the zanzarone.
So Grassi raised baby zanzarone. He let them hatch out in
a room, and every evening in this room, for four months, sat
this Battista Grassi with six or seven of his friends. What
3o6 ROSS VS. GRASSI
friends he must have had! For every evening they sat there
in the dusk, barelegged with their trousers rolled up to their
knees, bare-armed with their shirt sleeves rolled up to their
elbows. Some of these friends, whom the anopheles relished
particularly, were stabbed every night fifty or sixty times I So
Grassi demolished Robert Koch, and so he proved his point,
because, though the baby anopheles were children of mother
mosquitoes who came from the most pestiferous malaria holes
in Italy, not one of Grassi’s friends had a sign of malarial
“It is not the mosquito’s children, but only the mosquito
who herself bites a malaria sufferer— it is only that mosquito
who can give malaria to healthy people!” cried Grassi.
Grassi was as persistent as Ronald Ross had been erratic.
He plugged up every little hole in his theory that anopheles is
the one special and particular mosquito to bring malaria to
men. By a hundred air-tight experiments he proved the
malaria of birds could not be carried by the mosquitoes who
brought it to men and that the malaria of men could never be
strewn abroad by the mosquitoes who brought it to birds.
Nothing was too much trouble for this Battista Grassi! He
knew as much about the habits and customs and traditions of
those zanzarone as if he himself were a mosquito and the king
and ruler of mosquitoes. . . .
vn
What is more, Battista Grassi was a practical man, and as I
have said, an excessively patriotic man. He wanted to see his
discovery do well by Italy, for he loved his Italy faithfully and
violently. His experiments were no sooner finished, the last
good strong nail was no sooner driven into the house of his
case against the anopheles, than he began telling people, and
writing in newspapers, and preaching — you might almost say
he went about, bellowing till he bored everybody:
“Keep away the zanzarone and in a few years Italy will be
free from malaria)”
MALARIA
3oy
He became a fanatic on the best ways to kill anopheles: he
was indignant (that man had no sense of humor!) because
townspeople insisted on strolling through their streets in the
dusk. “How can you be so foolish as to walk in the twilight?”
Grassi asked them. “That is the very time when the malaria
mosquito is waiting for you.”
He was the very type of the silly sanitarian. “Don’t go out
in the warm evenings,” he told every one, “unless you wear
heavy cotton gloves and veils ! ” (Imagine young Italians mak-
ing love in heavy cotton gloves and veils.) So there was a good
deal of sniggering at this professor who had become a violent
missionary against the zanzarone.
But Battista Grassi was a practical man ! “One family, stay-
ing free from the tortures of malaria — that would be worth ten
years of preaching — I’ll have to show them!” he muttered.
So, in 1900, after his grinding experiments of 1898 and ’99,
this tough man set out to “show them.” He went down into the
worst malaria region of Italy, along the railroad line that ran
through the plain of Capaccio. It was high summer. It was
deadly summer there, and every summer the poor wretches of
railroad workers, miserable farmers whose blood was gutted
by the malaria poison, would leave that plain, at the cost of
their jobs, at the cost of food, at the risk of starvation — to the
hills to flee the malaria. And every summer from the swamps
at twilight swarmed the malignant hosts of female zanzarone;
at each hot dusk they made their meals and did their murders,
and in the night, bellies full of blood, they sang back to their
marshes, to marry and lay eggs and hatch out thousands more
of their kind.
In the summer of 1900 Battista Grassi went to the plain of
Capaccio. The hot days were just beginning, the anopheles
were on the march. In the windows and on the doors of ten lit-
tle houses of station-masters and employees of the railroad
Grassi put up wire screens, so fine-meshed and so perfect that
the slickest and the slightest of the zanzarone could not slip
through them. Then Grassi, armed with authority from the
3 o8 ROSS VS. GRASSI
officials of the railroad, supplied with money by the Queen of
Italy, became a task-master, a Pharaoh with lashes. One hun-
dred and twelve souls — railroad men and their families — be-
came the experimental animals of Battista Grassi and had to
be careful to do as he told them. They had to stay indoors in.
the beautiful but dangerous twilight. Careless of death — es
pecially unseen death— as all healthy human beings are care-
less, these one hundred and twelve Italians had to take pre-
cautions, to avoid the stabs of mosquitoes. Grassi had the
devil of a time with them. Grassi scolded them. Grassi kept
them inside those screens by giving them prizes of money.
Grassi set them an indignant example by coming down to Al-
banella, most deadly place of all, and sleeping two nights a
week behind those screens.
All around those screen-protected station houses the zanza-
rone swarmed in humming thousands — it was a frightful year
for mosquitoes. Into the unscreened neighboring station
houses (there were four hundred and fifteen wretches living in
those houses), the zanzarone swooped and sought their prey.
Almost to a man, woman, and child, those four hundred and
fifteen men, women and children fell sick with the malaria.
And of those one hundred and twelve prisoners behind the
screens at night? They were rained on during the day, they
breathed that air that for a thousand years the wisest men were
sure was the cause of malaria, they fell asleep at twilight, they
did all of the things the most eminent physicians had always
said it was dangerous to do, but in the dangerous evenings they
stayed behind screens — and only five of them got the malaria
during all that summer. Mild cases these were, too, maybe only
relapses from the year before, said Grassi.
“In the so-much-feared station of Albanella, from which for
years so many coffins had been carried, one could live as health-
fly as in the healthiest spot in Italy! ” cried Grassi.
MALARIA
309
vra
Such was the fight of Ronald Ross and Battista Grass!
against the assassins of the red blood corpuscles, the sappers of
vigorous life, the destroyer of men, the chief scourge of the
lands of the South — the microbe of malaria. There were after-
maths of this fight, some of them too long to tell, and some too
painful. There were good aftermaths and bad ones. There
are fertile fields now, and healthy babies, in Italy and Africa
and India and America, where once the hum of the anopheles
brought thin blood and chattering teeth, brought desolate land
and death.
There is the Panama Canal. . . .
Then there is Sir Ronald Ross, who was — as once he hoped
and dreamed — given enthusiastic banquets.
There is Ronald Ross who got the Nobel Prize of seven thou-
sand eight hundred and eighty pounds sterling for his discovery
of how the gray mosquito carries malaria to birds. . . .
There is Battista Grassi who didn’t get the Nobel Prize, and
is now unknown, except in Italy, where they huzzahed for him
and made him a Senator (he never missed a meeting of that
Senate to within a year of his death).
All these are, for the most part, good, even if some of them
are slightly ironical aftermaths.
Then there is Ronald Ross, who had learned the hard game
of searching while he made his discovery about the gray mos-
quito — you would say his best years of work were just begin-
ning — there is Ronald Ross, insinuating Grassi was a thief,
hinting that Grassi was a charlatan, saying Grassi had added al-
most nothing to the proof that mosquitoes carry malaria to
menl
There was Grassi — justifiably purple with indignation, writ-
ing violent papers in reply. ... You cannot blame him! But
why will such searchers scuffle, when there are so many things
left to find? You would think — of course it would be so in a
novel — that they could have ignored each other, or could have
310
ROSS VS. GRASSI
said: “The facts of science are greater than the little men who
find those facts!” — and then have gone on searching, and sav-
ing.
For the fight has only just begun. The day I finish this tale,
it is twenty-five years after the perfect experiment of Grassi,
conies this news item from Tokio — it is stuck away down in a
comer of an inside page of a newspaper:
“The population of the Ryukyu Islands, which lie between
Japan and Formosa, is rapidly dying off. . . . Malaria is
blamed principally. In eight villages of the Yaeyama group
. . . not a single baby has been born for the last thirty years.
In Nozoko village . . . one sick old woman was the only in-
habitant. . .
CHAPTER XI
WALTER REED
IN THE INTEREST OF SCIENCE — AND FOR HUMANITY 1
X
With yellow fever it was different — there were no brawls
about it.
Everybody is agreed that Walter Reed — head of the Yellow
Fever Commission — was a courteous man and a blameless one,
that he was a mild man and a logical: there is not one particle
of doubt he had to risk human lives; animals simply will not
satch yellow fever!
Then it is certain that the ex-lumberjack, James Carroll, was
perfectly ready to let go his own life to prove Reed’s point, and
he was not too sentimental about the lives of others when he
needed to prove a point — which might and might not be what
you would call a major point.
All Cubans (who were on the spot and ought to know) are
agreed that those American soldiers who volunteered for the
fate of guinea-pigs were brave beyond imagining. All Ameri-
cans who were then in Cuba are sure that those Spanish immi-
grants who volunteered for the fate of guinea-pigs were not
brave, but money-loving — for didn’t each one of them get two
hundred dollars?
Of course you might protest that fate hit Jesse Lazear a hard
knock — but it was his own fault: why didn’t he brush that mos-
quito off the back of his hand instead of letting her drink her
fill? Then, too, fate has been kind to his memory; the United
States Government named a Battery in Baltimore Harbor in
his honor! And that same government has been more than
312
WALTER REED
kind to his wife: the widow Lazear gets a pension of fifteen
hundred dollars a year! You see, there are no arguments —
and that makes it fun to tell this story of yellow fever. And
aside from the pleasure, it has to be told: this history is abso-
lutely necessary to the book of Microbe Hunters. It vindicates
Pasteur! At last Pasteur, from his handsome tomb in that
basement in Paris, can tell the world: “I told you so!” Be-
cause, in 1926, there is hardly enough of the poison of yellow
fever left in the world to put on the points of six pins; in a
few years there may not be a single speck of that virus left on
earth — it will be as completely extinct as the dinosaurs — unless
there is a catch in the fine gruesome experiments of Reed and
his Spanish immigrants and American soldiers. . . .
It was a grand cooperative fight, that scotching of the yel-
low jack. It was fought by a strange crew, and the fight was
begun by a curious old man, with enviable mutton chop whis-
kers — his name was Doctor Carlos Finlay — who made an
amazingly right guess, who was a terrible muddler at experi-
ments, who was considered by all good Cubans and wise doc-
tors to be a Theorizing Old Fool. What a crazy crank is Fin-
lay, said everybody.
For everybody knew just how to fight that most panic-
striking plague, yellow fever; everybody had a different idea
of just how to combat it. You should fumigate silks and
satins and possessions of folks before they left yellow
fever towns — no! that is not enough: you should bum them.
You should bury, burn, and utterly destroy these silks and
satins and possessions before they come into yellow fever
towns. It was wise not to shake hands with friends whose,
families were dying of yellow fever; it was perfectly safe to
shake hands with them. It was best to bum down houses where
yellow fever had lurked — no! it was enough to smoke them
out with sulphur. But there was one thing nearly everybody in
North, Central, and South America had been agreed upon for
nearly two hundred years, and that was this: when folks of a
town began to turn yellow and hiccup and vomit black, by
INTEREST OF SCIENCE— AND FOR HUMANITY! 313
scores, by hundreds, every day — the only thing to do was to get
up and get out of that town. Because the yellow murderer had a
way of crawling through walls and slithering along the ground
and popping around corners — it could even pass through fires!
— it could die and rise from the dead, that yellow murderer;
and after everybody (including the very best physicians) had
fought it by doing as many contrary things as they could think
of as frantically as they could do them — the yellow jack kept
on killing, until suddenly it got fed up with killing. In North
America that always came with the frosts in the fall. . . .
This was the state of scientific knowledge about yellow fever
up to the year 1900. But from between his mutton chop whis-
kers Carlos Finlay of Habana howled in a scornful wilderness:
“You are all wrong — yellow fever is caused by a mosquito! ”
n
There was a bad state of affairs in San Cristobal de Habana
in Cuba in 1900. The yellow jack had killed thousands more
American soldiers than the bullets of the Spaniards had killed.
And it wasn’t like most diseases, which considerately pounce
upon poor dirty people — it had killed more than one-third of
the officers of General Leonard Wood’s staff, and staff officers
— as all soldiers know — are the cleanest of all officers and the
best protected. General Wood had thundered orders; Habana
had been scrubbed; happy dirty Cubans had been made into
unhappy clean Cubans — “No stone had been left unturned” —
in vain! There was more yellow fever in Habana than there
had been in twenty years!
Cablegrams from Habana to Washington and on June 25th
of 1900 Major Walter Reed came to Quemados in Cuba with
orders to “give special attention to questions relating to the
cause and prevention of yellow fever.” It was a big order.
Considering who the man Walter Reed was, it was altogether
too big an order. Pasteur had tried it! Of course, in certain
ways — though you would say they had nothing to do with
314 WALTER REED
hunting microbes — Walter Reed had qualifications. He was
the best of soldiers; fourteen years and more he had served on
the western plains and mountains; he had been a brave angel
flying through blizzards to the bedsides of sick settlers — he had
shunned the dangers of beer and bottle-pool in the officers’
mess and resisted the seductions of alcoholic nights at draw
poker. He had a strong moral nature. He was gentle. But it
will take a genius to dig out this microbe of the yellow jack,
you say — and are geniuses gentle? Just the same, you will see
that this job needed particularly a strong moral nature, and
then, besides, since 1891 Walter Reed had been doing a bit of
microbe hunting. He had done some odd jobs of searching at
the very best medical school under the most eminent professor
of microbe hunting in America — and that professor had known
Robert Koch, intimately.
So Walter Reed came to Quemados, and as he went into the
yellow fever hospital there, more than enough young American
soldiers passed him, going out, on their backs, feet first. . . .
There were going to be plenty of cases to work on all right —
fatal cases 1 Dr. James Carroll was with Walter Reed, and he
was not what you would call gentle, but you will see in a mo-
ment what a soldier-searcher James Carroll was. And Reed
found Jesse Lazear waiting for him — Lazear was a European-
trained microbe hunter, aged thirty-four, with a wife and two
babies in the States, and with doom in his eyes. Finally there
was Aristides Agramonte (who was a Cuban) — it was to be his
job to cut up the dead bodies, and very well he did that job,
though he never became famous because he had had yellow
fever already and so ran no risks. These four were the Yellow
Fever Commission.
The first thing the Commission did was to fail to find any
microbe whatever in the first eighteen cases of yellow fever
that they probed into. There were many severe cases in those
eighteen; there were four of those eighteen cases who died;
there was not one of those eighteen cases that they didn’t claw
through from stem to gudgeon, so to speak, drawing blood,
INTEREST OF SCIENCE— AND FOR HUMANITY! 31S
making cultures, cutting up the dead ones, making endless
careful cultures — and not one bacillus did they find. All the
time — it was July and the very worst time for yellow fever —
the soldiers were coming out of the hospital of Las Animas feet
first. The Commission failed absolutely to find any cause, but
that failure put them on the right track. That is one of the
humors of microbe hunting — the way men make their finds!
Theobald Smith found out about those ticks because he had
faith in certain farmers; Ronald Ross found out the doings of
those gray mosquitoes because Patrick Manson told him to;
Grassi discovered the zanzarone carrying malaria because he
was patriotic. And now Walter Reed had failed in the very
first part — and anybody would say it was the most important
part — of his work. What to do? There was nothing to do.
And so Reed had time to hear the voice of that Theorizing Old
Fool, Dr. Carlos Finlay, of Habana, shouting: “Yellow fever
is caused by a mosquito!”
The Commission went to call on Dr. Finlay, and that old
gentleman — everybody had laughed at him, nobody had lis-
tened to him — was very glad to explain his fool theory to the
Commission. He told them the ingenious but vague reasons
why he thought it was mosquitoes carried yellow fever; he
showed them records of those awful experiments, which would
convince nobody; he gave them some little black eggs shaped
like cigars and said : “Those are the eggs of the criminal ! ” And
Walter Reed took those eggs, and gave them to Lazear, who
bad been in Italy and knew a thing or two about mosquitoes,
and Lazear put the eggs into a warm place to hatch into wig-
glers, which presently wiggled themselves into extremely pretty
mosquitoes, with silver markings on their backs — markings
that looked like a lyre. Now Walter Reed had failed, but you
have to give him credit for being a sharp-eyed man with plenty
of common sense — and then too, as you will see, he was ex-
traordinarily lucky. While he was failing to find bacilli, even
in the dreadful cases, with bloodshot eyes and chests yellow as
gold, with hiccoughs and with those prophetic retchings — while
WALTER REED
316
he was failing, Walter Reed noticed that the nurses who han-
dled those cases, were soiled by those cases, never got yellow
fever! They were non-immunes too, those nurses, but they
didn’t get yellow fever.
“If this disease were caused by bacillus, like cholera, or
plague, some of those nurses certainly should get it,” argued
Walter Reed to his Commission.
Then all kinds of strange tricks of yellow fever struck Wal-
ter Reed. He watched cases of the disease pop up most weirdly
in Quemados. A man in a house in 102 Real Street came down
with it; then it jumped around the corner to 20 General Lee
Street, and from there it hopped across the road — and not one
of these families had anything to do with each other, hadn’t
seen each other, even!
“That smells like something carrying the disease through the
air to those houses,” said Reed. There were various other ex-
ceedingly strange things about yellow fever — they had been
discovered by an American, Carter. A man came down with
yellow fever in a house. For two or three weeks nothing more
happened — the man might die, he might have got better and
gone away, but at the end of that two weeks, bang! a bunch of
other cases broke out in that house. “That two weeks makes
it look as if the virus were taking time to grow in some insect,”
said Reed, to his Commission who thought it was silly, but
they were soldiers.
“So we will try Finlay’s notion about mosquitoes,” said Wal-
ter Reed, for all of the just mentioned reasons, but particularly
because there was nothing else for the Commission to do.
That was easy to say, but how to go on with it? Everybody
knew perfectly well that you cannot give yellow fever to any
animal — not even to a monkey or an ape. To make any kind
of experiment to prove mosquitoes carry yellow fever you must
have experimental animals, and that meant nothing more nor
less than human animals. But give human beings yellow fever I
In some epidemics — there were records of them! — eighty-five
men out of a hundred died of it. in some fifty out of every
INTEREST OF SCIENCE— AND FOR HUMANITY! 317
hundred — almost never less than twenty out of every hundred.
It would De murder! But that is where the strong moral na-
ture of Walter Reed came to help him. Here was a b lam e less
man, a Christian man, and a man — though he was mild — who
was mad to help his fellow men. And if you could prove that
yellow fever was only carried by mosquitoes. . . .
So, on one hot night after a day among dying men at Pinar
del Rio, he faced his Commission: “If the members of the Com-
mission take the risk first — if they let themselves be bitten by
mosquitoes that have fed on yellow fever cases, that will set
an example to American soldiers, and then — ” Reed looked at
Lazear, and then at James Carroll.
“I am ready to take a bite,” said Jesse Lazear, who had a
wife and two small children.
“You can count on me, sir,” said James Carroll, whose total
assets were his searcher’s brain, and his miserable pay as an
assistant-surgeon in the army. (His liabilities were a wife and
five children.)
in
Then Walter Reed (he had been called home to Washington
to make a report on work done in the Spanish War) gave elabo-
rate instructions to Carroll and Lazear and Agramonte. They
were secret instructions, and savage instructions, when you
consider the mild man he was. It was an immoral business —
it was a breach of discipline in its way, for Walter Reed then
had no permission from the high military authorities to start it.
So Reed left for Washington, and Lazear and Carroll set off on
the wildest, most daring journey any two microbe hunters had
ever taken. Lazear? You could not see the doom in his eyes
— the gleam of the searcher outshone it. Carroll? That was
a soldier who cared no damn for death or courts-martial —
Carroll was a microbe hunter of the great line. . . .
Lazear went down between the rows of beds on which lay
men, doomed men with faces yellow as the leaves of autumn.
WALTER REED
3i8
delirious men with bloodshot eyes. He bit those men with his
silver-striped she-mosquitoes ; carefully he carried these blood-
filled beasts back to their glass homes, in which were little
saucers of water and little lumps of sugar. Here the she-mos-
quitoes digested their meal of yellow fever blood, and buzzed a
little, and waited for the test.
“We should remember malaria,” Reed had told Lazear and
Carroll. “In that disease it takes two or three weeks for the
mosquito to become dangerous — maybe it’s the same here.”
But look at the bold face of Jesse Lazear, and tell me if that
was a patient man! Not he. Somehow he collected seven
volunteers, who so far as I can find have remained nameless,
since the test was done in dark secrecy. To these seven men —
whom for all I know he may have shanghaied — but first of all
to himself, Lazear applied those mosquitoes who a few days
before had fed on men who now were dead. . . .
But alas, they all stayed fit as fiddles, and that discouraged
Lazear.
But there was James Carroll. For years he had been the
right-hand man of Walter Reed. He had come into the army
as a buck private and had been a corporal and a sergeant for
years — obeying orders was burned into his very bones — and
Major Reed had said: “Try mosquitoes! ” What is more, what
Major Reed thought was right, James Carroll thought was
right, too, and Major Reed thought there was something in the
notion of that Old Theorizing Fool. But in the army,
thoughts are secondary — Major Reed had left them saying:
“Try mosquitoes!”
So James Carroll reminded the discouraged Lazear: “I am
ready! ” He told Lazear to bring out the most dangerous mos-
quito in his collection — not one that had bitten only a single
case, but he must use a mosquito that had bitten many cases —
and they must be bad cases — of yellow fever. That mosquito
must be as dangerous as possible! On the twenty-seventh of
August, Jesse Lazear picked out what he thought to be his
champion mosquito, and this creature, which had fed on four
INTEREST OF SCIENCE— AND FOR HUMANITY! 319
cases of yellow fever, two of them severe ones, settled down on
the arm of James Carroll.
That soldier watched her while she felt around with her
stinger. . . . What did he think as he watched her swell into a
bright balloon with his blood? Nobody knows. But he could
think, what everybody knows: “I am forty-six years old, and
in yellow fever the older the fewer — get better.” He was forty-
six years old. He had a wife and five children, but that eve-
ning James Carroll wrote to Walter Reed:
“If there is anything in the mosquito theory, I should get a
good dose of yellow fever !” He did.
Two days later he felt tired and didn’t want to visit patients
in the yellow fever ward. Two days after that he was really
sick: “I must have malaria!” he cried, and went to the labora-
tory under his own power, to squint at his own blood under the
microscope. But no malaria. That night his eyes were blood-
shot, his face a dusky red. The next morning Lazear packed
Carroll off to the yellow fever wards, and there he lay, near to
death for days and days. . . . There was one minute when he
thought his heart had stopped . . . and that, as you will see,
was a bad minute for Assistant-Surgeon Carroll.
He always said those were the proudest days of his life. “I
was the first case to come down with yellow fever after the ex-
perimental bite of a mosquito!” said Carroll.
Then there was that American private soldier they called
“X.Y.” — these outlaw searchers called him “X.Y.,” though he
was really William Dean, of Grand Rapids, Michigan. While
James Carroll was having his first headaches, they bit this
X.Y. with four mosquitoes — the one that nearly killed Carroll,
and then three other silver-striped beauties besides, who had
fed on six men that were fairly sick, and four men that were
very sick with yellow fever and two men that died.
Now everything was fine with the experiments of Quemados.
Eight men had been bitten, it is true, and were fit as fiddles —
but the last two, James Carroll and X.Y., they were real experi-
mental guinea-pigs, those two, they had both got yellow fever — •
WALTER REED
320
and James Carroll’s heart had nearly stopped, but now they
were both getting better, and Carroll was on the heights, writ-
ing to Walter Reed, waiting proudly for his chief to come back
— to show him the records. Only Jesse Lazear was a little
cynical about these two cases, because Lazear was a fine ex-
perimenter, a tight one, a man who had to have every condi-
tion just so, like a real searcher — and, thought Lazear, “It is
too bad seeing the nerve of Carroll and X.Y. — but both of
them exposed themselves in dangerous zones once or twice, be-
fore they came down. It wasn’t an absolutely perfect experi-
ment — it isn’t sure that my mosquitoes gave them yellow
fever!” So Lazear was skeptical, but orders were orders, and
every afternoon he went to those rows of beds at Las Animas,
in the room with the faint strange smell, and here he turned
his test-tubes upside-down on the arms of boys with bloodshot
eyes, and let his she-mosquitoes suck their fill. But September
13th was a bad day, it was an unlucky day for Jesse Lazear,
for while he was at this silly job of feeding his mosquitoes, a
stray mosquito settled down on the back of his hand. “Oh!
that’s nothing!” he thought. “That wouldn’t be the right kind
of mosquito anyway!” he muttered, and he let the mosquito
drink her fill — though, mind you, she was a stray beast that
lived in this ward where men were dying!
That was September 13th.
“On the evening of September 18th . . . Dr. Lazear com-
plained of feeling out of sorts, and had a chill at 8 p.m.,” says
a hospital record of Las Animas. . . .
“September 19: Twelve o’clock noon,” goes on that laconic
record, “temperature 102.4 degrees, pulse 112. Eyes injected,
face suffused. [That means bloodshot and red] ... 6 p.m.
temperature 103.8 degrees, pulse, 106. Jaundice appeared on
the third day. The subsequent history of this case was one of
progressive and fatal yellow fever” [and the record softens a
little], “the death of our lamented colleague having occurred on
the evening of September 25, 1900.”
INTEREST OF SCIENCE— AND FOR HUMANITY! 321
IV
Then Reed came back to Cuba, and Carroll met him with en-
thusiasm, and Walter Reed was sad for Lazear, but very happy
about those two successful cases of Carroll and X.Y. — and then,
and then (brushing aside tears for Lazear) even in that there
was the Hand of God, there was something for Science: “As
Dr. Lazear was bitten by a mosquito while present in the wards
of a yellow fever hospital,” wrote Walter Reed, “one must, at
least, admit the possibility of this insect’s contamination by a
previous bite of a yellow fever patient. This case of accidental
infection therefore cannot fail to be of interest. . . .”
“Now it is my turn to take the bite! ” said Walter Reed, but
he was fifty years old, and they persuaded him not to. “But
we must prove it! ” he insisted, so gently, that, hearing his musi-
cal voice and looking at his chin that did not stick out like the
chin of a he-man, you might think Walter Reed was wavering
(after all, here was one man dead out of three).
“But we must prove it,” said that soft voice, and Reed went
to General Leonard Wood, and told him the exciting events that
had happened. Who could be less of a mollycoddle than this
Wood? And he gave Walter Reed permission to go as far as
he liked. He gave him money to build a camp of seven tents
and two little houses — to say nothing of a flagpole — but what
was best of all Wood gave him money to buy men, who would
get handsomely paid for taking a sure one chance out of five of
never having a chance to spend that money! So Walter Reed
said: “Thank you, General,” and one mile from Quemados they
pitched seven tents and raised a flagpole, and flew an American
flag and called that place Camp Lazear (three cheers for
Lazear!), and you will see what glorious things occurred
there.
Now, nothing is more sure than this: that every man of the
great line of microbe hunters is different from every other man
of them, but every man Jack of them has one thing in common :
they are original. They were all original, excepting Walter
WALTER REED
322
Reed — whom you cannot say would be shot for his originality,
seeing that this business of mosquitoes and various bugs and
ticks carrying diseases was very much in the air in those last ten
years of the nineteenth century. It was natural for a man to
think of that! But he was by all odds the most moral of the
great line of microbe hunters — aside from being a very thorough
clean-cut experimenter — and now that Walter Reed’s moral na-
ture told him: “You must kill men to save them!” he set out to
plan a series of air-tight tests — never was there a good man who
thought of more hellish and dastardly tests!
And he was exact. Every man about to be bit by a mosquito
must stay locked up for days and days and weeks, in that sun-
baked Camp Lazear — to keep him away from all danger of ac-
cidental contact with yellow fever. There would be no catch
in these experiments! And then Walter Reed let it be known,
to the American soldiers in Cuba, that there was another war
on, a war for the saving of men — were there men who would
volunteer? Before the ink was dry on the announcements Pri-
vate Kissenger of Ohio stepped into his office, and with him
came John J. Moran, who wasn’t even a soldier — he was a
civilian clerk in the office of General Fitzhugh Lee. “You can
try it on us, sir ! ” they told him.
Walter Reed was a thoroughly conscientious man. “But,
men, do you realize the danger?” And he told them of the
headaches and the hiccups and the black vomit — and he told
them of fearful epidemics in which not a man had lived to
carry news or tell the horrors ....
“We know,” said Private Kissenger and John J. Moran of
Ohio, “we volunteer solely for the cause of humanity and in the
interest of science.”
Then Walter Reed told them of the generosity of General
Wood. A handsome sum of money they would get — two hun-
dred, maybe three hundred dollars, if the silver-striped she-mos-
quitoes did things to them that would give them one chance out
of five sot to spend that money.
INTEREST OF SCIENCE— AND FOR HUMANITY! 323
“The one condition on which we volunteer, sir,” said Private
Kissenger and civilian clerk John J. Moran of Ohio, “is that we
get no compensation for it.”
To the tip of his cap went the hand of Walter Reed (who was
a major) : “Gentlemen, I salute you 1 ” And that day Kissenger
and John J. Moran went into the preparatory quarantine, that
would make them first-class, unquestionable guinea-pigs, above
suspicion and beyond reproach. On the 5th of December Kis-
senger furnished nice full meals for five mosquitoes — two of
them had bitten fatal cases fifteen days and nineteen days be-
fore. Presto! Five days later he had the devil of a backache,
two days more and he was turning yellow — it was a perfect case,
and in his quarters Walter Reed thanked God, for Kissenger got
better! Then great days came to Reed and Carroll and Agra-
monte — for, if they weren’t exactly overrun with young Ameri-
cans who were ready to throw away their lives in the interest
of science — and for humanity still there were ignorant people,
just come to Cuba from Spain, who could very well use two
hundred dollars. There were five of these mercenary fellows —
whom I shall simply have to call “Spanish immigrants,” or I
could call them Man 1, 2, 3, and 4 — just as microbe hunters
often mark animals: “Rabbit 1, 2, 3, and 4 — ” anyway they
were bitten, carefully, by mosquitoes who, when you take aver-
ages, were much more dangerous than machine gun bullets.
They earned their two hundred dollars — for four out of five of
them had nice typical (doctors would look scientific and call
them beautiful) cases of yellow fever! It was a triumph! It
was sure! Not one of these men had been anywhere near yellow
fever — like so many mice they had been kept in their screened
tents at Quemados. If they hadn’t been ignorant immigrants —
hardly more intelligent than animals, you might say — they
might have been bored, because nothing had happened to them
excepting — the stabs of silver-striped she-mosquitoes. . . .
“Rejoice with me, sweetheart,” Walter Reed wrote to his
wife, “as, aside from the antitoxin of diphtheria and Koch’s dis-
m WALTER REED
covery of the tubercle bacillus, it will be regarded as the most
important piece of work, scientifically, during the nineteenth
century. ...”
Walter Reed was so thorough that you can call him original,
as original as any of the microbe hunters of the great line —
for he was certainly original in his thoroughness. He might
have called it a day — you would swear he was tempted to call
it a day: eight men had got yellow fever from mosquito bites,
and only one — what amazing luck! — had died.
“But can yellow fever be carried in any other way?” asked
Reed.
Everybody believed that clothing and bedding and posses-
sions of yellow fever victims were deadly — millions of dollars
worth of clothing and bedding had been destroyed; the Sur-
geon-General believed it; every eminent physician in America,
North, South and Central (excepting that old fool Finlay)
believed it. “But can it?” asked Reed, and while he was
being so joyfully successful with Kissenger and Spaniards 1,2,
3, and 4, carpenters came, and built two ugly little houses in
Camp Lazear. House No. 1 was the nastier of these two little
houses. It was fourteen feet by twenty, it had two doors
cleverly arranged one back of the other so no mosquitoes could
get into it, it had two windows looking south — they were on
the same side as the door, so no draft could blow through
that little house. Then it was furnished with a nice stove, to
keep the temperature well above ninety, and there were tubs of
water in the house — to keep the air as chokey as the hold of a
ship in the tropics. So you see it was an uninhabitable little
house — under the best of conditions — but now, on the thir-
tieth of November in 1900, sweating soldiers carried several
tightly nailed suspicious-looking boxes, that came from the
yellow fever wards of Las Animas — to make this house alto-
gether cursed. . . .
That night, of the thirtieth of November, Walter Reed and
James Carroll were the witnesses of a miracle of bravery, for
into this House No. 1 walked a young American doctor named
INTEREST OF SCIENCE— AND FOR HUMANITY! 325
Cooke, and two American soldiers, whose names— where are
their monuments? — were Folk and Jernegan.
Those three men opened the tightly nailed, suspicious-look-
ing boxes. They opened those boxes inside that house, in air
already too sticky for proper breathing.
Phew! There were cursings, there were holdings of noses.
But they went on opening those boxes, and out of them
Cooke and Folk and Jernegan took pillows, soiled with the
black vomit of men dead of yellow fever; out of them they
took sheets and blankets, dirty with the discharges of dying
men past helping themselves. They beat those pillows and
shook those sheets and blankets — “you must see the yellow
fever poison is well spread around that room!” Walter
Reed had told them. Then Cooke and Folk and Jernegan
made up their little army cots with those pillows and blankets
and sheets. They undressed. They lay down on those filthy
beds. They tried to sleep — in that room fouler than the dank-
est of medieval dungeons. . . . And Walter Reed and James
Carroll guarded that little house, so tenderly, to see no mos-
quito got into it, and Folk and Cooke and Jernegan had the
very best of food, you may be sure. . . .
Night after night those three lay in that house, wondering
perhaps about the welfare of the souls of their predecessors in
those sheets and blankets. They lay there, wondering whether
anything else besides mosquitoes (though mosquitoes hadn’t
even been proved to carry it then!) carried yellow fever. . . .
Then Walter Reed, who was a moral man and a thorough man,
and James Carroll, who was a grim man, came to make their
test a little more thorough. More boxes came to them from
Las Animas — and when Cooke and Jernegan and Folk un-
packed them, they had to rush out of their little house, it was
so dreadful.
But they went back in, and they went to sleep. . . .
For twenty nights — where are their monuments? — these
three men stayed there, and then they were quarantined in a
nice airy tent s to wait for their attack of yellow fever. But
326
WALTER REED
they gained weight. They felt fit as fiddles. They made vast
jokes about their dirty house and their perilous sheets and
blankets. They were happy as so many schoolboys when they
heard Kissenger and those Spaniards (i, 2, 3, and 4) had
really got the yellow jack after the mosquito bites. What a
marvelous proof, you will say, but what a dastardly experi-
ment — but for the insanely scientific Walter Reed that most
dastardly experiment was not marvelous enough 1 Three more
American boys went in there, and for twenty nights slept in
new unspeakable sheets and blankets — with this little refine-
ment of the experiment: they slept in the very pajamas in
which yellow fever victims had died. And then for twenty
more nights three other American lads went into House No. 1,
and slept that way — with this additional little refinement of
the experiment: they slept on pillows covered with towels
soaked with the blood of men whom the yellow jack had
killed.
But they all stayed fit as fiddles! Not a soul of these nine
men had so much as a touch of yellow fever! How wonderful
is science, thought Walter Reed. “So,” he wrote, “the bubble
of the belief that clothing can transmit yellow fever was
pricked by the first touch of human experimentation.” Wal-
ter Reed was right. It is true, science is wonderful. But science
is cruel, microbe hunting can be heartless, and that relentless
devil that was the experimenter in Walter Reed kept asking:
“But is your experiment really sound?” None of those men
who slept in House No. 1 got yellow fever, that is true — but
how do you know they were susceptible to yellow fever?
Maybe they were naturally immune 1 Then Reed and Carroll,
who had already asked as much of Folk and Jemegan as any
captain has ever asked of any soldier — so it was that Reed and
Carroll now shot virulent yellow fever blood under the skin of
Jemegan, so it was they bit Folk with mosquitoes who had fed
on fatal cases of yellow fever. They both came down with
wracking pains and flushed faces and bloodshot eyes. They
both came through their Valley of the Shadow. “Thank God,”
INTEREST OF SCIENCE— AND FOR HUMANITY! 327
murmured Reed — but especially Walter Reed thanked God he
had proved those two boys were not immune during those
twenty hot stinking nights in House No. 1.
For these deeds Warren Gladsden Jernegan and Levi E. Folk
were generously rewarded with a purse of three hundred dol-
lars — which in those days was a lot of money.
v
While these tests were going on John J. Moran, that civilian
clerk from Ohio, whom Walter Reed had paid the honor of a
salute, was a very disappointed man. He had absolutely re-
fused to be paid; he had volunteered in “the interest of science
and for the cause of humanity,” he had been bitten by those
silver-striped Stegomyia mosquitoes (the bug experts just then
thought this was the proper name for that mosquito) — he had
been stabbed several times by several choice poisonous ones,
but he hadn’t come down with yellow fever, alas, he stayed fit
as a fiddle. What to do with John J. Moran?
“I have it!” said Walter Reed. “This to do with John J.
Moran!”
So there was built, close by that detestable little House No.
1, another little house, called House No. 2. That was a com-
fortable house 1 It had windows on the side opposite to its
door, so that a fine trade wind played through it. It was cool.
It had a nice clean cot in it, with steam-disinfected bedding.
It would have been an excellent house for a consumptive to get
better in. It was a thoroughly sanitary little house. Half way
across the inside of it was a screen, from top to bottom, a fine-
meshed screen that the tiniest mosquito found it impossible to
fly through. At 12 o’clock noon on the twenty-first of Decem-
ber in 1900, this John J. Moran (who was a hog for these tests)
“clad only in a nightshirt and fresh from a bath” walked into
this healthy little house. Five minutes before Reed and Car-
roll had opened a glass jar in that room, and out of that jar
flew fifteen she-mosquitoes, thirsty for blood, whining for a
328
WALTER REED
meal of blood, and each and every one of those fifteen mos-
quitoes, had fed, on various days before — on the blood of yel-
low-faced boys in the hospital of Las Animas.
Clad only in a nightshirt and fresh from a bath, Moran —
who knows of him now? — walked into the healthy little room
and lay down on his clean cot. In a minute that damned buzzing
started round his head, in two minutes he was bitten, in the
thirty minutes he lay there he was stabbed seven times — with-
out even the satisfaction of smashing those mosquitoes. You
remember Mr. Sola, whom Grassi tortured — he probably had
his worried moments — but all Mr. Sola had to look forward to
was a little attack of malaria and a good dose of curative qui-
nine to get him out of it. But Moran? But John J. Moran
was a hog for such tests! He was back there at four-thirty the
same afternoon, to be bitten again, and once more the next
day — to satisfy the rest of the hungry she-mosquitoes who
hadn’t found him the first day. In the other room of this
house, with only a fine meshed but perfect wire screen between
them and Moran — and the mosquitoes — lay two other boys,
and those two boys slept in that house safely for eighteen
nights.
But Moran?
On Christmas morning of 1900, there was a fine present wait-
ing for him — in his head, how that thumped — in his eyes, how
red they were and how the light hurt them — in his bones, how
tired they were! A nasty knock those mosquitoes had hit him
and he came within a hair of dying but (thank God! murmured
Walter Reed) he was saved, this Moran, to live the rest of his
life in an obscurity he didn’t deserve. So Moran had his wish
— in the interest of science, and for humanity! So he, with
Folk and Jernegan and Cooke and all those others proved that
the dirty pest hole of a house (with no mosquitoes) was safe;
and that the clean house (but with mosquitoes) was dangerous,
so dangerous! So at last Walter Reed had every answer to
his diabolical questions, and he wrote, in that old-fashioned
prose of his: “The essential factor in the infection of a building
INTEREST OF SCIENCE— AND FOR HUMANITY! 329
with yellow fever is the presence therein of mosquitoes that
have bitten cases of yellow fever.”
It was so simple. It was true. That was all. That was
that. And Walter Reed wrote to his wife:
“The prayer that has been mine for twenty years, that I
might be permitted in some way or at some time to do some-
thing to alleviate human suffering has been granted! A thou-
sand Happy New Years. . . . Hark, there go the twenty-four
buglers in concert, all sounding taps for the old year!”
They were sounding taps, were those buglers, for the
searcher that was Jesse Lazear, and for the scourge of yellow
fever that could now be wiped from the earth. They were
blowing their bugles, those musicians, to celebrate — as you will
see — the fate that waited for that little commission after a too
short hour of triumph. . . .
vi
Then the world came to Habana, and there was acclaim for
Walter Reed, and the customary solemn discussions and doubts
and arguments of the learned men who came. William Craw-
ford Gorgas (who was another blameless man! ) grooming him-
self for the immortality of Panama, went into the gutters and
cesspools and cisterns of Habana, making horrid war on the
Stegomyia mosquitoes, and in ninety days, Habana had not a
single case of yellow jack — she was free for the first time in
two hundred years. It was magical! But still there came
learned doctors, and solemn bearded physicians, from Europe
and America, asking this, questioning that — and one morning
fifteen of these skeptics were in the mosquito room of the
laboratory — oh! they were from Missouri! “These are re-
markable experiments, but the results should be weighed and
considered with reserve . . . et cetera!” Then the gauze lid
came off a jar of she-mosquitoes (of course it was by accident)
and into the room, with wicked lustful eyes on those learned
scientists the Stegomyia buzzed. Alas for skepticism! Away
330
WALTER REED
went all doubts! From the room rushed the eminent servants
of knowledge! Down went the screen door with a crash — such
was the vehemence of their conviction that Walter Reed was
right. (Though it happened that this particular jar of mos-
quitoes was not contaminated.)
Then William Crawford Gorgas and John Guiteras — he was
a great Cuban authority on yellow jack — they were convinced
too by those experiments at Camp Lazear, and they were full
of excellent plans to put those experiments in practice — fine
plans, but rash plans, alas. “It is remarkable,” said Gorgas
and Guiteras, “that these experimental cases at Camp Lazear
didn’t die — they had typical yellow fever, but they got better,
maybe because Reed put them to bed so quickly.” Then they
proceeded to play with fire. “We will give newly arrived non-
immune immigrants yellow fever — a smart attack of it, but a
safe attack of it.” They planned this, when it really was so
easy to wipe out yellow fever simply by warring on the Stego-
myia, which does not breed in secret places, which is a very
domestic mosquito! “And at the same time we can confirm
Reed’s results,” thought Gorgas and Guiteras.
The immigrants (of course they were very ignorant people)
came; the immigrants listened and were told it was safe; seven
immigrants and a bold young American nurse were bitten by
the poisoned Stegomyia. And of these eight, two immigrants
and the bold young American nurse went out from the hospital,
safe from another attack of yellow fever, safe from all the wor-
ries of the world. . . . They went out, feet first — to slow
music. What a fine searcher was Walter Reed — but what
amazing luck he had, in those experiments at Camp
Lazear. . . .
There was panic in Habana, and mutterings of the mob —
and who can blame that mob, for human life is sacred. But
there was Assistant Surgeon James Carroll, unsentimental as
an embalmer and before all else a soldier, — he had just then
come back to Habana to settle certain little academic ques-
tions. “We can wipe out yellow fever now, we have proved
INTEREST OF SCIENCE— AND FOR HUMANITY! 331
just how it gets from man to man — but what is it causes yellow
fever?” This is what Reed and Carroll asked each other, and
everybody must admit that it was a purely academic question,
and I ask you: was it worth a human life (even of a Spanish
immigrant) to find the answer? Myself I cannot answer yes
or no. But Reed and Carroll answered yes! Starting out as
soldiers obeying orders, as humanitarians risking their hides to
save the lives of men, they had been bitten by the virus of the
search for truth, cold truth — they were enchanted with the
glory that comes from the discovery of unknown things. . . .
They were sure there was no visible bacillus, nor any kind
of microbe that could be seen through the strongest microscope
to cause it — they had looked in the livers of men and the lights
of mosquitoes for such a germ, in vain. But there were other
possibilities — magical possibilities, of a new kind of germ that
might be the cause of yellow fever, an ultra-microbe, too im-
mensely small for the strongest lens to uncover, revealing its
existence only by the murdering of men with its unseen mys-
terious poison. That might be the nature of the germ of yellow
fever. Old Friedrich Loeffler — he of the mustaches — had
found such little life making calves sick with foot-and-mouth
disease. And now if Reed and Carroll could show the microbe
of yellow fever belonged to this sub-microscopic world too!
Walter Reed was busy, so he sent James Carroll to Habana
to see, and here you find James Carroll, intensely annoyed be-
cause those experimental cases of Guiteras had died. Guiteras
— do you blame him? — was in a funk. No, Carroll mightn’t
draw blood from yellow fever patients. Indeed not, Carroll
mightn’t even bite them with mosquitoes. What was most silly.
Dr. Guiteras would rather not have Dr. Carroll make post-mor-
tems on the dead cases — it might enrage the population of
Habana. “You can imagine my disappointment!” wrote Car-
roll to Walter Reed, with indignant remarks about the frivo-
lous fears of ignorant populations. But did those deaths stop
him? Not Carroll!
By some unexplained sorceries he got hold of some good
3 32
WALTER REED
poisonous yellow fever blood, and filtered it through a porce-
lain filter that was so fine no visible microbe could get through
it. The stuff that came through that filter Carroll shot under
the skin of three non-immunes (history doesn’t tell how he in-
duced them to stand for it) — and presto! two of them got yel-
low fever. Hurrahl Yellow fever was like foot-and-mouth
disease then. Its cause was a germ maybe too little to see, a
microbe that could sneak through fine-grained porcelain.*
Reed wrote to stop him: those deaths were too much — but
Carroll simply must get some contaminated mosquitoes, and
by some bold devilry he did get them, and heigho for this final
most horrible experiment!
“In my own case,” said Carroll, “produced by the bite of a
single mosquito, a fatal result was looked for during several
days. I became so firmly convinced that the severity of the
attack depended upon the susceptibility of an individual rather
than on the number of bites he had got, that on October 9,
1901, at Habana, I purposely applied, to a non-immune eight
mosquitoes ( all I had) that had been contaminated eighteen
days before. The attack that followed was a mild one " ended
Carroll, triumphantly. But what if that patient had died — as
God knows he might have?
Such was the strangest of that strange crew, and looking
back on this his boldness, in despite of his fanatic prying into
dangerous mysteries, my hat is off to this bald-headed be-
spectacled ex-lumberjack searcher. He himself was the first
to be hit, it was Carroll gave the example to those American sol-
diers, to that civilian clerk, and to those Spanish immigrants —
1, 2, 3, and 4 — and to all the rest of the unknown numbers of
them. And do you remember, in the middle of his attack of
yellow fever, that moment when his heart seemed to stop? In
1907, six years after, Carroll’s heart stopped for good. . . .
vn
And in 1902, five years before that, Walter Reed, in the
* A spiral-shaped microbe has recently been brought forward as the cause
of yellow fever, but this discovery has not yet been confirmed.
INTEREST OF SCIENCE— AND FOR HUMANITY! 333
prime of his life, but tired, so tired, died — just as the applause
of nations grew thunderous — of appendicitis. “I am leaving
my wife and daughter so little . . .” said Walter Reed to his
friend Kean, just before the ether cone went down over his
face. “So little . . ” he mumbled as the ether let him down
into his last dreams. But let us be proud of our nation, and
proud of our Congress — for they voted Mrs. Emilie Laurence
Reed, wife of the man who has saved the world no one knows
what millions of dollars — let us say nothing of lives — they
voted her a handsome pension, of fifteen hundred dollars a
year! And the same for the widow of Lazear, and the same
for the widow of James Carroll — and surely that was handsome
for them, because, as one committee of senators quaintly said:
“They can still help themselves.”
But what of Private Kissenger, of Ohio, who stood that test,
in the interest of science — and for humanity? He didn’t die
from yellow fever. And they prevailed upon him, at last, to
accept one hundred and fifteen dollars and a gold watch, which
was presented to him in the presence of the officers and men of
Columbia barracks. He didn’t die — but what was worse, as
the yellow fever germs went out of him, a paralysis crept into
him — now he sits, counting the hours on his gold watch. But
what luck! At the last account he had a good wife to support
him by taking in washing.
And what of the others? Time is too short to deal with those
others — and besides I do not know what has become of them.
So it is that this strange crew has made rendezvous, each one*,
with his special and particular fate — this strange crew who
put the capstone on that most marvelous ten years of the mi-
crobe hunters, that crew who worked together so that now, in
1926, there is hardly enough of the poison of yellow fever left
in the world to put on the points of six pins. . . .
So it is that the good death-fighter, David Bruce, should eat
his words: “It is impossible, at present, to experiment with
human beings.”
CHAPTER XII
PAUL EHRLICH
THE MAGIC BULLET
I
fwo hundred and fifty years ago, Antony Leeuwenhoek,
who was a matter-of-fact man, looked through a magic eye,
saw microbes, and so began this history. He would certainly
have snorted a contemptuous Dutch sort of snort at anybody
who called his microscope a magic eye.
Now Paul Ehrlich — who brings this history to the happy
end necessary to all serious histories — was a gay man. He
smoked twenty-five cigars a day; he was fond of drinking a
seidel of beer (publicly) with his old laboratory servant and
many seidels of beer with German, English and American col-
leagues; a modern man, there was still something medieval
about him for he said: “We must learn to shoot microbes with
magic bullets.” He was laughed at for saying that, and his
enemies cartooned him under the name “Doktor Phantasus.”
But he did make a magic bullet! Alchemist that he was,
he did something more outlandish than that, for he changed a
drug that is the favorite poison of murderers into a saver of
the lives of men. Out of arsenic he concocted a deliverer from
the scourge of that pale corkscrew microbe whose attack is the
reward of sin, whose bite is the cause of syphilis, the ill of the
loathsome name. Paul Ehrlich had a most weird and wrong-
headed and unscientific imagination: that helped him to make
microbe hunters turn another corner, though alas, there have
been few of them who have known what to do when they got
334
THE MAGIC BULLET 335
around that corner, which is why this history has to stop with
Paul Ehrlich.
Of course, it is sure as the sun following the dawn of to-
morrow, that the high deeds of the microbe hunters have not
come to an end; there will be others to fashion magic bullets.
And they will be waggish men and original, like Paul Ehrlich,
for it is not from a mere combination of incessant work and
magnificent laboratories that such marvelous cures are to be
got. . . . To-day? Well, to-day there are no microbe hunters
who look you solemnly in the eye and tell you that two plus
two makes five. Paul Ehrlich was that kind of a man. Born
in March of 1854 in Silesia in Germany, he went to the gym-
nasium at Breslau, and his teacher of literature ordered him to
write an essay, subject: “Life is a Dream.”
“Life rests on normal oxidations,” wrote that bright young
Jew, Paul Ehrlich. “Dreams are an activity of the brain and
the activities of the brain are only oxidations . . . dreams are
a sort of phosphorescence of the brain!”
He got a bad mark for such smartness, but then he was
always getting bad marks. Out of the gymnasium, he went to
a medical school, or rather, to three or four medical schools —
Ehrlich was that kind of a medical student. It was the opinion
of the distinguished medical faculties of Breslau and Stras-
bourg and Freiburg and Leipsic that he was no ordinary stu-
dent. It was also their opinion he was an abominably bad
student, which meant that Paul Ehrlich refused to memorize
the ten thousand and fifty long words supposed to be needed
for the cure of sick patients. He was a revolutionist, he was
part of the revolt led by that chemist, Louis Pasteur, and the
country doctor, Robert Koch. His professors told Paul Ehr-
lich to cut up dead bodies and learn the parts of dead bodies;
instead he cut up one part of a dead body into very thin slices
and set to work to paint these slices with an amazing variety
of pretty-colored aniline dyes, bought, borrowed, stolen from
under his demonstrator’s nose.
He hadn’t a notion of why he liked to do that — though there
PAUL EHRLICH
336
is no doubt that to the end of his days this man’s chief joy
(aside from wild scientific discussions over the beer tables)
was in looking at brilliant colors, and making them.
“Ho, Paul Ehrlich — what are you doing there?” asked one
of his professors, Waldeyer.
“Ja, Herr Professor, I am trying with different dyes!”
He hated classical training, he called himself a modem,
but he had a fine knowledge of Latin, and with this Latin he
used to coin his battle cries. For he worked by means of battle
cries and slogans rather than logic. “Corpora non agunt nisi
fixatal” he would shout, pounding the table till the dishes
danced — “Bodies do not act unless fixed!” That phrase
heartened him through thirty years of failure. “You see! You
understand! You know!” he would say, waving his horn-
rimmed spectacles in your face, and if you took him seriously
you might think that Latin rigmarole (and not his search-
er’s brain) carried him to his final triumph. And in a way
there is no doubt it did!
Paul Ehrlich was ten years younger than Robert Koch; he
was in Cohnheim’s laboratory on that day of Koch’s first dem-
onstration of the anthrax microbe; he was atheistical, so he
needed some human god and that god was Robert Koch. Paint-
ing a sick liver Ehrlich had seen the tubercle germ before ever
Koch laid eyes on it. Ignorant, lacking Koch’s clear intelli-
gence, he supposed those little colored rods were crystals. But
when he sat that evening in the room in Berlin in March, 1882,
and listened to Koch’s proof of the discovery of the cause of
consumption, he saw the light: “It was the most gripping ex-
perience of my scientific life,” said Paul Ehrlich, long after-
wards. So he went to Koch. He must hunt microbes too! He
showed Robert Koch an ingenious way to stain that tubercle
microbe— that trick is used, hardly changed, to this day. He
would hunt microbes! And in the enthusiastic way he had he
proceeded to get consumption germs all over himself: so he
caught consumption and had to <m to Forynt
THE MAGIC BULLET
337
ii
Ehrlich was thirty-four years old then, and if he had died in
Egypt, he would certainly have been forgotten, or been spoken
of as a color-loving, gay, visionary failure. He had the energy
of a dynamo; he had believed you could treat sick people and
hunt microbes at the same time; he had been head physician in
a famous clinic in Berlin, but he was a very raw-nerved man
and was fidgety under the cries of sufferers past helping and
the deaths of patients who could not be cured. To cure them!
Not by guess or by the bedside manner or by the laying on of
hands or by waiting for Nature to do it — but how to cure
them! These thoughts made him a bad doctor, because doc-
tors should be sympathetic but not desperate about ills over
which they are powerless. Then, too, Paul Ehrlich was a dis-
gusting doctor because his brain was in the grip of dreams: he
looked at the bodies of his patients: he seemed to see through
their skins: his eyes became super-microscopes that saw the
quivering stuff of the cells of these bodies as nothing more
than complicated chemical formulas. Why of course! Living
human stuff was only a business of benzene rings and side-
chains, just like his dyes! So Paul Ehrlich (caring nothing for
the latest physiological theories) invented a weird old-fash-
ioned life-chemistry of his own; so Paul Ehrlich was anything
but a Great Healer; so he would have been a failure But
he didn’t die!
“I will stain live animals!” he cried. “The chemistry of
animals is like the chemistry of my dyes — staining them while
they are still alive — that will tell me all about them!” So he
took his favorite dye, which was methylene blue, and shot a
little of it into the ear vein of a rabbit. He watched the color
flow through the blood and body of the beast and mysteriously
pick out and paint the living endings of its nerves blue — but
no other part of it! How strange 1 He forgot all about his
fundamental science for a moment. “Maybe methylene blue
kill pa'" then,” he muttered, and he straightway injected
PAUL EHRLICH
338
this blue stuff into groaning patients, and maybe they were
eased a little, but there were difficulties, of a more or less en-
tertaining nature, which maybe frightened the patients — who
can blame them?
He failed to invent a good pain-killer, but from this strange
business of methylene blue pouncing on just one tissue out of
all the hundred different kinds of stuff that living things are
made of, Paul Ehrlich invented a fantastic idea which led him
at last to his magic bullet.
“Here is a dye,” he dreamed, “to stain only one tissue out
of all the tissues of an animal’s body — there must be one to hit
no tissue of men, but to stain and kill the microbes that attack
men.” For fifteen years and more he dreamed that, before
ever he had a chance to try it. . . .
In 1890 Ehrlich came back from Egypt; he had not died
from tuberculosis; Robert Koch shot his terrible cure for con-
sumption into him, still he did not die from tuberculosis — and
presently he went to work in the Institute of Robert Koch in
Berlin, in those momentous days when Behring was massacring
guinea-pigs to save babies from diphtheria and the Japanese
Kitasato was doing miraculous things to mice with lockjaw.
Ehrlich was the life of that grave place! Koch would come
into his pupil’s crammed and topsy-turvy laboratory, that
gleamed and shimmered with rows of bottles of dyes Ehrlich
had no time to use — for you may be sure Koch was Tsar in
that house and thought Ehrlich’s dreams of magic bullets were
nonsense. Robert Koch would come in and say:
“Ja, my dear Ehrlich, what do your experiments tell us to--
day?”
Then would come a geyser of excited explanations from
Paul Ehrlich, who was prying then into the way mice may be-
come immune to those poisons of the beans called the castor
and the jequirity:
“You see, I can measure exactly — it is always the same! —
the amount of poison to kill in forty-eight hours a mouse weigh-
ing ten grams. . . . You know, I can now plot a curve of the
THE MAGIC BULLET
339
way the immunity of my mice increases — it is as exact as ex-
periments in the science of physics. . . . You understand, I
have found how it is this poison kills my mice; it clots his blood
corpuscles inside his arteries 1 That is the whole explanation
of it . . .” and Paul Ehrlich waved test-tubes filled with brick-
red clotted clumps of mouse blood at his famous chief, proving
to him that the amount of poison to clot that blood was just
the amount that would kill the mouse that the blood came from.
Torrents of figures and experiment Paul Ehrlich poured over
Robert Koch
“But wait a moment, my dear Ehrlich! I can’t follow you
— please explain more clearly! ”
“Certainly, Herr Doktor! That I can do right off!” Never
for a moment does Ehrlich stop talking, but grabs a piece of
chalk, gets down on his knees, and scrawls huge diagrams of his
ideas over the laboratory floor — “Now, do you see, is that
clear?”
There was no dignity about Paul Ehrlich ! Neither about his
attitudes, for he would draw pictures of his theories anywhere,
with no more sense of propriety than an annoying little boy,
on his cuffs and the bottoms of shoes, on his own shirt front
to the distress of his wife, and on the shirt fronts of his col-
leagues if they did not dodge fast enough. Nor could you
properly say Paul Ehrlich was dignified about his thoughts, be-
cause, twenty-four hours a day he was having the most out-
rageous thoughts of why we are immune or how to measure
immunity or how a dye could be turned into a magic bullet.
He left a trail of fantastic pictures of those thoughts behind
him everywhere!
Just the same he was the most exact of men in his experi-
ments. He was the first to cry out against the messy ways of
microbe hunters, who searched for truth by pouring a little of
this into some of that, and in that laboratory of Robert Koch
he murdered fifty white mice where one was killed before, try-
ing to dig up simple laws, to be expressed in numbers, that he
felt lay beneath the enigmas of immunity and life and death.
340
PAUL EHRLICH
And that exactness, though it did nothing to answer those
riddles, helped him at last to make the magic bullet.
in
Such was the gayety of Paul Ehrlich, and such his modesty —
for he was always making straight-faced jokes at his own
ridiculousness — that he easily won friends, and he was a crafty
man too and saw to it that certain of these friends were men in
high places. Presently, in 1896, he was director of a laboratory
of his own; it was called the Royal Prussian Institute for
Serum Testing. It was at Steglitz, near Berlin, and it had one
little room that had been a bakery and another little room that
had been a stable. “It is because we are not exact that we
fail!” cried Ehrlich, remembering the bubble of the vaccines
of Pasteur which had burst, and the balloon of the serums of
Behring which had been pricked. “There must be mathemati-
cal laws to govern the doings of these poisons and vaccines and
antitoxins!” he insisted, so this man with the erratic imagina-
tion walked up and down in those two dark rooms, smoking,
explaining, expostulating, and measuring as accurately as God
would let him with drops of poison broth and calibrated tubes
of healing serum.
But laws? He would make an experiment. It would turn
out beautifully. “You see! here is the reason of it!” he would
say, and draw a queer picture of what a toxin must look like
and what the chemistry of a body cell must look like, but as he
went on working, as regiments of guinea-pigs marched to their
doom, Paul Ehrlich found more exceptions to his simple
theories than agreements with them. That didn’t bother him,
for, such was his imagination, that he invented new little sup-
porting laws to take care of the exceptions, he drew stranger
and stranger pictures, until his famous “Side-Chain” theory of
immunity became a crazy puzzle, which could explain hardly
anything, which could predict nothing at all. To his dying day
Paul Ehrlich believed in his silly side-chain theory of immunity;
THE MAGIC BULLET 341
from all parts of the world critics knocked that theory to smith-
ereens — but he never gave it up; when he couldn’t find experi-
ments to destroy his critics he argued at them with enormoui
hair-splittings like Duns Scotus and St. Thomas Aquinas.
When he was beaten in these arguments at medical congresses
it was his custom to curse — gayly — at his antagonist all the
way home. “You see, my dear colleague 1 ” he would cry, “that
man is a SHAMELESS BADGER!” Every few minutes, at
the top of his voice he yelled this, defying the indignant con-
ductor to put him off the train.
So, in 1899, when he was forty-five, if he had died then,
Ehrlich would certainly still have been called a failure. His
efforts to find laws for serums had resulted in a collection of
fantastic pictures that nobody took very seriously, they cer-
tainly had done nothing to turn feebly curative serums into
powerful ones — what to do? First, this to do, thought Ehrlich,
and he pulled his wires and cajoled his influential friends, and
presently the indispensable and estimable Mr. Kadereit, his
chief cook and bottle-washer, was dismounting that laboratory
at Steglitz — they were moving to Frankfort-on-the-Main, away
from the vast medical schools and scientific buzzings of Berlin.
What to do? Well, Frankfort was near those factories where
the master-chemists turned out their endless bouquets of pretty
colors — what could be more important for Paul Ehrlich? Then
there were rich Jews in Frankfort, and these rich Jews were
famous for their public spirit, and money — Geld, that was one
of his four big “G’s,” along with Geduld — patience, Geshick —
cleverness and Gluck — luck, which Ehrlich always said were
needed to find the magic bullet. So Paul Ehrlich came to
Frankfort-on-the-Main, or rather, “WE came to Frankfort-on-
the-Main,” said the valuable Mr. Kadereit, who had the very
devil of a time moving all of those dyes and that litter of be-
penciled and dog-eared chemical journals.
Reading this history, you might think there was only one
good kind of microbe hunter: the kind of searcher who stood
on his own absolutely, who paid little attention to the work of
342
PAUL EHRLICH
other microbe hunters, who read nature and not books. But
Paul Ehrlich was not that kind of man! He rarely observed
nature, unless it was the pet toad in his garden, whose activi-
ties helped Ehrlich to prophesy the weather — it was Mr. Kade-
reit’s first duty to bring plenty of flies to that toad. . . . No,
Paul Ehrlich got his ideas out of books.
He lived among scientific books and subscribed to every
chemical journal in every language he could read, and in sev-
eral he couldn’t read. Books littered his laboratory so that
when visitors came and Ehrlich said: “I beg you, be seated!”
there was no place for them to sit at all. Journals stuck out
of the pockets of his overcoat — when he remembered to wear
one — and the maid, bringing his coffee in the morning, fell over
ever-growing mountains of books in his bedroom. Books, with
the help of those expensive cigars, kept Paul Ehrlich poor.
Mice built nests in the vast piles of books on the old sofa in
his office. When he wasn’t painting the insides of his animals
and the outside of himself with his dyes, he was peering in
these books. And what was important inside of those books,
was in the brain of Paul Ehrlich, ripening, changing itself into
those outlandish ideas of his, waiting to be used. That was
where Paul Ehrlich got his ideas — you would never accuse him
of stealing the ideas of others! — and queer things happened to
those ideas of others when they stewed in Ehrlich’s brain.
So now, in 1901, at the beginning of his eight-year search
for the magic bullet he read of the researches of Alphonse
Laveran. Laveran was the man, you remember, who discov-
ered the malaria microbe, and very lately Laveran had taken
to fussing with trypanosomes. He had shot those finned devils,
which do evil things to the hind-quarters of horses and give
them a disease called the mal de Caderas, into mice. Laveran
had watched those trypanosomes kill those mice, one hundred
times out of one hundred. Then Laveran had injected arsenic
under the skins of some of those suffering mice. That had
helped them a little, and killed many of the trypanosomes that
THE MAGIC BULLET
343
gnawed at them, but not one of these mice ever got really bet-
ter; one hundred out of one hundred died and that was as far
as Alphonse Laveran ever got.
But reading this was enough to get Ehrlich started. “Hoi
here is an excellent microbe to work with! It is large and easy
to see. It is easy to grow in mice. It kills them with the most
beautiful regularity! It always kills mice! What could be a
better microbe than this trypanosome to use to try to find a
magic bullet to cure? Because, if I could find a dye that would
save, completely save, just one mouse!”
IV
So Paul Ehrlich, in 1902, set out on his hunt. He got out
his entire array of gleaming and glittering and shimmering
dyes. “Splen-did!” he cried as he squatted before cupboards
holding an astounding mosaic of sloppy bottles. He provided
himself with plenty of the healthiest mice. He got himself a
most earnest and diligent Japanese doctor, Shiga, to do the
patient job of watching those mice, of snipping a bit off the
ends of their tails to get a drop of blood to look for the trypano-
somes, of snipping another bit off the ends of the same tails to
get a drop of blood to inject into the next mouse — to do the
job, in short, that it takes the industry and patience of a
Japanese to do. The evil trypanosomes of the mal de Caderas
came in a doomed guinea-pig from the Pasteur Institute in
Paris; into the first mouse they went, and the hunt was on.
They tried nearly five hundred dyes! What a completely
unscientific hunter Paul Ehrlich was! It was like the first
boatman hunting for the right kind of wood from which to
make stout oars; it was like primitive blacksmiths clawing
among metals for the best stuff from which to forge swords. It
was, in short, the oldest of all the ways of man to get knowl-
edge. It was the method of Trial and Sweating! Ehrlich
tried; Shiga sweat. Their mice turned blue from this dye
34*
PAUL EHRLICH
and yellow from that one, but the beastly finned trypanosomes
of the mal de Caderas swarmed gayly in their veins, and killed
those mice, one hundred out of every hundred!
That man Ehrlich smoked more of his imported cigars, even
at night in bed he would awake to smoke them; he drank more
mineral water; he read in more books, and he threw books at
the head of poor Kadereit — who heaven knows could not be
blamed for not knowing what dye would kill trypanosomes. He
said Latin phrases; he propounded amazing theories of what
these dyes ought to do. Never had any searcher coined so
many utterly wrong theories. But then, in 1903, came a day
when one of these wrong explanations came to help him.
Ehrlich was testing the pretty-colored but complicated benzo-
purpurin dyes on dying mice, but the mice were dying, with
sickening regularity, from the mal de Caderas. Paul Ehrlich
wrinkled his forehead — already it was like a corrugated iron
roof from the perplexities and failures of twenty years — and
he told Shiga:
“These dyes do not spread enough through the mouse’s
body! Maybe, my dear Shiga, if we change it a little — maybe,
let us say, if we added sulfo-groups to this dye, it would dis-
solve better in the blood of the mouse!” Paul Ehrlich wrin-
kled his brow.
Now, while Paul Ehrlich’s head was an encyclopedia of
chemical knowledge, his hands were not the hands of an expert
chemist. He hated complicated apparatus as much as he loved
complicated theories. He didn’t know how to manage appa-
ratus. He was only a chemical dabbler making endless fussy
little starts with test-tubes, dumping in first this and then that
to change the color of a dye, rushing out of his room to show
the first person he met the result, waving the test-tube at him,
shouting: “You understand? This is splen-didl” But as for
delicate syntheses, those subtle buildings-up and changings of
dyes, that was work for the master chemists. “But we must
change this dye a little — then it will work!” he cried. Now
Paul Ehrlich was a gay man and a most charming one, and pres*
THE MAGIC BULLET
345
ently back from the dye factory near by came that benzo-
purpurin color, with the sulfo-groups properly stuck onto it,
“changed a little.”
Under the skin of two white mice Shiga shot the evil trypano-
somes of the mal de Caderas. A day passes. Two days go by.
The eyes of those mice begin to stick shut with the mucilage of
doom, their hair stands up straight with their dread of destruc-
tion — one day more and it will be all over with both of those
mice. . . . But wait! Under the skin of one of those two mice
Shiga sends a shot of that red dye — changed a little. Ehrlich
watches, paces, mutters, gesticulates, shoots his cuffs. In a few
minutes the ears of that mouse turn red, the whites of his nearly
shut eyes turn pinker than the pink of his albino pupils. That
day is a day of fate for Paul Ehrlich, it is the day the god of
chance is good, for, like snows before the sun of April, so those
fell trypanosomes melt out of the blood of that mouse!
Away they go, shot down by the magic bullet, till the last
one has perished. And the mouse? His eyes open. He snouts
in the shavings in the bottom of his cage and sniffs at the piti-
ful little body of his dead companion, the untreated one.
He is the first one of all mice to fail to die from the attack of
the trypanosome.
Paul Ehrlich, by the grace of persistence, chance, God, and a
dye called “Trypan Red” (its real chemical name would stretch
across this page!) has saved him! How that encouraged this
already too courageous man! “I have a dye to cure a mouse —
I shall find one to save a million men,” so dreamed that con-
fident German Jew.
But not at once, alas and alas. With gruesome diligence
Shiga shot in that trypan red, and some mice got better but
others got worse. One, seeming to be cured, would frisk about
its cage, and then, after sixty days ( ! ) would turn up seedy in
the morning. Snip! went an end off its tail, and the skillful
Shiga would call Paul Ehrlich to see its blood matted with a
writhing swarm of the fell trypanosomes of the mal de Caderas.
Terrible beasts are trypanosomes, sly, tough, as all despicable
346 PAUL EHRLICH
microbes are tough. And among the tough lot of them there
are super-hardy ones. These beasts, when a Jew and a Japa-
nese come along to have at them with a bright-colored dye, lap
up that dye. They like itl Or they retreat discreetly to
some out-of-the-way place in a mouse’s carcass. There they
wait their time to multiply in swarms. . . .
So, for his first little success, Paul Ehrlich paid with a
thousand disappointments. The trypanosome of David Bruce’s
nagana and the deadly trypanosome of human sleeping sick-
ness laughed at that trypan red! They absolutely refused to
be touched by it! Then, what worked so beautifully with
mice, failed completely when they came to try it on white
rats and guinea-pigs and dogs. It was a grinding work, to be
tackled only by such an impatient persistent man as Ehrlich,
for had he not saved one mouse? — What waste! He used
thousands of animals! I used to think, in the arrogance of
my faith in science: “What waste!” But no. Or call it waste
if you like, remembering that nature gets her most sublime re-
sults — so often — by being lavishly wasteful. And then remem-
ber that Paul Ehrlich had learned one lesson: change an appar-
ently useless dye, a little, and it turns from a merely pretty
color into something of a cure. That was enough to drive for-
ward this too confident man.
All the time the laboratory was growing. To the good people
of Frankfort Paul Ehrlich was a savant who understood all
mysteries, who probed all the riddles of nature, who forgot
everything. And how the people of Frankfort loved him for
being so forgetful! It was said that this Herr Professor Dok-
tor Ehrlich had to write himself postal cards several days ahead
to remind himself of festive events in his family. “What a hu-
man being!” they said. “What a deep thinker!” said the cab-
bies who drove him every morning to his Institute. “That
must be a genius!” said the grind-organ musicians whom he
tipped heavily once a week to play dance music in the garden
by the laboratory. “My best ideas come when I hear gay
music like that,” said Paul Ehrlich, who detested all highbrow
Then the rich people worshiped him. A great stroke of luck
came in 1906. Mrs. Franziska Speyer, the widow of the rich
banker, Georg Speyer, gave him a great sum of money to
build the Georg Speyer House, to buy glassware and mice and
expert chemists, who could put together the most complicated
of his darling dyes with a twist of the wrist, who could make
even the crazy drugs that Ehrlich invented on paper. Without
this Mrs. Franziska Speyer, Paul Ehrlich might very well
never have molded those magic bullets, for that was a job —
you can watch what a job! — for a factory full of searchers.
Here in this new Speyer House Ehrlich lorded it over chemists
and microbe hunters like the president of a company that
turned out a thousand automobiles a day. But he was really
old-fashioned, and never pressed buttons. He was always pop-
ping into one or another of the laboratories every conceivable
time of the day, scolding his slaves, patting them on the back,
telling them of howling blunders he himself had made, laugh-
ing when he was told that his own assistants said he was crazy.
He was everywhere! But there was always one way of track-
ing him down, for ever and again his voice could be heard,
bawling down the corridors:
“Ka-de-reitl . . . Ci-gars!” or “Ka-de-reit! . . . Min-er-al
wa-terl”
v
The dyes were a great disappointment. The chemists mut-
tered he was an idiot. But then, you must remember Paul
Ehrlich read books. One day, sitting in the one chair in his
office that wasn’t piled high with them, peering through chem-
ical journals like some Rosicrudan in search of the formula for
the philosopher’s stone, he came across a wicked drug. It was
ratted “Atoxyl” which means: “Not poisonous.” Not poison-
PAUL EHRLICH
348
ous? Atoxyl had almost cured mice with sleeping sickness.
Atoxyl had killed mice without sleeping sickness. Atoxyl had
been tried on those poor darkies down in Africa. It had not
cured them, but an altogether embarrassing number of those
darkies had gone blind, stone blind, from Atoxyl before they
had had time to die from sleeping sickness. So, you see, this
Atoxyl was a sinister medicine that its inventors — had they
been living — should have been ashamed of. It was made of
a benzene ring, which is nothing more than six atoms of carbon
chasing themselves round in a circle like a dog running round
biting the end of his tail, and four atoms of hydrogen, and
some ammonia and the oxide of arsenic — which everybody
knows is poisonous.
“We will change it a little,” said Paul Ehrlich, though he
knew the chemists who had invented Atoxyl had said it was
so built that it couldn’t be changed without spoiling it. But
every afternoon Ehrlich fussed around alone in his chemical
laboratory, which was like no other chemical laboratory in the
world. It had no retorts, no beakers, no flasks nor thermom-
eters nor ovens — no, not even a balance! It was crude as the
prescription counter of the country druggist (who also runs the
postoffice) excepting that in its middle stood a huge table, with
ranks and ranks of bottles — bottles with labels and bottles
without, bottles with scrawled unreadable labels and bottles
whose purple contents had slopped all over the labels. But
that man’s memory remembered what was in every one of those
bottles! From the middle of this jungle of bottles a single
Bunsen burner reared its head and spouted a blue flame. What
chemist would not laugh at this laboratory?
Here Paul Ehrlich dabbled with Atoxyl, shouting: “Splen-
did!”, growling: “Un-be-liev-a-ble!”, dictating to the long-suf-
fering Miss Marquardt, bawling for the indispensable Kade-
reit. In that laboratory, with a chemical cunning the gods
sometimes bestow on searchers who could never be chemists,
Paul Ehrlich found that you can change Atoxyl, not a little but
a lot, that it can be built into heaven knows how many entirely
THE MAGIC BULLET
349
unheard-of compounds of arsenic, without spoiling the com-
bination of benzene and arsenic at all!
“I can change Atoxyl!” Without his hat or coat Ehrlich
hurried out of this dingy room to the marvelous workshop of
Bertheim, chief of his chemist slaves. “Atoxyl can be changed
— maybe we can change it into a hundred, a thousand new
compounds of arsenic 1” he exclaimed. . . . “Now, my dear
Bertheim,” and he poured out a thousand fantastic schemes.
Bertheim? He could not resist that “Now my dear Bert-
heim!”
For the next two years the whole staff, Japs and Germans,
not to mention some Jews, men and white rats and white mice,
not to mention Miss Marquardt and Miss Leupold — and don’t
forget Kadereit! — toiled together in that laboratory which was
like a subterranean forge of imps and gnomes. They tried
this, they did that, with six hundred and six — that is their exact
number — different compounds of arsenic. Such was the power
of the chief imp over them, that this staff never stopped to
think of the absurdity and the impossibility of their job, which
was this: to turn arsenic from a pet weapon of murderers into
a cure which no one was sure could exist for a disease Ehrlich
hadn’t even dreamed might be cured. These slaves worked as
only men can work when they are inspired by a wrinkle-browed
fanatic with kind gray eyes.
They changed Atoxyl! They developed marvelous com-
pounds of arsenic which — hurrah! — would really cure mice.
“We have it!” the staff would be ready to shout, but then,
worse luck, when the fell trypanosomes of the mal de Caderas
had gone, those marvelous cures turned the blood of the cured
mice to water, or killed them with a fatal jaundice. . . . And
— who would believe it? — some of those arsenic remedies made
mice dance, not for a minute but for the rest of their live9
round and round they whirled, up and down they jumped.
Satan himself could not have schemed a worse torture for crea-
tures just saved from death. It seemed ridiculous, hopeless,
to try to find a perfect cure. But Paul Ehrlich? He wrote:
350
PAUL EHRLICH
“It is very interesting that the only damage to the mice is
that they become dancing mice. Those who visit my labora-
tory must be impressed by the great number of dancing mice
it entertains. . . .” He was a sanguine man!
They invented countless compounds, and it was a business
for despair. There was that strange affair of the arsenic fast-
ness. When Ehrlich found that one big dose of a compound
was too dangerous for his beasts, he tried to cure them by
giving them a lot of little doses. But, curse it! The trypano-
somes became immune to the arsenic, and refused to be killed
off at all, and the mice died in droves. . . .
Such was the grim procession through the first five hundred
and ninety-one compounds of arsenic. Paul Ehrlich kept
cheering himself by telling himself fairy stories of marvelous
new cures, stories that God and all nature could prove were
lies. He drew absurd diagrams for Bertheim and the staff, pic-
tures of imaginary arsenical remedies that they in their expert
wisdom knew it was impossible to make. Everywhere he made
pictures for his boys — who knew more than he did — on innu-
merable reams of paper, on the menu cards of restaurants and
on picture post cards in beer halls. His men were aghast at his
neglect of the impossible; they were encouraged by his in-
domitable mulishness. They said : “He is so enthusiastic! ” and
became enthusiastic with him. So, burning his candle at both
ends, Paul Ehrlich came, in 1909, to his day of days.
VI
Burning his candle at both ends, for he was past fifty and
his time was short, Paul Ehrlich stumbled onto the famous
preparation 606 — though you understand he could never have
found it without the aid of that expert, Bertheim. Product of
the most subtle chemical synthesis was this 606, dangerous to
mak e because of the peril of explosions and fire from those con-
stantly present ether vapors, and so hard to keep — the least
THE MAGIC BULLET 351
trace of air changed it from a mild stuff to a terrible poison.
That was the celebrated preparation 606, and it rejoiced
in the name: “Dioxy-diamino-arsenobenzol-dihydro-chloride.”
Its deadly effect on trypanosomes was as great as its name was
long. At a swoop one shot of it cleaned those fell trypano-
somes of the mal de Caderas out of the blood of a mouse — a
wee bit of it cleaned them out without leaving a single one to
carry news or tell the story. And it was safe! So safe —
though it was heavily charged with arsenic, that pet poison of
murderers. It never made mice blind, it never turned their
blood to water, they never danced — it was safe!
“Those were the days!” muttered old Kadereit, long after.
Already in those days he was growing stiff, but how he stumped
about taking care of the “Father.” “Those were the days,
when we discovered the 606!” And they were the days — for
what more hectic days (always excepting the days of Pasteur)
in the whole history of microbe hunting? 606 was safe, 606
would cure the mal de Caderas, which was nice for mice and
the hindquarters of horses, but what next? Next was that Paul
Ehrlich made a lucky stab, that came from reading a theory
with no truth in it. First Paul Ehrlich read — it had happened
in 1906 — of the discovery by the German zoologist, Schaudinn,
of a thin pale spiral-shaped microbe that looked like a cork-
screw without a handle. (It was a fine discovery and Fritz
Schaudinn was a fantastic fellow, who drank and saw weird
visions. I wish I could tell you more of him.) Schaudinn spied
out this pale microbe looking like a corkscrew without a han-
dle. He named it the Spirocheta pallida. He proved that this
was the cause of the disease of the loathsome name.
Of course Paul Ehrlich (who knew everything) read about
that, but it particularly stuck in Ehrlich’s memory that Schau-
dinn had said: “This pale spirochete belongs to the animal
kingdom, it is not like the bacteria. Indeed, it is closely re-
lated to the trypanosomes. . . . Spirochetes may sometimes
turn into trypanosomes. . .
352
PAUL EHRLICH
Now, it was hardly more than a guess of that romantic
Schaudinn that spirochetes had anything to do with trypano-
somes, but it set Paul Ehrlich aflame.
“If the pale spirochete is a cousin of the trypanosome of the
mal de Caderas — then 606 ought to hit that spirochete. . . .
What kills trypanosomes should kill their cousins!” Paul
Ehrlich was not bothered by the fact that there was no proof
these two microbes were cousins. . . . Not he. So he marched
towards his day of days.
He gave vast orders. He smoked more strong cigars each
day. Presently regiments of fine male rabbits trooped into
the Georg Speyer House in Frankfort-on-the-Main, and with
these creatures came a small and most diligent Japanese mi-
crobe hunter, S. Hata. This S. Hata was accurate. He was
capable. He could stand the strain of doing the same experi-
ment a dozen times over and he could, so nimble was this
S. Hata, do a dozen experiments at the same time. So he
suited the uses of Ehrlich, who was a thorough man, do not
forget it!
Hata started out by doing long tests with 606 on spirochetes
not so pale or so dangerous. There was that spirochete fatal
to chickens. . . . The results? “Un-heard ... of ! In-cred-
i-ble!” shouted Paul Ehrlich. Chickens and roosters whose
blood swarmed with that microbe received their shot of 606.
Next day the chickens were clucking and roosters strutting —
it was superb. But that disease of the loathsome name?
On the 31st of August, 1909, Paul Ehrlich and Hata stood
before a cage in which sat an excellent buck rabbit. Flourish-
ing in every way was this rabbit, excepting for the tender skin
of his scrotum, which was disfigured with two terrible ulcers,
each bigger than a twenty-five-cent piece. These sores were
caused by the gnawing of the pale spirochete of the disease that
is the reward of sin. They had been put under the skin of that
rabbit by S. Hata a month before. Under the microscope —
it was a special one built for spying just such a thin rogue as
that pale microbe — under this lens Hata put a wee drop of the
THE MAGIC BULLET
353
fluid from these ugly sores. Against the blackness of the dark
field of this special microscope, gleaming in a powerful beam
of light that hit them sidewise, shooting backwards and for-
wards like ten thousand silver drills and augers, played
myriads of these pale spirochetes. It was a pretty picture, to
hold you there for hours, but it was sinister — for what living
things can bring worse plague and sorrow to men?
Hata leaned aside. Paul Ehrlich looked down the shiny
tube. Then he looked at Hata, and then at the rabbit.
“Make the injection,” said Paul Ehrlich. And into the ear-
vein of that rabbit went the clear yellow fluid of the solution
of 606, for the first time to do battle with the disease of the
loathsome name.
Next day there was not one of those spiral devils to be
found in the scrotum of that rabbit. His ulcers? They were
drying already! Good clean scabs were forming on them. In
less than a month there was nothing to be seen but tiny scabs —
it was like a cure of Bible times — no less! And a little while
after that Paul Ehrlich could write:
“It is evident from these experiments that, if a large enough
dose is given, the spirochetes can be destroyed absolutely and
immediately with a single injection !”
This was Paul Ehrlich’s day of days. This was the magic
bullet! And what a safe bullet! Of course there was no
danger in it — look at all these cured rabbits! They had never
turned a hair when Hata shot into their ear-veins doses of 606
three times as big as the amount that surely and promptly
cured them. It was more marvelous than his dreams, which
all searchers in Germany had smiled at. Now he would laugh!
“It is safe!” shouted Paul Ehrlich, and you can guess what
visions floated into that too confident man’s imagination. “It
is safe — perfectly safe!” he assured every one. But at night,
sitting in the almost unbreathable fog of cigar smoke in his
study, alone, among those piles of books and journals that
heaped up fantastic shadows round him, sitting there before
the pads of blue and green and yellow and orange note paper
354 PAUL EHRLICH
on which every night he scrawled hieroglyphic directions for
the next day’s work of his scientific slaves, Paul Ehrlich, noted
as a man of action, whispered:
“Is it safe?”
Arsenic is the favorite poison of murderers. . . . “But how
wonderfully we have changed it!” Paul Ehrlich protested.
What saves mice and rabbits might murder men. . . . “The
step from the laboratory to the bedside is dangerous — but it
must be taken!” answered Paul Ehrlich. You remember his
gray eyes, that were so kind.
But, heigho! Here was the next morning, the brave light of
the bright morning. Here was the laboratory with its cured
rabbits, here was that wizard, Bertheim — how he had twisted
that arsenic through all these six hundred and six compounds.
That man could not go wrong. So many of them had been
dangerous that this six hundred and sixth one must be safe.
. . . Bravo! Here was the mixed good smell of a hundred
experimental animals and a thousand chemicals. Here were
all these men and women, how they believed in him! So, let’s
go! Let us try it!
At bottom Paul Ehrlich was a gambler, as who of the great
line of the microbe hunters has not been?
And before that sore on the scrotum of the first rabbit had
shed its last scab, Paul Ehrlich had written to his friend, Dr.
Konrad Alt: “Will you be so good as to try this new prepara-
tion, 606, on human beings with syphilis?”
Of course Alt wrote back: “Certainly!” which any German
doctor — for they are right hardy fellows — would have replied.
Came 1910, and that was Paul Ehrlich’s year. One day,
that year, he walked into the scientific congress at Koenigs-
berg, and there was applause. It was frantic, it was long, you
would think they were never going to let Paul Ehrlich say his
say. He told of how the magic bullet had been found at last.
He told of the terror of the disease of the loathsome name, of
those sad cases that went to horrible disfiguring death, or to
what was worse — the idiot asylums. They went there in spite
THE MAGIC BULLET
3S5
of mercury — mercury fed them and rubbed into them and shot
into them until their teeth were like to drop out of their gums.
He told of such cases given up to die. One shot of the com-
pound six hundred and six, and they were up, they were on
their feet. They gained thirty pounds. They were clean once
more — their friends would associate with them again. . . .
Paul Ehrlich told, that day, of healings that could only be
called Biblical! Of a wretch, so dreadfully had the pale spi-
rochetes gnawed at his throat that he had had to be fed liquid
food through a tube for months. One shot of the 606, at two
in the afternoon, and at supper time that man had eaten a
sausage sandwich! There were poor women, innocent suffer-
ers from the sins of their men — there was one woman with
pains in her bones, such pains she had been given morphine
every night for years, to give her a little sleep. One shot of
compound six hundred and six. She had gone to sleep, quiet
and deep, with no morphine, that very night. It was Biblical,
no less. It was miraculous — no drug nor herb of the old
women and priests and medicine men of the ages had ever
done tricks like that. No serum nor vaccine of the modem
microbe hunters could come near to the beneficent slaughter-
ings of the magic bullet, compound six hundred and six.
Never was there such applause.
Never has it been better earned, for that day Paul Ehrlich
— forget for a moment the false hopes raised and the troubles
that followed — that day Paul Ehrlich had led searchers around
a corner.
But, to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
What is true in the realm of lifeless things is true in the lives
of such men as Paul Ehrlich. The whole world bawled for
salvarsan. That was what Ehrlich — we must forgive him his
grandiloquence — called compound six hundred and six. Then,
in the laboratory of the Georg Speyer House, Bertheim and
ten assistants — worn these fellows were before they started it
— turned out hundreds of thousands of doses of this marvelous
stuff. They did the job of a chemical factory in their small
PAUL EHRLICH
356
laboratory, in the dangerous fumes of ether, in the fear that
one little slip might rob a hundred men and women of life, for
it was two-edged stuff, that salvarsan. And Ehrlich? Now
he was only a shell of a man, with diabetes — and why did he
keep on smoking more cigars? — now Ehrlich burned the candle
in the middle.
He was everywhere in the Georg Speyer House. He directed
the making of compounds that would be still more wonderful
— so he hoped. He chased around so that even Kadereit
couldn’t keep track of him. He dictated hundreds of enthusi-
astic letters to Martha Marquardt, he read thousands of letters
from every corner of the world, he kept records, careful rec-
ords they were too, of every one of the sixty-five thousand
doses of salvarsan injected in the year 1910. He kept them —
this was like that strangely systematic man! — on a big sheet
of paper tacked to the inside of the cupboard door of his office,
from the top to the bottom of that door in tiny scrawls, so that
he had constantly to squat on his heels or stretch up on tiptoe
and strain his eyes to read them.
As the list grew, there were records of most extraordinary
cures, but there were reports it was not pleasant to read, too,
records that told of hiccups and vomitings and stiffenings of
legs and convulsions and death — every now and then a death
in people who had no business dying, coming right after in-
jections of the salvarsan.
How he worked to explain them! How he wore himself to
a shred to avoid them, for Paul Ehrlich was not a hard-boiled
man. He made experiments; he conducted immense corre-
spondences in which he asked minute questions of just how
the injections had been made. He devised explanations, on
the margins of the playing cards he used for his games of soli-
taire each evening, on the backs of those blood-and-thunder
murder mysteries that were the one thing he read — so he im-
agined — to rest. But he never rested! Those disasters pur-
sued him and marred his triumph. . . .
The wrinkles deepened to ditches on his forehead. The
THE MAGIC BULLET
357
circles darkened under those gray eyes that still, but not so
often, danced with that owlish humor.
So this compound six hundred and six, saving its thousands
from death, from insanity, from the ostracism worse than death
that came to those sufferers whose bodies the pale spirochete
gnawed until they were things for loathing, this 606 began
killing its tens. Paul Ehrlich wore his too feeble body to a
shadow, trying to explain a mystery too deep for explanation.
There is no light on that mystery now, ten years after
Ehrlich smoked the last of his black cigars. So it was
that this triumph of Paul Ehrlich was at the same time the last
disproof of his theories, which were so often wrong. “Com-
pound six hundred and six unites chemically with the spiro-
chetes and kills them — it does not unite chemically with the
human body and so can do no damage!” That had been his
theory. . . .
But alas! What is the chemistry of what this subtle 606
does to the still more subtle — and unknown — machine that is
the human body? Nothing is known about it even now.
Paul Ehrlich paid the penalty for his fault — which may be for-
given him seeing the blessings he has brought to men — his
fault of not foreseeing that once in every so many thou-
sands of bodies a magic bullet may shoot two ways.
But then, the microbe hunters of the great line have always
been gamblers: let us think of the good brave adventurer Paul
Ehrlich was and the thousands he has saved.
Let us remember him, trail-breaker who turned a cor-
ner for microbe hunters and started them looking for magic
bullets. Already (though it is too soon to tell the whole story)
certain obscure searchers, some of them old slaves of Paul Ehr-
lich, sweating in the great dye factories of Elberfeld, have hit
upon a most fantastical drug. Its chemistry is kept a secret.
It is called “Bayer 205.” It is a mild mysterious powder that
cures the hitherto always fatal sleeping sickness of Rhodesia
and Nyassaland. That was the ill, you remember, that the hard
man. David Bruce, fought his last fight, in vain, to prevent.
PAUL EHRLICH
358
It does outlandish things to the cells and fluids of the human
body — you would say they were fibs and fairy tales if you
heard the queer things that drug can do! But what is best, it
slaughters microbes! It kills them beautifully, precisely, with
a completeness that must make Paul Ehrlich wriggle in his
grave — and when it doesn’t kill microbes it tames them.
It is as sure as the sun following the dawn of to-morrow that
there will be other microbe hunters to mold other magic bul-
lets, surer, safer, bullets to wipe out for always the most malig-
nant microbes of which this history has told. Let us remem-
ber Paul Ehrlich, who broke this trail. . . .
This plain history would not be complete if I were not to
make a confession, and that is this: that I love these microbe
hunters, from old Antony Leeuwenhoek to Paul Ehrlich. Not
especially for the discoveries they have made nor for the boons
they have brought mankind. No. I love them for the men
they are. I say they are, for in my memory every man jack of
them lives and will survive until this brain must stop remem-
bering.
So I love Paul Ehrlich — he was a gay man who carried his
medals about with him all mixed up in a box never knowing
which ones to wear on what night. He was an impulsive man
who has, on occasion, run out of his bedroom in his shirt tail
to greet a fellow microbe hunter who came to call him out for
an evening of wassail.
And he was an owlish man! “You say a great work of the
mind, a wonderful scientific achievement?” he repeated after a
worshiper who told him that was what the discovery of 606
was.
“My dear colleague,” said Paul Ehrlich, “for seven years
of misfortune I had one moment of good luck!”
END OF
Microbe Hunters
INDEX
Academie Fran$aise, 168
Academy of Medicine, 146, 147, 155,
157
Academy of Sciences, French, 25, 37,
67, 69, 73, 86, 149, 156, 157
Agramonte, A., 314
Alexander, servant of Th. Smith,
237 , 239, 244
Alexander, the Great, 10
Alt, K., 354
Anthrax, 108-122; Koch proves mi-
crobe cause of, 115
Antitoxin, diphtheria, 198-206; first
produced in America by Park,
201 ; first tried on child, 201 ;
Roux announces cure by, 204, 205
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 341
Aristotle, 7, 27
Arrhenius, Svante, 56
Arsenic, changed by Ehrlich into
magic bullet, 349-355
Atoxyl, Ehrlich’s experiments with,
347-349
Balard, Prof., 80, 81, 82, 83, 101
Baptist, John the, 91
Bassi, Laura, 28
Bastianelli, Dr., 304-305
Baumgarten, J., 220
Bayer, 205; new magic bullet, 357,
358
Beer, diseases of, 9 7, 98
Beethoven, 55, 175, 222, 236, 250
Behring E., 184-206 ; attempts chem-
ical cure of diphtheria, 195; dis-
covers diphtheria antitoxin, 198-
200; other references, 220, 234,
338, 340
Bernard, Claude, 73, 101
Bertheim, A., 349, 354, 355
Bignami, 304-305
Bigo, M., 64, 69
Biot, the horse doctor, conversion of,
by Pasteur, 163
Bloxam, Rosa, 281
Bonnet, Charles, 33, 47, 51
Bordet, J., 226-227
Bourrel, the horse doctor, 170
Boyle, Robert, 8, 19
Bruce, David, 252-277 ; discovers
359
microbe Malta fever, 254; dis-
covers trypanosome of nagana,
257 ; discovers trypanosome of
sleeping sickness, 264-266; other
references to, 235, 278, 346, 357;
proof tsetse fly carries nagana,
259-262; proves tsetse fly carries
sleeping sickness, 267-270 ; surgeon
at siege of Ladysmith, 262
Bruce, Lady, 252-277
Buffon, Count, 36, 42
Bux, Mahomed, 292, 293
Carroll, J., 311-333; bitten by yel-
low fever mosquito, 318 ; death of,
332
Carter, H. R., 316
Castellani, A., 264, 265
Chaillou, M., 203
Chamberland, M., work with Pas-
teur on anthrax and rabies, 147-
182, 221
Chappuis, Charles, 60
Charles II, of England, 8
Child-bed Fever, Pasteur discovers
cause of, 146
Cholera, Asiatic, 140-143; Metchni-
koff feeds microbes of, to self
and assistants, 225
Cholera, of chickens, vaccine dis-
covered for, 152-156
Claus, Prof., coins term “phago-
cyte” for Metchnikoff, 214
Cohn, F., 120, 122, 123
Cohnheim, J., 121, 122, 123, I2&
129
Cooke, Dr., 325, 328
Cromwell, 7
Darwin, 209, 233
Davaine, Dr. C., 109
Dean, Wm., bitten by yellow fever
mosquito, 319
De Blowitz, 160, 162, 164
De Graaf, Regnier, 8
De la Rochette, Baron, 158
De la Tour, Cagniard, experiments
on alcoholic fermentation, 60, 6i,
65
De Saussure, 51, 54
360
INDEX
Diphtheria, 184-206; antitoxin dis-
covered by Behring, 198-206; mi-
crobe of, discovered, 185-187; new
method of prevention, 206; toxin
discovered by Roux, 189-193
Dostoevski, F., 207
Duclaux, E., 88, 89, 90, 94
Dumas, A., 87
Dumas, J. B., 60, 69, 73, 91, 92, 96,
156
Duns Scotus, 341
Edison, T. A., 287
Ehrenberg, 59
Ehrlich, Paul, 334-358 ; announces
cure human syphilis by salvarsan,
355; attempts to find law of im-
munity, 339; changes arsenic into
magic bullet, 349-355 ; cures syph-
ilis of rabbits, 353 ; discovers
chemical cure for mal de caderas,
343-345 ; discovers salvarsan
(606), 350-356; experiments with
atoxyl, 347-349; invents stain for
tubercle microbe, 336 ; other refer-
ences to, 121, 194; side chain the-
ory of immunity, 340 ; worries
over deaths from salvarsan, 356-
35?
Ellis, 52, 53, 54
Evolution, theory of organic, 78 ;
championed by Metchnikoff, 209
Faraday, Michael, 56, 64
Fehleisen, F., discovers microbe of
erysipelas, 139
Fermentation, 60; alcoholic, 60, 61,
7i, 72, 73, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103;
lactic, 64, 65, 66, 67
Finlay, Carlos, 312, 313, 315, 316,
324
Fischer, Emil, 56
Flaubert, E., 228
Folk, L., 325, 327 , 328
Force, vegetative, 37 e t seq.
Fraatz, Emmy, 105
Frederick, the Great, 45
Fremy, M., 99, 100, 101
Gaffky, G., 129, 131, 132, 138, 141
Galileo, 4, 26, 27, 63, 163
Gamaleia, Dr., 217, 219, 224
Garre, Dr., injects self with dan-
gerous microbes, 139
Germ theory, battle of, 124
Gemez, M., 94, 95
Gibbons, Staff- Sergeant, 264
Goethe, W.. 198, 222
Gorgas, W. G, 329, 330
Grancher, Dr., 179
Grassi, B., 298-310; other references
to, 235, 278, 279, 288, 315, 328;
practical demonstration malaria
prevention, 307; proves anopheles
mosquito carries human malaria,
301-306
Grew, Nehemiah, 16
Guerin, J., 155, 156, 157
Guiteras, J., death of yellow fever
patients in experiments, 330, 331
Hanging drop, invention of, 113, 114
Harvey, William, 19
Hata, S., 352, 353
Hely-Hutchinson, Sir W., 255, 259,
262
Homer, 28, 55
Hoogvliet, 24
Hooke, Robert, 16
Immunity, 207-229; due to phago-
cytes, 212-229; Ehrlich attempts
find law of, 339 ; side-chain theory
of, 340
Inquisition, Grand, 27
Institut Pasteur, 181, 187, 217, 218,
222
Invisible College, The, 7, 27
Jenner, E., 155
Jernegan, W., 325, 327, 328
Joly, M., 85, 86
Joseph II, of Austria, 49
Joubert, Prof., 147
Kadereit, 342, 344, 347, 348, 349, 356
Kagwa, Apolo, 268, 269, 270, 271,
272
Khan, Husein, as experimental ani-
mal for Ross, 288, 289
Kilborne, F. L., 237-251
Kissenger, Private, 322, 324, 326;
paralysis of, from yellow fever
experiment, 333 ; volunteers for
mosquito bite, 323
Kitasato, S., 194, 338
Koch, Mrs., 106, 107, no, III, 300
Koch, Robert, 1 05-144 ; dangerous
experiments with tuberculosis,
136; discovers microbe of cholera,
1 40- 143 ; experiments with an-
thrax, 108-128; failure to cure tu-
berculosis with vaccine, 193, 194,
299 ; first photographs microbes,
123; invention of hanging drop,
1 13, 1 14; other references to, 24,
INDEX 3W
104, 145, 146, 147, 148, 166, 167,
168, 184, 185, 193, 194, 198, 200,
209, 2 II, 219, 234, 236, 237, 238,
250, 297, 299, 300, 304, 305, 314,
323, 335, 336, 338, 339; proves
microbe cause of anthrax, 115;
pure culture microbes discovered,
125, 126; works on cause of tu-
berculosis, 128-138
Laveran, A., discovers malaria para-
site, 281 ; microbe of, demonstrated
by Manson to Ross, 282 ; other
references to, 296, 342, 343
Lavoisier, A., 77
Lazear, J., 31 1-333 ; bitten by yellow
fever mosquito, 318; died of yel-
low fever, 320
Lazear, Mrs. J., 312
Leeuwenhoek, Antony, 3-24; an ad-
mirer of God, 12; discovers hu-
man sperm, 19; discovers mi-
crobes, 10, 11, 12; discovers mi-
crobes in mouth, 17, 18; experi-
ments on origin of microbes, 13;
failure to find disease microbes,
22 ; letters to Liebniz, 23 ; letters
to Royal Society, 9; microbes in
pepper water, 14; other references
to, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 44, 51, 61,
76, 77, 106, 108, 109, hi, 1 14, 128,
137, 138, 209, 228, 250, 334, 358
Leibniz, Gottfried W., 23
Leucart, R., 209
Leupold, 349
Le Verrier, 83
Liebig, J., 70, 73
Linnaeus, 59
Lister, J., 100, 106, 182
Loeffler, F., discovers diphtheria mi-
crobe, 185-187 ; foretells diph-
theria toxin, 187 ; other references
to, 129, 131, 132, 138, 188, 189,
, 193, 331
Louvrier, the horse doctor, 149-150
Lutchman, 287
Maillot, M., 94
Maisonneuve, Dr., 231
Malaria, 278-310; human, Grassi
proves carried by anopheles mos-
quito, 301-306; Manson’s theory
mosquito carries, 283 ; of birds
carried by gray mosquito, 292-298 ;
prevention of practical demonstra-
tion of, by Grassi, 307
Mai de caderas, 342-350; Ehrlich
cures by chemical. 343-345
Malta Fever, Bruce discovers mi-
crobe of, 254 ff.
Manson, Patrick, 282-298, 315; an-
nounces Ross's success at Edin-
burgh, 296, 297; other references
to, 235; theory mosquitoes carry
malaria, 283
Maria Theresa, 45
Marquardt, M., 348, 349, 356
Martin, M., 203
Meister, Joseph, vaccination of, for
rabies, 179
Metchnikoff, E., 207-233 ; acquires
drug habit, 210; assistants of,
Blagovestchensky, Gheorgiewski,
Hugenschmidt, Saltykoff, Sawt-
chenko, Wagner, 222, 223; at-
tempts suicide, 210; attempts to
prolong life, 228-233; champions
theory of evolution, 209; comedy
of Bulgarian bacilli, 232-233 ;
feeds cholera to self and assistants,
225 ; founds phagocyte theory,
214-229 ; nicknamed “God-is-not,”
207; nicknamed “Mamma Metch-
nikoff, ” 222; nicknamed “Grandpa
Christmas,” 228; other references
to, 187, 234; starts circus at Pas-
teur Institute, 219-220; syphilis,
prevented by, 229-232
Metchnikoff, Ludmilla, 210, 21 1
Metchnikoff, Olga, 21 1, 212, 213,
214, 219, 220, 228, 233
Microbes, origin of, 13, 31 ; Bruce
discovers Malta fever, 254 ; of
diphtheria discovered by Loeffler,
185-187; of Texas fever discov-
ered by Th. Smith, 244; of the
air, 83, 84, 85, 86; of tuberculosis
discovered by Koch, 128-138; pure
culture discovered, 125, 126; spon-
taneous generation of, 31, 32, 33,
38, 39, 40, 4 2 , 43. 44. 78, 79. 86, 97
Molyneux, 16
Moran, John, 322, 327, 328; volun-
teers for mosquito bite, 322, 323
Mosquito, gray carries bird malaria,
292-298; anopheles carries human
malaria, 301-306; stegomyia car-
ries yellow fever, 317-329
Mozart, W., 222, 280
Musset, M., 85, 86
Nabarro, 264
Nagana, 255-262 ; trypanosome of,
discovered by Bruce, 257; tsetse
fly carries, 259-262
Napoleon I, 55# 5&
INDEX
362
Napoleon III, 86
Needham, John T., experiments on
spontaneous generation of mi-
crobes, 31 et seq .
Newton, Isaac, 8, 19, 27, 36, 63, 64
250, 280
Nocard, M., 177
Pasteur, Louis, 57-104, 145-183; al-
coholic fermentation by yeast, 71,
72, 73, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103; as
a chemist, 61 ; a violent patriot,
97; boyhood experience with mad
wolf, 57, 170; death of, 181, 182;
disasters with anthrax vaccine,
165, 166; discovers anthrax vac-
cine, 157-164; discovers vaccine
for chicken cholera, 152-156; dis-
eases of wines, 88, 89, 90; experi-
ments on spontaneous generation,
78, 79 ; experiments with lactic
fermentation, 64, 65, 66, 67; ex-
periments with microbes of the
air, 83, 84, 85, 86; inspirational
letters to sisters, 59, 60 ; last
speech of, 182, 183; other refer-
ences to, 23, 24, 56, 105, 106, 107,
108, 109, 1 16, 121, 122, 123, 128,
132, 138, 139, 140, 141, 184, 187,
188, 193, 203, 21 1, 216, 218, 221,
228, 230, 234, 238, 250, 279, 312,
335, 340 ; press agent for microbes,
63, 73, 77, 87. 90; quarrel with
Bernard, 101, 102, 103 ; quarrels
with Koch, 167, 168; rabies vac-
cine discovered by, 169-181 ; reli-
gious philosophy of, 79; saves
Russian peasants from rabies, 180,
181 ; work on diseases of beer, 97 ;
work on diseases of silkworms,
91-97
Pasteurization, 90
Pasteur, Madame, 62, 63, 66, 68, 69,
72, 103, 151, 1 77, 182
Park, W. H., 201, 206
Peronqito, Dr., 152
Peter, the Great, 19
Pettenkofer, Max, swallows Koch's
cholera culture, 133, 134
Phagocytes, discovered by Metchni-
koff, 214-229 ; immunity due to,
212-229
Pidoux, Dr., theory of consumption,
i°8
Pompadour, Madame de, 27
Pouchet, M., 85, 86
Pouilly-le-Fort, famous experiment
of, 159-164
Prolongation of life, attempted by
Metchnikoff, 228-233
Prometheus, 163
Purboona, 292
Putrefaction, caused by microbes,
61
Rabelais, 166
Rabies, 169-181
Rayer, M., 109
Reaumur, Rene, 25
Redi, Francesco, 30, 35
Reed, W., 3H-333J death of, 333;
disproves infected clothing theory,
324, 325, 326; fails to find mi-
crobe of yellow fever, 314, 315;
other references to, 235; proves
stegomyia mosquito carries yellow
fever, 317-329
Renan, E., praises and admonishes
Pasteur, 168, 169
Ross, Ronald, 278-298 ; attempts
proof Manson's mosquito theory,
297, 298; discovers gray
mosquito carries bird malaria, 292-
298; discovers malaria pigment in
mosquito stomach, 289 ; meets
Patrick Manson, 282; other refer-
ences to, 309, 315
Rossignol, Dr., 158
Roux, E., 184-206; announces cures
by antitoxin at Budapest, 204, 205 ;
discovers diphtheria toxin, 189-
193; other references to, 69, 147-
182, 217, 221, 229, 230, 231, 234;
syphilis prevented by, 229-232
Royal Society, 8, 25, 31, 32, 37; as
audience for Leeuwenhoek, 9, 13,
I 5> 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 24; confirm
Leeuwenhoek's discovery of mi-
crobes, 16; elect Leeuwenhoek
Fellow, 16
Russian peasants, saved by Pasteur
180-181
Ruth, Babe, 237
Rutherford, Ernest, 56
Salmon, D. E., 237, 238, 242
Salvarsan (606), discovered by Ehr-
lich, 350-356; deaths from, 356-
357; Ehrlich cures human syphilis
with, 355; Ehrlich cures syphilis
of rabbits with, 353
Sand, George, 87
Schaudinn, F., discovers Spirocheta
pallida f 351
Schwann, Th., experiments on pu-
trefaction by microbes, 61, 76
INDEX
Semmelweis, I., 145
Servetus, 4, 27
Shiga, I., 343, 344, 345
Silkworms, diseases of, 91-97
Sleeping sickness, 263-277 ; Bruce
proves tsetse fly carries, 267-270;
trypanosome of, discovered, 264-
266
Smiles, Dr., 96
Smith, Th., 236-251; discovers mi-
crobe of Texas fever, 244; first
experiments with Texas fever,
240; other references to, 252, 255,
259, 270, 278, 299, 315; Proves
ticks carry Texas fever, 246
Socrates, 166
Sola, Mr., experimental animal for
Grassi, 303, 304, 328
Spallanzani, Lazzaro, 25-56; accused
of theft from museum, 49, 50, 51 ;
bladder of, preserved, 55; experi-
ments cruelly on self, 41 ; experi-
ments on multiplication of mi-
crobes, 53, 54 J experiments on
spontaneous generation of mi-
crobes, 32, 33, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43,
44; other references to, 24, 57, 61,
76, 77, 78, 79, 123, 128, 298; proves
microbes may live without air, 47 ;
studies on sex, 41
Spanish immigrants, Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4,
323, 324, 326, 332
Speyer, F., 347
Speyer, G., 347
Spirocheta pallida, discovered by
Schaudinn, 351
Spontaneous generation, 28, 30, 31,
32, 33, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 78,
79, 86, 97
Syphilis, 229-232 ; human, cure of, by
salvarsan, 355; of rabbits cured
by Ehrlich's salvarsan, 353; pre-
vention of, by Roux and Metchni-
koff, 229-232
Taute, injects self with nagana, 276
Texas fever, 238-251 ; Th. Smith
discovers microbe of, 244
Thuillier, L., killed in experiments
with cholera, 141 ; other references
to, 161, 164, 165, 173
Tick, of Texas fever, 239-251 ;
Smith proves carries Texas fever,
246
363
Toxin, of diphtheria, 187-206; dis-
covered by Roux, 189-193; fore-
told by Loeffler, 187
Trecul, M., 99
Trypan red, discovered by Ehrlich,
345 ; fails to cure nagana and
sleeping sickness, 346
Trypanosome, of nagana, 257-262;
of mal de caderas, 342-352; of
sleeping sickness discovered by
Bruce, 264-266
Tsetse fly, carries nagana, 259-262;
Bruce proves, carries sleeping
sickness, 267-27 0
Tuberculosis, 128-138; Koch's dan-
gerous experiments with, 136;
Koch discovers microbe of, 128-
138; Koch's failure to cure with
vaccine, 193, 194 299
Tulloch, killed by sleeping sickness,
272
Tyndall, John, disproof of spon-
taneous generation of microbes, 86
Vaccines, anthrax, 157-164; chicken
cholera, 152-156; famous Pouilly-
le-Fort experiment with, 159-164;
Koch’s failure with tuberculosis
vaccine, 193, 194, 299; rabies, 169-
181 ; smallpox, 155
Vallisnieri, 26
Vercel, J., 179
Villemin, J. A., 128
Virchow, R., 127, 137, 214
Volta, Canon, 49, 50, 51
Voltaire, 27, 41, 50
Vulpian, Dr., 179
Wahab, Abdul, 286
Waldeyer, W., 336
Wassermann, Reaction, principle
discovered by Bordet, 226
Wines, diseases of, 88, 89, 90
Wood, Gen. Leonard, 313, 321
Yellow fever, 31 1-333; disproof of
infected clothing theory, 324-326;
failure of Reed to find microbe
of, 314, 315; Reed proves stego-
myia mosquito carries, 317-329
Yersin, A., 188-192
Zanzarone, popular name for anophe-
les, 302-308
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