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Title: Microbe hunters
Author: Paul de Kruif
Release date: February 2, 2026 [eBook #77842]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1926
Credits: Dori Allard, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MICROBE HUNTERS ***
Transcriber’s Note: Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by
_underscores_.
MICROBE HUNTERS
MICROBE HUNTERS
_by_
PAUL DE KRUIF
“The gods are frankly human, sharing in the weaknesses of
mankind, yet not untouched with a halo of divine Romance.”
E. H. BLAKENEY.
[Illustration: (colophon)]
_New York_
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.
TO
RHEA
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
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! 311
XII PAUL EHRLICH: The Magic Bullet 334
INDEX 359
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
ANTONY LEEUWENHOEK 16
LAZZARO SPALLANZANI 48
PASTEUR AT FORTY-FIVE 74
ROBERT KOCH 140
VACCINATING SHEEP FOR ANTHRAX 166
DR. ROUX 204
ÉLIE METCHNIKOFF 228
LAST PORTRAIT OF EHRLICH 354
MICROBE HUNTERS
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 achievements 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 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--because 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 Leeuwenhoek 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 windmills 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 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
cultured 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 you! But _buy_ lenses? Not
Leeuwenhoek! There never was a more suspicious man. Buy lenses? He
would make them himself! During these twenty years of his obscurity
he went to spectacle-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 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. Working 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 enormousness. 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!
II
There never was a less sure man than Leeuwenhoek. He looked at this
bee’s sting or that louse’s leg again and again 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 observer 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 observations 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 because 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 unicorn’s horn
and that spider can’t crawl out--so said the wisdom 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. Silence, 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 Society 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 corresponding member because he had written them of interesting
things he had found in the human ovary. Already Leeuwenhoek 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 hurried to write to the Royal Society:
“Get Antony Leeuwenhoek to write you telling of his discoveries.”
And Leeuwenhoek answered the request of the Royal Society 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 conversational 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
through his new lenses. The Secretary of the Royal Society thanked
Leeuwenhoek and told him he hoped his first communication would be
followed by others. It was, by hundreds of others over a period
of fifty years. They were talkative letters full of salty remarks
about his ignorant neighbors, of exposures 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 letter, 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 discoveries 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
greenest 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 Leeuwenhoek was
born there were no microscopes but only crude handlenses 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 examined 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
whatnot 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--
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 microscope....
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. Cæsar had gone to England and come upon savages that
opened his eyes with wonder--but these Britons were as ordinary to
each other as Roman centurions were to Cæsar. 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 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 unknown 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....
III
That man was so unashamed of his admirations and his surprises 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 Dutchman’s shoes, to be inside his brain
and body, to feel his excitement--it is almost nausea!--at his first
peep at those cavorting “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 because they were furnished with divers incredibly
thin feet.” Wait! Here is a third kind--and a fourth, so tiny I
can’t 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, Leeuwenhoek 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 cobwebbed 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 thousand of his brother
and sister lice.
But where did these outlandish little inhabitants of the rainwater
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 Seventeenth 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 materialist 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 animals in the rain water
pot out of nothing! But wait.... Maybe? Well, there was only one way
to find out where they came from. “I will experiment!” 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!” 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 cocksure judgments to the ordeal of the
common-sense experiments of a Leeuwenhoek!
Did he write to the Royal Society to tell them of this entirely
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 “swim about among
one another gently like a swarm of mosquitoes 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 London!
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 the
learned skeptics--who no longer believed in the magic virtues of
unicorn’s horns--and it bowled the learned body over! 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 calculations (and modern microbe hunters with
all of their apparatus 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 God,
one notary public, and eight other persons worthy to be believed. But
he wouldn’t tell them how he made his microscopes.
That was a suspicious man! 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 order 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 Nehemiah 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 microscope to the meeting--agog--for Antony
Leeuwenhoek had not lied. Here they were, those enchanted beasts! The
members rose from their seats and crowded round the microscope. They
peered, they exclaimed: this man must be a wizard observer! 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 faithfully 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
impossible 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 Leeuwenhoek 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! Was there
anything the gentleman 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 corner of his eye to see that the undoubtedly most honest
visitor didn’t touch anything--or filch anything....
[Illustration: ANTONY LEEUWENHOEK]
“But your instruments are marvelous!” 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--
[Illustration: (line drawing of microbes)]
What was this that rose from the gray dimness of his lens into clear
distinctness as he brought the tube into the focus? Here was an
unbelievably tiny creature, 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 somersaults. 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 menagerie in his
mouth! There were creatures shaped like flexible 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 Leeuwenhoek 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 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 Harvey’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.
Leeuwenhoek discovered the human sperm, and the cold-blooded science
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
Newton and Robert Boyle he was the most famous of their members. But
did these honors turn his head? They couldn’t turn his head because
he had from the first a sufficiently high opinion of himself! His
arrogance was limitless--but it was equaled by his humility when he
thought of that misty unknown 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 unborn 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! 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.”
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 nature, there were always new angles to be found in it,
the pages of his book of nature were thumbed and dog-eared by his
insatiable 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 conceived 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 heads or tails of
any of his little animals. After wiggling forward 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 complicated 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 Society, 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 rôle of
assassin for his wretched creatures, he did show that sub-visible
beasts could devour and kill living beings much larger than they were
themselves. He was fussing with mussels, 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 growing--but what was this?
Astounded he 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 pondered.
“And it is for our good, of course, because if there 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 Leeuwenhoek 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 observations 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 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 Hoogvliet 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!
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 England, asked Réaumur
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
Spallanzani, a strange boy who lisped verses while he fashioned
mudpies; who forgot mudpies to do fumbling childish and cruel
experiments with beetles and bugs and flies and worms. Instead 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 become 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 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 craftily 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 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 obscure 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
permitted 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 mechanics
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 Aristotle 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 Societies
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.
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 follower 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 University 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 Leeuwenhoek 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 allowing new animals to spring up in humorous ways?
In Spallanzani’s time the popular side was the party that asserted
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 your swarm of
bees.
II
Even the scientists were on this side of the question. The English
naturalist Ross announced learnedly that: “To question that beetles
and wasps were generated in cow dung is to question reason, sense,
and experience.” Even such complicated 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 inhabitants!
Spallanzani heard all of these stories which so many important 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 advances in science so often start from prejudice,
on ideas got not from science but straight out of a scientist’s
head, on notions 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 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 forgot 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 microscopic animals. For
all the professors were saying just then that though maybe flies had
to come from eggs, little sub-visible animals certainly could rise by
themselves.
Spallanzani began fumblingly to learn how to grow wee 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
yarns 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 Catholic who
liked to think he could do experiments, was becoming notorious in
England and Ireland, claiming that little microscopic 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.
The Royal Society and the whole educated world were excited 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, Spallanzani 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
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 carefully
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 marvelous wee beasts that
Leeuwenhoek had found in his mouth to the strange eunuchs and the
veiled multitudinous wives of Turkish harems. At last he vanished
and students and professors--and ladies--asked: “Where is the Abbé
Spallanzani?”
He had gone back to his rows of flasks of seed soup.
III
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 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 living thing has to
have a parent--even these wretched little animals! Seal your soup
flasks in a flame, and nothing can get into them from outside. Heat
them long enough, and everything, even those tough beasts that can
stand boiling, will be killed. Do that, and you’ll never find any
living animals arising in any kind of soup--you could keep it till
doomsday. Then he threw his work at Needham’s head in a brilliant
sarcastic paper, and the world of science was thrown into an uproar.
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.
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.
Besides 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 experimenting--whether little
animals could come to life without 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
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 discovery, 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 perhaps 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 answered his facts, they
had not shown where Spallanzani’s experiment of the sealed flasks was
wrong. The Italian was a fighter, but he liked to fight with facts
and experiments, and 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 elephants.
Then suddenly Spallanzani had his chance, for Needham made an
objection to one of his experiments. “Your experiment 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, we’ll 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 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 boiling water for
a few minutes, another for a half hour, another for an hour, and
still another for two hours. Instead of sealing them in the flame he
plugged them all up with corks--Needham said that was enough--and
then he put them carefully 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 disappeared 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 cherished whims and wishes. Spallanzani walked up
and down his narrow work room, hands behind him, meditating--“Wait,
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, growling: “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 proclaimed
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 attic 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 life arises,
that question which his religion taught him to ignore, 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 persistent 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
barbarity.
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 heartless 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 revolutions while they tried so honestly to find
truth and establish happiness and justice in the world. These men
believed 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 mysterious
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 ingeniously 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 air in sealed up flasks? 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 Needham 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 bottle around in a hot flame until it
melted down to a tiny narrow opening--very, very narrow, but still
open to the air outside. 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. Content,
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-t! 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 Leeuwenhoek, 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
always 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 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, ceaselessly 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 remarkable
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 Europe; 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 Frederick’s bitter enemy,
Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria, put it over the great king
by offering Spallanzani the job of professor 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 Imperial Seals and begged Spallanzani to put this defunct
college 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 History Cabinet of Pavia.
Spallanzani went to the Museum, the Natural History Cabinet, 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
minerals and precious ores; he caught hammer-head sharks and snared
gay-plumed fowl; he went on incredible collecting expeditions for
his museum--and to work off that tormenting energy that made him so
fantastically different from the popular 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 microscopic animals,
and made long experiments to show that these beasts obey nature’s
laws, just as men and horses and elephants are forced to follow them.
He put drops of stews swarming with microbes on little pieces of
glass and blew tobacco 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 animals!” 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 himself, alone
one day in his laboratory. He cleverly drew out some very thin
tubes of glass, like the ones Leeuwenhoek had 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 off 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 moving....
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-maintaining 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 believed there is no living being that can live
without the advantages 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 experiments, who
would never report anything but the truth of what he found amid the
smells and poisonous vapors and shining machines of his laboratory,
this superbly honest scientist, I say, was planning low tricks to
increase his pay as Professor at Pavia. Spallanzani, the football
player, the climber of mountains and explorer, this Spallanzani
whined to the authorities 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 vacations.
Spallanzani laughed and cynically called his lie a political gesture!
He always got everything he wanted. He got truth by dazzling
experiments and close observation and insane 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 researches
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 searcher, the
fact finder, flashed 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 discovery and even the conquering of
this unknown Nature.
[Illustration: LAZZARO SPALLANZANI]
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 fatigues 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 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 return 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 Voltaire. He turned into a crafty
politician, he demanded an investigating 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! He proved to the judges that the alleged
stolen birds were miserably stuffed, draggle-feathered creatures
which would have disgraced 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 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
complotters were fired from the University, and all parties,
including Spallanzani, were ordered by the Emperor to stop their
deplorable brawling and shut up--this thing was getting to be a
smell all over Europe--students were breaking up the classroom
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 microbe 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 notebooks 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 animalcule which is dividing into two parts, into
two new little animals! This, said de Saussure, was the only way the
microbes ever multiplied--the joys of marriage were unknown to them!
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 ambitious and often jealous of the fame
of other men, but he lost himself in his joy at the prettiness of
de Saussure’s sharp observations. 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
cathedral 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 Vegetative 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 another 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 meditated, “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 ingenious pieces of patient
work in his hectic life. He did no less a thing than to invent a sure
method of getting _one_ animalcule--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 between 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! there’s one of the wee
ones--just one, in the water drop!” Deftly he flicked the little
brush across the small 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!” he cried. “I’ve done it--no one’s ever done this before--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 descended 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 himself
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 whispered 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....
VII
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 passion to find truth, that
passion which stopped at nothing, which despised conventions, which
laughed at hardship, which ignored 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, sniffingly
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 horribly 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 useful work which
no complicated steam engine could attempt; there was no hint of the
somber fact that these wretched microbes 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 people 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 Pasteur, 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 mysterious.
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 ordinary 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 Spallanzani 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 by the tannery, and
his sisters posed for him until their necks grew stiff and their
backs ached grievously; 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 animals
were going to be put permanently on the shelf along with the dodo
and other forgotten beasts. The Swede Linnæus, 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!” said Linnæus. They were only defended by the famous
round-faced German 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 arguments
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 Bezançon, 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, 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 marvelous 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 lectures on the crystals of tartaric
acid, and Pasteur told Chappuis: “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 fellow creatures, just as useful
as horses or elephants, by two lonely searchers, one in France and
one in Germany. A modest 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 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 begin 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
took him out under the thick shade of the Gardens of the Luxembourg.
There he poured mouthfuls of triumphant explanation at him--he must
tell some one. He wanted to tell the world!
II
In a month he was praised by gray-haired chemists and became 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 furiously 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 mysterious 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 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 opinion 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 close coöperation 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 laboratory are taken care of.”
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 nineteenth
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 complained;
“we’re losing thousands of francs every day. I wonder 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 ferments into alcohol--indeed, no chemist in the world knew
anything about it. He got back to his laboratory, scratched his head,
and decided to examine the stuff from the healthy vats first. He
put some of this stuff--a drop of it--before his microscope, maybe
with an aimless idea of looking for crystals, 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 alcohol!”
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 microscope 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 different, a strange look of
the juice forced its way up into his wool-gathering thoughts. “Here
are little gray specks sticking 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....
His moment had come.
No yeast globes here, no, 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 incessant 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; nothing 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 thousands 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 test it and prove it and sniff along after it and chase
it and throw himself on it and bring it to earth! 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 testing 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 experiments not coming off at once that is always the curse of
microbe hunting.
He waited and signed some vouchers and lectured to students 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 not a patient
man--to tell the 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 were like bad weeds that get into
gardens. But to Pasteur that didn’t matter so much. Here was the one
important 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 remarkable--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....
III
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 without 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!
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 he 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 turning 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 whispered his
hopes and fears to Madame Pasteur--she couldn’t advise him but she
comforted him. She understood everything but couldn’t explain away
his worries. She was his perfect 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 incubator 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 microscope--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 he
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 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 showman, 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 bouquets 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 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 indignantly at an innocently intended comment on his
grammar or his punctuation. Look at portraits of him taken at this
time--it was 1860--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 ammunition to his enemies and brought
sleepless nights to Pasteur. But not for long! 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 man--instead of butting his head against the wall of
this problem, he slipped around it and turned it to his great fame
and advantage.
[Illustration: PASTEUR AT FORTY-FIVE]
Why this annoying rancid butter smell--why sometimes no
sour-milk-acid? 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 together 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 bottles, 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, because 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 microscope. “There’s something new here--in the middle of the
drop they are lively, going every which way.” Gently, precisely, a
little aimlessly, he moved the specimen so that the edge of the drop
was under his lens.... “But here at the edge they’re not moving,
they’re lying round stiff as pokers.” 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 microscopic 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 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, 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 deserted 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 before. 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 corner 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 microbes have to
have parents! He was, you see, a good Catholic. 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 procession of living beings until it gets to monkeys and at
last--triumphantly--to men. There doesn’t have to be a God to 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 microbe-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 animals 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!” cried the believers in spontaneous generation,
the evolutionists, the doubting botanists, cried all Godless men
from their libraries and their armchairs. They shouted, but made no
experiments.
Pasteur, in a muddle, tried to invent ways of getting unheated 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 workroom. 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 creatures 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?”
“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 something out of the water. Then
just leave the end of the tube open. It’s like this----” and Balard
sketched a diagram:
[Illustration: (line drawing of glass flask with curved neck)]
Pasteur looked, then suddenly saw the magnificent 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 now!”
“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 ordered 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 queues 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.
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.”
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 rapturous words.
“Never will the doctrine of Spontaneous Generation recover from the
mortal blow that this simple experiment 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 experiment, 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 them, Pasteur
started on his travels. He went down first into the dank cellars of
the Observatory of Paris, that famous Observatory where worked the
great Le Verrier, who had done the proud feat of prophesying the
existence of the planet Neptune. “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 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 bottles 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
exploits: “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 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 experiments 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 chemists 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 experiments. “I am of the persuasion that that
would put a new sap into their science,” he said. You can imagine
how the naturalists liked that kind of talk; particularly Mr.
Pouchet, director of the Museum of Rouen, did not like it and he was
enthusiastically joined in not liking it by Professor Joly and Mr.
Musset, 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 decided 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!
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.” Pasteur 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 experiment. 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 settled 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 Compiègne. The guests were commanded to get
ready to go hunting, but Pasteur begged to be excused; he had had a
dray load of apparatus sent up from Paris--though he was only staying
at the palace for a week!--and he impressed their Imperial Majesties
enormously by bending over his microscope while everybody else was
occupied with frivolous and gay amusements.
The world must know that microbes have got to have parents! At Paris
he made a popular speech at the scientific soirée 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 pestilences!” 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 smartest 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 excited about
Pasteur and his microbes. Whisperings of mysterious and marvelous
events seeped through the gates of the Normal School. Students,
even professors, passed the laboratory a little atremble with awe.
One student might be heard remarking to another, as they passed the
high gray walls of the Normal 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; his students
shed tears of emotion at the fiery eloquence of his lectures. He
talked about microbes causing disease long before he knew anything
about whether or not they caused disease--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 meaningly 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 wool-gathering 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 diseases of wine--to save the
imperiled wine industry. He set up his laboratory in what had been an
old café 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 bellows; 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 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 café; 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 common 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 microscopes and
prophesied: “Bitter wine”--it turned out to be bitter; 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 fermenting, 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 approached 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 billions 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 actually 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.
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 became, 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 doctor. “What’s wrong with
silkworms? I did not know that they ever had diseases--I know nothing
at all about silkworms--what’s more, I have never even seen one!”
protested Pasteur.
VI
“The silk country of the South is my native country,” answered 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 it!” Pasteur hated to go South to try to find out
what ailed silkworms, he knew he risked a horrid failure by going and
he detested failure above everything. But it is one of the charming
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 sicknesses 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 _pébrine_, because the sick worms were covered with
little black spots that looked like pepper. Pasteur 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
together and told them: “At the moment of egg-laying put aside 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 machine. 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 try 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 directions. 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 answers to letters and scientific papers and speeches to
Madame Pasteur. The next morning he was off again to the neighboring
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 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! He had been so busy trying to save the silkworm
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 diarrhœa and died
miserably--but in these he could find no globules whatever. He became
completely 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 experiments,
this instinct--and the Goddess of Chance--came together to save him.
He pondered to himself: “I’ve at least managed 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 the healthy worms died sure enough, but,
confound it! the experiment 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 _pébrine_--the worms of his
experiment curled up and passed away in seventy-two hours. He was
discouraged, he stopped his experiments; his faithful assistants
worried about him--why didn’t he try the experiment over?
At last Gernez 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. Gernez 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 nothing. Gernez
was excited--and he became more excited when still nights at his
microscope showed him that the globules increased 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 Gernez 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 are 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 _pébrine_,
came from outside the worm--it did not rise by itself inside the
worm--and he went everywhere, showing the farmers 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 indignantly
that it would be criminal not to finish saving the silkworms while so
many poor people were starving! All Frenchmen, 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 silkworms. He
had no sooner settled _pébrine_ than another malady of these unhappy
beasts popped up, but he knew his problem 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.
VII
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 disappear from
the face of the globe, if the doctrine of spontaneous 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 wandered 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 became 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 brewers 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 keeping 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 versatile 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 opponents were in the right....
Pasteur’s life was becoming more and more unlike the austere
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 became 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 marvelously 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,
Frémy and Trécul. Frémy admitted that yeasts were needed to make
alcohol from grape juice, but he argued ignorantly before the amused
Academy that yeasts were spontaneously generated inside of grapes.
The wise men of the Academy pooh-poohed; they were amused, all except
Pasteur.
[Illustration: (line drawing of a round-bellied flask)]
“So Frémy 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 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 Frémy 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 Frémy--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 animal’s blood or urine.
All microbes have to get in from the _outside_! That settles Frémy.”
Then you can fancy him whispering to himself: “The world will soon
learn the miracles that will grow from this little experiment.”
VIII
Surely it looked then as if Pasteur had a right to his fantastic
dreams of wiping out disease. He had just received a worshiping
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 infection 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 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 humanity 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 published it--of all
places--in his book on beer! Then he took a final smash at poor old
Frémy, who you would have thought was already sufficiently crushed by
the gorgeous experiments; he smashed Frémy not by damning Frémy, 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 characteristic
which Mr. Balard, with an entirely fatherly friendliness, has made
stand out in speaking of my researches.” Frémy 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 playthings 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 laboratories. When suddenly Claude Bernard died, and
some of Bernard’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 talk was keeping 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 muttering.
Pasteur was overwhelmed, but only for a moment. He demanded 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. Vulgarly 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 unseemly 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. His 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 assistants 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 microscope; there
was not a yeast to be found on their skins. Feverishly 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 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 experiments, not a speck of soil
which was not capable of fermenting 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
his 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
kingdom for so many years.
CHAPTER IV
KOCH
THE DEATH FIGHTER
I
In those astounding and exciting years between 1860 and 1870, when
Pasteur was saving vinegar industries and astonishing emperors
and finding out what ailed sick silkworms, a small, serious, and
nearsighted German was learning to be a doctor at the University
of Göttingen. 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. Conscientiously 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 interesting 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 condition that he forget this
nonsense about an adventurous life, 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 medicine in a succession of
unromantic Prussian villages.
Just now, while Koch wrote prescriptions and rode horseback 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 keeping microbes away from them. The professors and
the students 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 consoling of sick people and the beneficent and
praiseworthy attempt 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 ... perhaps 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 Pasteur had dreamed of
but which no man had ever had before--came on him out of the dead
carcasses of sheep and cows. These new sights and adventures jumped
at him impossibly 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 business 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 console 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 Russian 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 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 conclusion is the necrobiotic and infecting
destruction of the plasmatic tissue of an organ by a number of roads
that the hygienist and the physician must endeavor to close!” It
was so that the doctors fought Pasteur’s prophecies with utterly
meaningless and often idiotic words.
II
Koch was spending his evenings fussing with his new microscope, 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 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
bellyache 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 microscope 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 interested 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 enthusiasms of Pasteur did not for
one moment make him jump at conclusions. Luckily nobody anxious to
develop young microbe 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 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, multiply....”
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 began to be shoved away
into one corner of his head. How-to-prove-these-wee-sticks-are-alive,
this question made him forget to sign his name to prescriptions, it
made him a morose husband, it made him call the carpenter in to put
up a partition 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 number of cages
full of scampering white mice.
“I haven’t the money to buy sheep and cows for my experiments,”
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 explorations.
To me Koch is a still more weird and uncanny microbe 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 so!”
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 laboratory--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 knives, 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 laboratory 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--I--find--a--way--to--see--the--rods--grow--out--into--threads?
This question pounded at him while he counted pulses and looked at
his patients’ 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
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 abominable way of getting in between these strips of glass,
over-growing, 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 flounderingly 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 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 apparatus 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.
[Illustration: (line drawing of hanging-drop)]
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 minutes 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 hidden by the myriads of rods,
the masses of thread that were like a hopelessly tangled ball of
colorless yarn, 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 terrible.”
Time, his office and its dull duties, his waiting and complaining
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 million 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 diseased tissue left in
this eighth hanging-drop--only the children 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.
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 anything 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.
III
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 momentous secrets, and keep his
mouth shut about it.
But Koch plugged on, and it is doubtful whether this hesitating,
entirely modest genius of a German country doctor realized the
beauty or the importance of his lonely experiments.
He plugged on. He must know more! 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 hanging-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 important 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, tugging 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 doctors
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-long bacillus!
“Your little germ may be what kills our herds, all right, 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 microscope--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 mystery of the cursed
fields and mountains of France. He had kept a hanging-drop, in
its closed glass well, at the temperature 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 thread 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 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 microscope, 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 encouraging letters.
Professor Cohn, who had been amazed at the marvelous experiments
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 invitations 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 Professor Cohn. But Koch didn’t
lecture--he was never much at 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--groping and failing often--for years. Never was there a greater
come-down for bigwigs who had arrived prepared to be indulgent 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 scientists
in the study of diseases in all of Europe, could hold himself 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 disappeared 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 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 experiments 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 cannot 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 superstition 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 their
tongues. In short, men of science have either to be showmen--as were
the magnificent Spallanzani and the passionate 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 hundred 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 beings. 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 photographs 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. Here he was given a
fine laboratory and a sudden undreamed-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 Battle 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
supposed discovery of some new deadly microbe, surely the assassin of
suffering from cancer or typhoid fever or consumption. 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 different species of microbes.
So great was the enthusiasm about germs--and the confusion--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 disease--every disease has its own
specific microbe, I _know_ that,” said Koch--without knowing it.
“I’ve got to find a sure easy 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 probably 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!
V
Until, one day, Koch--who frankly admitted it was by accident--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 microscope.
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!
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 assistants,
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 mixtures 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
millions 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 something 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 until he was sure of his results. He told
of his discoveries with a disarming modesty and his work was so
unanswerably complete--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 Virchow, 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 mistakenness--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 respectfully into
this Presence.
“I have discovered a way to grow microbes pure, unmixed with other
germs, Herr Professor,” the bashful Koch told Virchow, 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 potato.... 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 remark 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 discover 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 microbes 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, Villemin, 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 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
experiment 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 tubercles 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 consumption, he began to peer with his most powerful microscope
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 tubercle 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 perilous 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 microscope and out
of the gray mist a strange picture untangled itself. Lying among
the shattered diseased lung cells were curious 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 staining
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 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 corner 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 thoroughness.
“Ach! this is a little hard on the nerves, this work,” he 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 possibilities of excitement--of
something tragically worse than mere excitement....
But the hand of this completely unheroic looking little microbe
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 everything, 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 millions--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.
Loeffler and Gaffky, ashamed of their jumping at conclusions, went
back awed to their own searchings.
Testing every possible combination that his head could invent, 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, 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 _complete_ 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 slaughtered 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 yellow
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 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 incubating 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 fourteenth 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 disappointing
serum-tubes out, but at this stubbly-haired country doctor’s shoulder
his familiar demon whispered: “Wait--be patient, 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 trembling 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 microscope....
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.
Now Koch, in taut intent months, confirmed his first success--he went
after proving it with a patience and a detail that made me sick of
his everlasting thoroughness and prudence 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 marvelous 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 weirdest 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 sticking 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 goldfish continued to open and shut
his mouth and swim placidly about in his round-bellied bowl. The
frogs croaked unconcernedly and the eels kept all of their slippery
liveliness; the tortoise 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 pitifully 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 experiments
and was ready to give his news to the world: The bacillus, the true
cause of tuberculosis, has been trapped, discovered! 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 consumption. 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 murderers 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 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 Koch!
VII
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 quivered 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 inevitable
arguments and objections that greet the finish of revolutionary
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.
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 experiments
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 precisely 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 instruction, 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 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 Pasteur, 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 billions 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 Garrè 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. Garrè came down horribly with an enormous carbuncle and
twenty boils--the tremendous dose of microbes he shot into himself
might easily have finished him--but he dismissed his danger as merely
“unpleasant” and shouted triumphantly: “I now know that this microbe,
this staphylococcus, is the true cause of boils and carbuncles!”
Meanwhile, at the end of 1882, when Koch had finished his virulent
and partly comic wrangle with Pasteur, who was just then with
prodigious enthusiasm saving the lives of sheep and cattle in France,
the discoverer of the tubercle bacillus started sniffing along
the trail of one of the most delicate, the most easy to kill, and
yet the most terribly savage of all microbes. In 1883 the Asiatic
cholera knocked at the door of Europe. This cholera had stolen out
of its lurking place in India and slipped mysteriously across the
sea and over desert sands to Egypt; suddenly a murderous epidemic
of it exploded in Alexandria and Europe across the Mediterranean
was frightened. In Alexandria the streets were still with fear; the
murderous virus--no one had the slightest notion of what kind of an
invisible beast it was--this virus, I say, sneaked into healthy men
in the morning, doubled them into knots of spasm-racked agony by
afternoon, and put them to rest beyond the reach of all pain by night.
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 menagerie of animals from Berlin; Pasteur--who
was desperately busy struggling to conquer the mysterious microbe
of hydrophobia--sent the brilliant and devoted Émile 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 dripping 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
to 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 saw death receding, their
chance of trapping their prey slipping from them.
[Illustration: ROBERT KOCH]
Koch and Gaffky were getting ready to return to Berlin, when one
morning a frightened messenger came to them and told them: “Dr.
Thuillier, of the French Commission, is dead--of cholera.”
Koch and Pasteur hated each other sincerely and enthusiastically,
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 carried in a plain box to its last
home the body of Thuillier, this daring young Thuillier whom the
miserably weak--but treacherous--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 unearthed the same
microbe in the intestines of patients at the moment the fatal disease
hit them. But he never found this germ in any of the hundreds of
healthy Hindus that he examined, nor in any 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 miserable 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 received
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....
VIII
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 admirers 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 of man,
these men were brave, but there was careless heroism too among some
of the ancient doctors and old-fogey sanitarians 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
authors 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 if I get cholera!” Mysteriously, nothing happened,
and the failure of the mad Pettenkofer to come down with cholera
remains to this day an enigma, without even the beginning of an
explanation.
Pettenkofer, who was foolhardy enough to try such a possibly suicidal
experiment, was also sufficiently cocksure to believe 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
controversies, 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 by have revealed that
Pettenkofer’s experiment pointed out a mystery behind the curtains of
the unknown, and these obscuring 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 animals 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 microbes 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 sensational proofs of
Koch that microbes murder men. It is certain 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 complete 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 Semmelweis, 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 mothers
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 themselves--accustomed though they were helplessly
but sympathetically to preside at the demise of their patients--even
the 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 unknown to him--of child-bed
fever. Suddenly one of his learned and stately sentences was
interrupted by a voice bellowing 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 microbes from sick
women to healthy ones...!” It was Pasteur who said this; he was out
of his seat; his eyes flamed excitement.
“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 blackboard, 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 impetuous
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 spoiling, he had rushed from this job
into the saving of sick silkworms, 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 authors of
disease.
Then suddenly he found Koch had done the trick ahead of him. He must
catch up with this Koch. “Microbes are in 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--phew! 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 Chamberland became his assistants; youngsters they were, these
three, radicals who were Bolshevik against ancient idiotic medical
doctrines. They sat worshiping Pasteur at his unpopular 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 anything to have doubts about. Koch always recited his
failures with just as much and no more enthusiasm than he did his
triumphs. 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! 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 anthrax 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 disease, there is no doubt
about that--but this isn’t the most important 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 planted anthrax bacilli was swarming
with unbidden guests, contaminating microbes of the air that had
sneaked 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 microbes 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, Louvrier,
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 treatment received scientific
approval.
II
Pasteur arrived there, escorted by his young assistants, and found
that this miraculous cure consisted first, in having several farm
hands rub the sick cow violently to make her as 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 covered--excepting her face!--with an
inch thick layer of unmentionable 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 treatment. 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 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 injected
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 injected millions of poisonous
bacilli; the cows remained perfectly happy!
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 obvious 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.
In 1880, Pasteur was playing with the very tiny microbe that kills
chickens with a malady known as chicken cholera. Doctor Peronçito
had discovered this microbe, so tiny that it was hardly more than
a quivering point before the strongest lens. Pasteur was the first
microbe hunter to grow it pure, in a soup that he cooked for it from
chicken meat. And after he had watched these dancing points multiply
into millions in a few hours, he let fall the smallest part of a
drop of this bug-swarming broth onto a crumb of bread--and fed this
bread to a chicken. In a few hours the unfortunate beast stopped
clucking and refused to eat, her feathers ruffled until she looked
like a fluffy ball, and the next day Pasteur came in to find the bird
tottering, its eyes shut in a kind of invincible drowsiness that
turned quickly into death.
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 frivolousness. But next
morning, when Pasteur came into the laboratory looking for these
birds, to put them on the post-mortem board--he was sure they would
be dead--he found them perfectly happy and gay!
“This is strange,” pondered Pasteur, “always before this the
microbes from our cultivations have killed twenty chickens out of
twenty....” But the time for his discovery was not yet, and next day,
after these strangely recovered chickens had been put in charge of
the caretaker, Pasteur and his family and Roux and Chamberland went
off on their summer vacations. They forgot about those birds....
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_! 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 yesterday--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 murderous dose yesterday--but look at them--they
have resisted the virulent dose perfectly ... they are gay ... they
are eating!”
Roux and Chamberland were puzzled for a moment.
Then Pasteur raved: “But don’t you see what this means? 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
diseases.... We will save lives...!”
III
A lesser man than Pasteur might have done this same accidental
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 Pasteur, stumbling on this chance
protection of a couple of miserable 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 triumphs 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 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 injections 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 Medicine 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 Pasteur’s
appointing himself a god superior to the great Jenner; Doctor Jules
Guérin, the famous surgeon, became particularly 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 Guérin’s pet operations, and there occurred
a most scandalous scene--it embarrasses me to have to tell about
it--a strange shambles in which Guérin, 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 Guérin sent his seconds to Pasteur with a
challenge to a duel, but Pasteur, evidently, did not care to risk
dying that way and he sent Guérin’s friends to the Secretary 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 mysterious Infinite--he
worshiped the Infinite when he was not clutching at it like a
baby reaching for the moon; but frequently, 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 dissolved 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 wonderful Pan-Protector
against all kinds of virulent maladies. “If this is confirmed,” he
wrote, “we can hope for the most important 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 vaccine made from one kind
of bacillus does not protect an animal against all diseases, but
only--and then not absolutely 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 characteristic
of a scientific Phœnix, 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 Sundays off, and never went on vacations; they slept at the
laboratory 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 microbes 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
Guérin--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 Pasteur’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:
“I would not be surprised if such a man were to be caught beating his
wife!”
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 of the horse doctors, and one of the leading horse
doctors, the editor of one of the most important 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 Society of Melun and said:
“Pasteur claims that nothing is easier than to make a vaccine 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 Pasteur! When he prepared 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 millions 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. PASTEUR.
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.” Pasteur 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 MELUN!” 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 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
Pasteur 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 suffering
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 beautifully 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; 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 orders.
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 murderous 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 vaccinated 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 delicate
test, realizing at last that he had done the brave but terribly 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 everything will come out all right”; he sulked
in and out of the laboratory; 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 second 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.
“See! There goes another one of those sheep that Pasteur did not
vaccinate!” 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 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 applause; Galileo was
actually clapped in prison for those searchings that have done more
than any other to transform the world. We do not even know the names
of those completely anonymous geniuses who first built the wheel and
invented sails and thought to tame a horse.
VI
But here stood Louis Pasteur, while his twenty-four immune 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 Gospel,” 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.”
The great de Blowitz cheered and rushed off to file his telegram
to the London _Times_ and to the newspapers of the world: “The
experiment at Pouilly-le-Fort is a perfect, an unprecedented success.”
The world received this news and waited, confusedly believing 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 poisonous virus of anthrax--all these sent telegrams
begging him for thousands of doses of the life-saving vaccine. And
Pasteur, 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 laboratory
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 Lord! 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 in this place and five
hundred and seventy-six in that--in less than a year hundreds of
thousands of beasts had got 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:
contaminating 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 rabbits.... 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 experiments.
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. Disturbing letters began to pile
up on his desk; complaints from Montpothier 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 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
flocks 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 perfectly? Well, I
must stick to that,” you can hear him mutter between his teeth.
[Illustration: VACCINATING SHEEP FOR ANTHRAX]
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 disease-fighters of
the world he gave a thrilling speech, subject: “How to guard living
creatures from virulent maladies by 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 greatest hopes.”
“We are all animated with a superior passion, the passion for
progress and for truth!” he shouted--but unhappily he said no word
about those numerous occasions when his vaccine 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 myself 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-called 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! which Mr. Pasteur 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 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 contaminating microbes? “For
twenty years before Koch’s scientific birth in 1876, it has been my
one occupation to isolate 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, patriotically
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 _Académie Française_, the ultimate
honor to bestow on a Frenchman. 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 wonderful thing when he showed that weak bugs
may protect living 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 never quite convinced that he was himself
alive, so firmly doubting 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 untruthful 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.
VII
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
showmanship, 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 diseases, just
then, whose microbes had not yet been found, diseases 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 himself 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
suspected of having rabies. Doubtless he saw himself the deliverer 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 making mistakes. In
the saliva of a little child dying from hydrophobia 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 hydrophobia. 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 animals 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 laboratory;
dangerously he was slid into a big cage with healthy 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 weeks
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...!”
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, indeed! What nonsense! But not to Roux!
“But why not put the virus right into a dog’s brain, master, 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 he 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.... No! 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 experiment that his weird
idea demanded. But Roux--the faithful, 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 sleeping dog’s skull went the needle of the syringe, and into the
living 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 he was back,
his operated dog prancing in ahead of him, jumping gayly against
Pasteur, sniffing ’round among the old broth bottles 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 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 Pasteur 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 taming 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 Pasteur 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 entangled 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 dangerous animals. They sweat through endless
experiments.
Pasteur mounted guard over his young men and kept their backs bent
over their benches as if they were some higher kind of galley slave.
He watched their perilous experiments with one eye and kept the other
on the glass door of the workroom, and when he saw some of Roux’s and
Chamberland’s friends approaching, to ask them maybe to come out for
a glass of beer on the terrace of a near-by café, the master would
hurry out and tell the interlopers: “No. No! Not now! Cannot you see?
They are busy--it is a most important experiment they are doing!”
Months--gray months went by during which it seemed to all of them
that there was no possible way of weakening the invisible virus of
rabies.... One hundred animals, alas, out of every hundred that they
injected--died. You would think that Roux and Chamberland, still
youngsters, would have been the indomitable ones, the never-say-die
men of this desperate crew. But on the contrary!
“It’s no go, master,” said they, making limp waves of their hands
toward the cages with their paralyzed beasts--toward the tangled
jungles of useless tubes and bottles....
Then Pasteur’s eyebrows cocked at them, and his thinning gray hair
seemed to stiffen: “Do the same experiment over again--no matter if
it failed last time--it may look foolish to you, but the important
thing is not to leave the subject!” Pasteur shouted, in a fury. So
it was that this man scolded his monkish disciples and prodded them
to do useless tests over and over and over--with no reasons, with
complete lack of logic. With every fact against him Pasteur searched
and tried and failed and tried again with that insane neglect of
common sense that sometimes turns hopeless causes into victories.
Indeed, why wasn’t this setting out to tame the hydrophobia
virus--why wasn’t it a nonsensical wild-goose chase? There was in all
human history no single record of any man or beast getting better
from this horrible malady, once the symptoms had declared themselves,
once the mysterious messengers of evil had wormed their unseen way
into the spinal cord and brain. It was this kind of murderous stuff
that Pasteur and his men balanced on the tips of their knives, sucked
up into their glass pipettes within an inch from the lips--stuff that
was separated from their mouths by a thin little wisp of cotton....
Then, one exciting day, the first sweet music of encouragement
came to these gropers in the dark--one of their dogs inoculated
with the surely fatal stuff from a rabid rabbit’s brain--this dog
came down with his weird barkings and portentous shiverings and
slatherings--and then miraculously got completely better! Excitedly,
a few weeks later, they shot this first of all recovered beasts
with a deadly virus, directly into his brain they injected the wee
murderers. The little wound on his head healed quickly--anxiously
Pasteur waited for his doomful symptoms to come on him, but these
signs never came. For months the dog romped about his cage. He was
absolutely immune!
“Now we know it--we know we have a chance.... When a beast once has
rabies and gets better from it, there will be no recurrence.... We
must find a way to _tame_ the virus now,” said Pasteur to his men,
who agreed, but were perfectly certain that there was no way to tame
that virus.
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!” 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 symphonies--and then
miraculously discovering hornblowers to play those parts.) For, one
way or another, the ingenious Roux and Chamberland devised tricks to
do those crazy experiments....
And at last they found a way of weakening the savage hydrophobia
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 o’ the wisp of an experiment.
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 fourteen vaccinations had
not hurt the dogs--but were they immune?
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 virus--right into their
brains--a business that killed an ordinary 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 forgot 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 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 easy!... 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, mysteriously, 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 commission 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 virulent 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 magnificent Emperor
of Brazil condescended to write Pasteur, begging him....
And you may guess how Pasteur was worried! This was no 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.... Horrid 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 gestures, rose in
him again: “I am much inclined to begin on myself--inoculating myself
with rabies, and then arresting the consequences; for I am beginning
to feel very sure of my results,” he wrote to his old friend, Jules
Vercel.
At last, mercifully, the worried Mrs. Meister from Meissengott in
Alsace took the dreadful decision out of Pasteur’s unsure 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 whimpering, 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 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. Research 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 fourteen doses of partly weakened
germs of rabies--unknown microbes 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 concern 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 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 nor did he
sleep at all. He took a terrible risk, and morning and night, twice
as quickly as he had ever made the fourteen injections--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 Pasteur, went
up from the Parisians, and all of France and all the world raised
a pæan of thanks to him--for the vaccine marvelously 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 laboratory 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 Villeneuve 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 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 Republic. 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 serene peace of
laboratories and libraries. Say to yourselves first: What have I done
for my instruction? and, as you gradually 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
progress 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!
Émile 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 disappointed by his supposed cure for consumption, Emil
Behring, the poetical pupil of Koch, spied out a strange virtue, an
unknown 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.
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 mustache 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 eighties, and diphtheria, which several
times each hundred years seems to have violent ups and downs of
viciousness--diphtheria was particularly murderous then. The wards
of the hospitals 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--trying 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 bacilli; 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, 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 different 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 injected 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 mumbling as he wrote, “but in a few children dead of
diphtheria I could not find these germs ... none of my inoculated
animals 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 throat
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, sneaking 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....
II
Four years later Loeffler’s words came true--by what seemed an
utterly silly, but what was surely a most fantastical experiment 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 malignant 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 tired!--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 children, 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 discovered 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 Émile 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
obscure 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 microbe 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 Loeffler had failed to find. Their diphtheria
soup paralyzed rabbits! The stuff went into their veins; in a few
days the delighted 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....
“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 now!”
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 forgot 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.... Together 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 before 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 nothing 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. 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 the 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 laboratory bench.
“This stuff should have the poison in it ... the filter has held back
all the microbes--but this stuff should kill our animals,” 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 Émile 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! 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 engaged 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.
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 caring 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 diphtheria 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 tablets 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 of the
living diphtheria bacilli. So it was that Émile 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 diphtheria 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 do 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 hundred
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 of this pure toxin--the tissues of those bodies looked like
the sad tissues of a baby dead of diphtheria....
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
insignificant bodies of diphtheria bacilli. But he stuck here;
he had explained how a diphtheria germ murders 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 tremendous grim stick-to-itiveness, nor his resourceful
brain.
III
But away in Berlin there toiled another Émile--the Germans 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 Councilor. 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 prepared his own disaster by telling the world about
his “Tuberculin.” 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 marvelous criticism at
that poet’s searchings!
And what a house of microbe hunters it was, that dingy Triangel! Its
walls shook under the arguments and guttural cries and incessant
experiments of Koch’s young men. Paul Ehrlich 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 shooting
lock-jaw bacilli into the tails of mice and solemnly amputating 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 originality. 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 something in the
blood of rats--this stuff would kill anthrax bacilli! He had two
scientific obsessions, which were also poetical: one was that blood
is the most marvelous of the juices circulating in living things
(what an extraordinary mysterious sap it was, this blood!)--the
other was the strange notion (not a new one) that there must exist
chemicals to wipe invading microbes 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 diphtheria 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 microbes 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 test like this to see
whether or no his patient would live! 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 dreadfully scraggly
looking beasts they were, but they were getting better from
diphtheria, these creatures whose untreated companions 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! 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 proceeded 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 gropings might do. The
gods were kind to him. He pondered, and at last he asked himself:
“Will these cured animals be immune 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 diphtheria
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 multiplying,” he wrote in
his notes with regret. But blood is wonderful stuff. Some way it must
be at the bottom of his guinea-pigs’ immunity. “After all,” muttered
Behring, “this Frenchman, Roux, has proved it isn’t the diphtheria
germ but the poison it makes--it is the poison kills animals, and
children.... 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 number of desolate cured
guinea-pigs. Again, they were immune! Their sores went on healing,
they grew fat. The poison bothered them no more than had the bacilli
which made it. Here was something entirely new in microbe hunting,
something 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 protects
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 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!” 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 faintest 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 creatures told him how well the serum saved the other
ones. Hundreds of pretty experiments of this kind Behring made (there
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 muttered, “you couldn’t go around giving all the
children of Germany 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. Miracles! 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 carried 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. 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 unbelievable 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 pottering poet have pulled off the
discovery of the diphtheria antitoxin? But then, come to think of it,
those first ancient nameless 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 diphtheria in
the Bergmann clinic in the Brick Street in Berlin. On the night of
Christmas, a child desperately sick with diphtheria 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 mysteriously a few minutes
after the serum went into him and there was a great hullabaloo about
that--but presently large chemical 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.
In the excitement of this cure, those sad ones, who had lost dear
ones through the first enthusiasm about the dangerous injections of
the consumption cure of Koch, forgot their sorrow and forgave Koch
because of his brilliant pupil Behring.
IV
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
perhaps?) kept dying horribly in spite of it. Doctors questioned....
Some parents had their hopes dashed....
Then Émile 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 destroyed 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 diphtheria 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). 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?
“Yes!” shouted Émile Roux, the human being.
“I don’t know--let us make an experiment,” whispered Émile 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 Émile
Roux, the man with a heart, and all voices of all despairing parents
were joined to the pleading voice of this Émile 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 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!”
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 received 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). The most dignified congress of prominent and
celebrated physicians cheered. It rose to its feet....
[Illustration: _à M^r. le D^r. Kruif
Souvenir amical
Dr. Roux.
18 Octobre 1923._]
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 annoying 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 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, because, since all the world
believes in the antitoxin, no man can be found heartless enough or
bold enough to do the experiment 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 to see microbes;
a chemist put them on the map and made people properly afraid of
them; a country doctor turned the hunting of them into something that
came near to being a science; to save the lives of babies from the
poison of one of the deadliest 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, insane
paradoxes. If that is the history of the hunting of microbes, it is
the same with the story of the science, still in its babyhood, of
why we are immune to microbes. For Metchnikoff, the always excited
searcher who in a manner of speaking founded that science--this
Metchnikoff was not a sober scientific investigator; he was more like
some hysterical character out of one of Dostoevski’s novels.
Élie Metchnikoff was a Jew, and was born in southern Russia 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!”
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 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 “Crystals 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 lessons 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 constantly
spoiling his chances to do a good steady piece of scientific 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 protoplasm ... but there is no science in
Russia,” so he rushed off to the University of Würzburg 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 evolutionary
researches; he lay awake nights, seeing visions--huge panoramas they
were, of all beasts from cockroaches to elephants, 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 expostulating his
way from one laboratory to another, from Russia through Germany to
Italy, and from Italy to the island of Heligoland. He worked at the
evolution of worms. He accused the distinguished German zoölogist
Leuckart of stealing his stuff; incurably clumsy with his fingers, he
clawed desperately 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, importantly 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 driving him
toward his fantastic theory--partly true--of how mankind resists the
assaults of germs.
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 married Ludmilla
Feodorovitch, who was a consumptive and had to be carried to the
wedding in an invalid’s chair. Then followed a pitiful four years
for them. They dragged about Europe, looking for a cure; Metchnikoff
trying in odd moments 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 afterwards to try to catch his death
of pneumonia. But it seems that the wise witty gods who fashion
searchers had other purposes for him. That very night he stopped,
agape at the spectacle 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 respected for his learning,
and grew in dignity, and in less than 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 married.
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 experiments. 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 afterwards: “The scientific methods which Metchnikoff applied
to everything might have been a grave mistake at this delicate
psychological moment....”
II
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, expounding 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....
Then, one day, he began to study the way sponges and starfishes
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 larvæ are as transparent as a good
glass window; so he could see, through his lens, what went on
inside the beast; and with excited delight 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 without seeing them at
his bowls of starfish. Then--it was like that blinding light that
bowled Paul over on his way to Damascus--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 starfish, 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_ wandering cells, the white cells of our
blood--they must be what protects us from invading germs ... they are
the cause of 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 surpassing 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 surrounded 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 conclusions 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 happened 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 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....
III
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 zoölogist, 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: “Phagocytes!
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 explanation 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 reputations, 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.
He went from Vienna to Odessa, and there he gave a great 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 Metchnikoff’s, this story of our little white blood cells
rushing to an endless series of Thermopylæs to man the pass against
murderous 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 larvæ, were transparent so that he could see
through his lens what went on inside 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 swarming yeasts, which in
their turn ate the water flea, poisoned him--and that meant good-by
to him!
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 observations 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 farmers of the
Zemstvo round about gave thanks to God, hurrahs 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,
shrewdly: “I am only a theoretician; I am overwhelmed with
researches--some one else will have to be trained to make vaccines,
to do the practical work.”
Nobody in Odessa knew anything about microbe hunting then, so
Metchnikoff’s friend, Doctor Gamaléia, 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 Gamaléia, after a little while in Paris, where he watched Roux
and Pasteur and learned a great deal from them, but not quite
enough--this Gamaléia 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 swallow
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. Gamaléia and the other members 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 meadow mice which were eating up the
crops. But, alas, a lying, inflammatory report appeared in the daily
paper, screaming that this Metchnikoff was sowing death--that chicken
cholera could change into human cholera....
“I am overwhelmed with my researches,” muttered Metchnikoff. “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 dishing 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 veritable movie of the battle between the
wandering cells and microbes....
The old captain of the microbe hunters looked at Metchnikoff 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
microörganisms which I have had occasion to observe. 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 greatest of all microbe
hunters really understood him, believed in him.... Olga’s father
had died, leaving them a modest income, 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 laboratories 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 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!” Metchnikoff had told Dr.
Gamaléia 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 country, a fearful telegram came to him from
Gamaléia:
“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.
V
Metchnikoff bounced into the austere Pasteur Institute and started a
circus there 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 theory--this story that we are immune because
of a kind of battle royal between our phagocytes and marauding
microbes, this yarn had thrown the searchers of Europe into an
uproar. The microbe hunters of Germany and Austria for the most part
did not believe it--on the contrary, tempted to believe it by its
simplicity and prettiness, they denied it with a peculiar violence.
They denounced Metchnikoff in congresses and by experiments. One
old German, Baumgarten, wrote a general 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 contemplated 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 microbes.
“I have demonstrated that the serum of rats kills anthrax germs--it
is the _blood_ of animals not their phagocytes, that 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 libraries.
“It is the phagocytes that eat up germs and so defend us,” roared
Metchnikoff in reply. And he published ingenious experiments 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 position. For
twenty years both sides were so enraged they could not stop to think
that perhaps both our blood _and_ our phagocytes might work together
to guard us from germs. That 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 wandering
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 grotesque, 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 in 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 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
scorpion....
He had brilliant ideas for experiments and was always trying 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 instincts 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!
Metchnikoff’s 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
fireworks.
“Mr. Saltykoff!” he would cry. “This student of Professor 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 Gheorgiewski, 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 hundred hearts
that beat as one and a hundred minds with but a single thought--to
write the epic of those tiny, roundish, colorless, 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 exciting
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 arguments!” 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, alligators, or weird Mexican axolotls were brought from the
animal 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 menagerie. “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 Metchnikoff’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 Gamaléia, 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 Gamaléia’s bacilli. Presto! These
roundish crawling cells were crammed full of the microbes!
“Now I shall prove that these microbes inside the phagocytes 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 microbes 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 entertaining, 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 working!” 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 violently
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 (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 explained 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
insignificant, he had careless ways and watery-blue, absent-minded
eyes--eyes that saw things nobody else was looking for. Bordet 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
to them, Metchnikoff consoled himself by inventing 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 laboratory....
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, when romantic microbe
hunting began to turn into a regular profession, recruited from good
steady law-abiding young doctors who were not prophets or reckless
searchers--in those days Metchnikoff’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
respectful when he walked majestically into some congress. A thousand
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
bullheadedness, really did discover a fact which may make life easier
for suffering mankind. Because, some day, a dreamer, an experimenting
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 opponents were
partly convinced, and partly they stopped arguing with him because
they found it was no use--he could always experiment more tirelessly
than they, he could talk longer, he could expostulate more loudly.
So Metchnikoff, at the beginning 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
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 himself, and hating life,
he had told Olga: “It is a crime to have children--no human being
should consciously reproduce himself.” But now that he had begun to
take delight in existence, the children of Sèvres, 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 Metchnikoff 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 sonorous 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 experiments Metchnikoff made, to support
these sciences, would have caused Pasteur to foam with indignation
that he had ever welcomed 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....
[Illustration: ÉLIE METCHNIKOFF]
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 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
thing 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 questioning old
crones, with their teeth out, who were too deaf to hear him. He went
all the way from Paris to Rouen to interview (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 sending him
gray-haired dogs and dilapidated ancient cats; he published a solemn
research on why a superannuated parrot lived to be seventy. He owned
an ancient he-turtle, who lived in his garden, and Metchnikoff was
overjoyed when this venerable 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, remembering 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, suggested 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--who, though
so different, so much more the searcher, had always 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 hardened 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-chatter 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 diseases 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 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 calomel 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 disease
appear on the unanointed beast, and saw all signs of the disease stay
away from the one that had got the calomel.
Then for the last time Metchnikoff’s strange insanity got hold
of him. He forgot his 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 Maisonneuve 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 Metchnikoff, 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 you--raised
a great clamor against these experiments of Metchnikoff. “It will
remove the penalty of immorality!” said they, “to spread abroad
such an easy and a perfect means of prevention!” But Metchnikoff
only answered: “It has been objected that the attempt to prevent
the spread of this disease is immoral. But since all means of moral
prophylaxis have not prevented the great spread of syphilis and the
contamination of innocents, the immoral thing is to restrain any
available means we have of combating this plague.”
VIII
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, indeed,
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 uncomfortable 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, reminding 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 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. “Ah! 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 microbe 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 disappear from
the face of the globe!” So promised Pasteur, palsied but famous
after his fight with the sicknesses of silkworms. He promised
that, you remember, with a kind of enthusiastic 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 vaccines--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 Pasteur’s 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 secretly
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....
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 flickering
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 farmers’ reasonings that he proved, show microbe hunters a way
to begin to realize the poetic promise of Pasteur to men?
II
In 1884 Theobald Smith was in his middle twenties; he was a Bachelor
of Philosophy of Cornell University; he was a doctor 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
physician, he wanted to do science! In especial he was eager--as what
searcher was not in those piping days--about microbes. 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) Theobald 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 doctors 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 medical 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 observations 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 experimenter, 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 important
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, struggling, insignificant,
financially rather ill-nourished, and in general almost negligible
Bureau of Animal Industry at Washington. Counting Smith, there were
four members of the staff 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. Kilborne 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 nose and set to work
in the right, classic way of Koch--with an astounding instinct he
avoided the cruder methods of Pasteur.
III
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 authorities 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 Industry. 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 unloaded 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 aimless 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.
What was this strange death, brought from the South by cattle
never sick with it themselves, and left invisibly in ambush on the
fields? Why did it take more than a month for those fields to become
dangerous? Why were they only dangerous 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 doctors 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 disease! 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 Kilborne to help
him, and Alexander to clean up after them--saying nothing about ticks,
Salmon put his entire staff to work 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--including 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 instead 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 odoriferous 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.
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 watch 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 summer of 1889 came, the days grew
hot; the year before the cattlemen 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
appropriation, 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 northern 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 northerners 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 experiment
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 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
foreheads. 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, sniffing 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 itself 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 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. 1 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 over 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 middle
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 microscopes in the
attic--even Alexander, dimly sensing the momentous things afoot,
even Alexander got busy. And Theobald Smith looked at the thin blood
of the dead cows. “It is the blood the unknown Texas fever microbe
attacks--something 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 himself 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, 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!” 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 fever but recovered.
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
oh! 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. Instead, 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
southern 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 question--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 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 laboriously 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 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!
Suspiciously 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
fantastical, this business!--were the little pear-shaped microbes....
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 completely accidental victim, that yearling heifer!
In a flash all those mysterious questions cleared up for Theobald
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
instead 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 research, 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 Texas fever. This fell disease is
everywhere that ticks are in the South--and ticks are everywhere;
ticks are biting southern 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 classic unappreciated and completely out of print.
For presently, 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 complete 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 British 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 gentleman 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 professorial, 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 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 until 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 disobedient,
and, what is much worse, tactless. Still a lieutenant, he one day
disapproved of the conduct of his colonel, and offered 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 English
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!
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 his uniform; the stuff set into obstinate jelly when he
tried to filter it; he spent weeks doing a job a modern laboratory
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 general
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 notorious conquests....
They were such muddlers at first, it is hard to believe it, but
together these newly wed bacteriologists worked and discovered 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.
II
Then he was ordered back to England, to the Army Medical School at
Netley, to teach microbe hunting there--for hadn’t 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 investigate strange diseases in
impossible places.
It was then that he, only a brash captain, went to the majestic
Director-General, and I have just told how he was demolished. 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 presently 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
express 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 Commission to Zululand. So they were
happy.
They were commanded to find out everything about the disease 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 spreads over their eyes and they go blind; they droop, and at
last die--every last horse touched by the nagana dies. It was the
same with cattle. Farmers tried to improve their herds by 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 grass. 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 microscopes; 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 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 unwonted
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....
[Illustration: (line drawing of trypanosomes)]
There, suddenly, popped into view the cause of the commotion--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
panatella cigar, only it was flexible, almost tying itself in knots
sometimes, 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!
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 nagana!” 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.
III
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 tangled--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 secretly trembled at his burliness
and his mustaches and his air of the Berserker. This fellow was
born 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 to respect and to test
folk-hunches and superstitions. He respected the beliefs of folks,
himself he had no fancy super-scientific thoughts and never talked
big words--yes, he respected 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 mimosa 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 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 experiment
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!--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, nor drunk, nor even
inhaled the air of the plain--every one died of the nagana.
How they worked, Bruce and his wife! They post-mortemed dead horses;
they named a sick horse “The Unicorn” 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 trypanosomes, 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 demanded 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 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 chloroformed 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
became 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 bronchitic 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 always had to fight their red-tape--until at last I got
too str-r-rong for them!”
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--began 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 ignorant. No one could
tell how it stole from a black father to his neighbor’s dusky
pickaninnies. But now the Royal Society 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 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 trypanosome. 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 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 machines at a succession of gray nothingnesses.
A bellow from Bruce: “I’ve got one!” The rest crowd round, squint
in turn, exclaim as they watch the writhing trypanosome poke his
exploring whip about in the gray field of the lens. Then they go back
to their places--to shout discovery 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 sickness. 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 operation 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 some good--but no
matter, they had served their purpose. The trypanosome, Castellani
and Bruce now knew, was the cause of sleeping sickness!
Now--and this is rare in the dreamers who find fundamental facts in
science--Bruce was a fiend for practical applications, 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 thousand pretty little researches to
tempt the scholar in him, but he brushed all these aside. Old crafty
hand at searching 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 answer. 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-sucking 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 banks!”
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 thousand 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 Botanical 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 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 informed 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, 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 promise 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
flies 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 amiable 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 cluttered 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 medical 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 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 beloved 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 had made....
VII
But now for action! Whatever of the dreamer and laboratory
experimenter there was in him--and there was much--those creative
parts of David Bruce went to sleep, or evaporated 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 sleeping-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.
“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 primordial 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 drowsiness. 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 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 benevolent
white men. But nature had other notions. She had cards up her
sleeve. She almost never lets herself be conquered 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
trypanosomes 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 reports 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 Society 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 Commission 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 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 her! Lady
Bruce as usual went with him, and they found new epidemics of
sleeping 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. “Somewhere, 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 sleeping-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 crocodiles! Everywhere they look for those
deadly, hiding, thousandth-of-an-inch-long wigglers.
They caught tsetse flies on Crocodile Point. See the fantastic
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 paddlers 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, dissects 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-bitings 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 laboratory, 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 become harmless,”
Bruce said at last to Apolo.
And now the sleeping death really disappeared from the shores of Lake
Victoria Nyanza.
VIII
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 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 philosophers 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 themselves 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 learning 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 an animal
about to die from nagana, and shot five cubic centimeters 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 somewhat 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_ impossible to do the experiment to
clinch the matter one way or the other.
That experiment was the injection of the nagana trypanosomes, not
into one, or a hundred--but a thousand human beings.
IX
But there was grisly hope left in the old Viking. “_At present_ it
is impossible,” he said, while he believed that somewhere, 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 delight 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 unfortunate 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 puzzle without Grassi.
And Grassi might (though I am not so sure of that!) have muddled for
years if the searchings of 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 metaphorical scratched faces. Like two quarrelsome small
boys they sat there.
II
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 foothills 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 belligerent 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 spectacular
antics of Pasteur, but from the autobiography of Ronald Ross, which
is a strange mixture of cleverness and contradiction, of frank abuse
of himself and of high enthusiasm for himself, you can only conclude
that this revolution in medicine left Ronald Ross cold.
But he was, for all that, something of a chaser of moonbeams,
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 practice 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 Ross!
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 mathematician. 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; 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 microbe 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 certainly 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 microbe hunting!
III
He went back to London in 1894, plotting to throw up medicine 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 depress 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.”
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 enthusiastic 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
“pathological 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 mosquitoes 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, peppered with a blackish
pigment. Together they watched these germs, fished out of the blood
of sailors just back from the equator, 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 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 mosquito 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
presently 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 mosquitoes....”
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 hunting. 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
superstition--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 chance, a gamble! If
Ronald Ross could prove mosquitoes were to blame for malaria! 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 mosquitoes,”
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 sublimely 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 Manson’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 Secunderabad, 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 mosquito 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 doctors! 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, dragging 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 microbes
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 superstitious 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 mosquitoes kept on humming and remained
sniffish. But, eureka! At last he hit on the idea of pouring water
over the nets, soaking 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!
He bungled. He was like any tyro searcher--only his innate hastiness
made him worse--and he was constantly making 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 phagocyte. 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 collected
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!
What an incredible pair of searchers they were! Away in London
Patrick Manson kept answering Ross’s tangled tortured 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 mosquitoes 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 Lutchman, 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 ordered to Bangalore
to try to stop the cholera epidemic, and didn’t stop it. He became
passionate about the Indian authorities. “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.”
IV
So passed two years, until, in June of 1897 Ronald Ross came back
to Secunderabad, to the steamy hospital of Begumpett. 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 mosquito with which to plague this Husein Khan, and in his
unscientific 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 mosquito, he says: “I have failed in
finding their grubs also.”)
It is no wonder--though lamentable for the purposes of history--that
Ronald Ross was mixed up, considering his lone-wolf work and that
hot wind and his perpetual failures! Anyway, 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
insects.
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 stomach, 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.
[Illustration: (line drawing of cells with small black granules)]
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 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 growing! (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 dots might not be
malaria parasites at all, but only pigment coming from the blood in
the mosquito’s gullet. There certainly 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
enthusiastic 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 doctoring. 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
superstitious 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 fine malaria
pest-hole!--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 mosquitoes. 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 mosquitoes.... 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 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 became 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 persistent Patrick Manson.
You would think that such a man as Ross, wild as the maddest of
hatters, topsy-turvy as the dream of a hasheesh-eater, you would
swear, I say, that he could do no accurate experiments. 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 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! 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 pigmented 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 encouraged himself. There
was another regrettable interlude, in which the unseen hand of his
incurable restless dissatisfaction 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 100 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?”
They went, those microbes, to the spit-gland of those mosquitoes!
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 nonsense 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. Mahomed Bux let into the cage with
those healthy sparrows a 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 swarming 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 Manson, 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 Calcutta 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 bad!) 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
microbes in the bodies of gray she-mosquitoes: he described how his
protégé, 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 itself 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
congresses--believed that what is true for birds goes for men too.
The congress--men in the mass are ever uncritical--thought 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 absolutely 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 nervous man,
feeling he could stand this cursed India not one moment 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 England! 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 England--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 hunting 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
seductions 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 searching. He had
visions of himself at the head of important committees, 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 mosquitoes 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
zoölogy. With a certain amount of sniffishness he always insisted:
“I am a zoologo--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 abominable 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, before Ross had dreamt of becoming a searcher,
Battista Grassi 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. “Mankind,” he said, “is composed of those who work, those who
pretend to work, and those who do neither.” He was ready to admit
that he belonged in the first class, and it is entirely certain 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 millions in our lush lowlands! Why
don’t you solve that problem?” 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
mosquitoes 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 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--without mosquitoes! That means one
special kind of mosquito! I must discover the suspect....”
That was the homely reasoning of Battista Grassi. He compared 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 lectures than the law
demanded, he needed a rest, and on the 15th 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 expert 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 pothooks 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 utterly without a
sense of humor. And he was annoying.
“No,” the indignant head of the house might tell him, “we 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 discovered 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 householders 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 villages 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
zanzarone, and the naturalists had given her the name _Anopheles
claviger_ many years before. _Anopheles claviger!_ This became
the slogan of Battista Grassi. You can see him, shuffling along
behind lovers in the dusk, making fists of his fingers to keep
himself from pouncing on the zanzarone who made 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 delight--riding on the ceiling of the wagon
in which he journeyed from one utterly terrible little malarious
village to another still more cursed.
[Illustration: (line drawing of zanzarone and Culex mosquitoes)]
“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!”
Then Grassi went back to Rome to his lectures, and on September 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 mosquitoes--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 important autumn for mankind.
Besides all that it was a most itchy autumn for Mr. Sola, who for six
years had been a patient of Dr. Bastianelli 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.
Bastianelli 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 Bastianelli 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 discouraged him.
But, one fine morning, Grassi hurried out of Rome to Moletta 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 temperature 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 zanzarone 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 assistant, Bignami) loosed
zanzarone into the bedrooms of people who had never had malaria--and
so gave them malaria.
It was an itchy autumn and an exciting one. The newspapers 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 zanzarone 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 stomachs 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 things 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 demolish 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
mosquitoes 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 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! 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 malaria!
“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....
VII
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!”
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 making 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, staying 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 little 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 officials of the railroad, supplied with money
by the Queen of Italy, became a task-master, a Pharaoh with lashes.
One hundred and twelve souls--railroad men and their families--became
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--especially unseen death--as
all healthy human beings are careless, these one hundred and twelve
Italians had to take precautions, 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 Albanella, most
deadly place of all, and sleeping two nights a week behind those
screens.
All around those screen-protected station houses the zanzarone
swarmed in humming thousands--it was a frightful year for mosquitoes.
Into the _un-screened_ 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 healthily as in the
healthiest spot in Italy!” cried Grassi.
VIII
Such was the fight of Ronald Ross and Battista Grassi 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 aftermaths 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 thousand 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 mosquito--you would say
his best years of work were just beginning--there is Ronald Ross,
insinuating Grassi was a thief, hinting that Grassi was a charlatan,
saying Grassi had added almost nothing to the proof that mosquitoes
carry malaria to men!
There was Grassi--justifiably purple with indignation, writing
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 said: “The facts of science
are greater than the little men who find those facts!”--and then have
gone on searching, and saving.
For the fight has only just begun. The day I finish this tale, it is
twenty-five years after the perfect experiment of Grassi, comes this
news item from Tokio--it is stuck away down in a corner 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 inhabitant....”
CHAPTER XI
WALTER REED
IN THE INTEREST OF SCIENCE--AND FOR HUMANITY!
I
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 catch 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 Americans who were then in Cuba are
sure that those Spanish immigrants 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 mosquito
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 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 absolutely 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!” Because, 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 coöperative fight, that scotching of the yellow jack.
It was fought by a strange crew, and the fight was begun by a curious
old man, with enviable mutton chop whiskers--his name was Doctor
Carlos Finlay--who made an amazingly right guess, who was a terrible
muddler at experiments, who was considered by all good Cubans and
wise doctors to be a Theorizing Old Fool. What a crazy crank is
Finlay, 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 burn 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 burn 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 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 whiskers Carlos
Finlay of Habana howled in a scornful wilderness: “You are all
wrong--yellow fever is caused by a mosquito!”
II
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
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! Dr. James
Carroll was with Walter Reed, and he was not what you would call
gentle, but you will see in a moment 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, 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 listened 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 had been in Italy and knew a thing or two about
mosquitoes, and Lazear put the eggs into a warm place to hatch into
wigglers, 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 extraordinarily 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 he was failing, Walter Reed noticed that
the nurses who handled 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 Walter 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 exceedingly
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 Walter 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! In some epidemics--there were records of
them!--eighty-five men out of a hundred died of it, in some fifty
out of every hundred--almost never less than twenty out of every
hundred. It would be murder! But that is where the strong moral
nature of Walter Reed came to help him. Here was a blameless 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 Commission 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.)
III
Then Walter Reed (he had been called home to Washington to make a
report on work done in the Spanish War) gave elaborate 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, 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-mosquitoes 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 mosquito 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 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 evening 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 laboratory under his
own power, to squint at his own blood under the microscope. But no
malaria. That night his eyes were bloodshot, 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 experimental 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 experimental guinea-pigs,
those two, they had both got yellow fever--and James Carroll’s
heart had nearly stopped, but now they were both getting better, and
Carroll was on the heights, writing 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 experimenter, a tight one, a man who had to have every
condition 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, before they came
down. It wasn’t an absolutely perfect experiment--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 complained 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.”
IV
Then Reed came back to Cuba, and Carroll met him with enthusiasm,
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 musical 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 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
nature 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 sunbaked Camp
Lazear--to keep him away from all danger of accidental 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
Private 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 hundred, maybe three
hundred dollars, if the silver-striped she-mosquitoes did things to
them that would give them one chance out of five not to spend that
money.
“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!” 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 Kissenger furnished nice full meals
for five mosquitoes--two of them had bitten fatal cases fifteen days
and nineteen days before. 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 Agramonte--for,
if they weren’t exactly overrun with young Americans 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 averages,
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 discovery 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 possessions of
yellow fever victims were deadly--millions of dollars worth of
clothing and bedding had been destroyed; the Surgeon-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 thirtieth 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 altogether
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 Cooke, and two
American soldiers, whose names--where are their monuments?--were Folk
and Jernegan.
Those three men opened the tightly nailed, suspicious-looking 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 dankest of medieval dungeons.... And Walter Reed and James
Carroll guarded that little house, so tenderly, to see no mosquito
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 unpacked 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, to wait
for their attack of yellow fever. But 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 (1, 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 experiment--but
for the insanely scientific Walter Reed that most dastardly
experiment was not marvelous enough! Three more American boys went
in there, and for twenty nights slept in new unspeakable sheets and
blankets--with this little refinement 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.” Walter 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! Then Reed and Carroll, who had already asked
as much of Folk and Jernegan 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 Jernegan, 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,” 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 dollars--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 refused 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 comfortable
house! 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 December 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 Carroll had opened a glass jar in that room, and out of that
jar flew fifteen she-mosquitoes, thirsty for blood, whining for a
meal of blood, and each and every one of those fifteen mosquitoes,
had fed, on various days before--on the blood of yellow-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--without 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 quinine 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 waiting 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 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 something to alleviate
human suffering has been granted! A thousand 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 Crawford Gorgas (who was another
blameless man!) grooming himself 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 remarkable 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 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 mosquitoes was not contaminated.)
Then William Crawford Gorgas and John Guitéras--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 Guitéras, “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 Stegomyia, 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 Guitéras.
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 worries 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 questions. “We can wipe out yellow
fever now, we have proved 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 immensely small for the strongest
lens to uncover, revealing its existence only by the murdering of
men with its unseen mysterious 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 because those
experimental cases of Guitéras had died. Guitéras--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. Guitéras would rather not have
Dr. Carroll make post-mortems on the dead cases--it might enrage the
population of Habana. “You can imagine my disappointment!” wrote
Carroll to Walter Reed, with indignant remarks about the frivolous
fears of ignorant populations. But did those deaths stop him? Not
Carroll!
By some unexplained sorceries he got hold of some good poisonous
yellow fever blood, and filtered it through a porcelain 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 induced them to stand for
it)--and presto! two of them got yellow fever. Hurrah! 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.[1]
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 bespectacled
ex-lumberjack searcher. He himself was the first to be hit, it was
Carroll gave the example to those American soldiers, 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....
VII
And in 1902, five years before that, Walter Reed, in the 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 microbe 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.”
FOOTNOTE:
1 A spiral-shaped microbe has recently been brought forward as the
cause of yellow fever, but this discovery has not yet been confirmed.
CHAPTER XII
PAUL EHRLICH
THE MAGIC BULLET
I
Two 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 colleagues; 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
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 gymnasium 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 Strasbourg and Freiburg and Leipsic that
he was no ordinary student. 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 Ehrlich 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 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 modern, 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 fixata!_” 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 searcher’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 demonstration of
the anthrax microbe; he was atheistical, so he needed some human
god and that god was Robert Koch. Painting a sick liver Ehrlich had
seen the tubercle germ before ever Koch laid eyes on it. Ignorant,
lacking Koch’s clear intelligence, 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 experience of my scientific life,” said Paul Ehrlich, long
afterwards. 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 go to
Egypt.
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
doctors should be sympathetic but not desperate about ills over which
they are powerless. Then, too, Paul Ehrlich was a disgusting 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-fashioned
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!
He forgot all about his fundamental science for a moment. “Maybe
methylene blue will kill pain then,” he muttered, and he straightway
injected this blue stuff into groaning patients, and maybe they
were eased a little, but there were difficulties, of a more or less
entertaining 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 consumption 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 become 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 weighing ten grams....
You know, I can now plot a curve of the way the immunity of my
mice increases--it is as exact as experiments 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! 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 colleagues if they did not dodge fast
enough. Nor could you properly say Paul Ehrlich was dignified about
his thoughts, because, twenty-four hours a day he was having the most
outrageous 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 experiments. 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, trying to dig up simple laws, to be expressed
in numbers, that he felt lay beneath the enigmas of immunity and life
and death. And that exactness, though it did nothing to answer those
riddles, helped him at last to make the magic bullet.
III
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 mathematical laws
to govern the doings of these poisons and vaccines and antitoxins!”
he insisted, so this man with the erratic imagination 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
supporting 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; from all parts of the
world critics knocked that theory to smithereens--but he never gave
it up; when he couldn’t find experiments to destroy his critics he
argued at them with enormous 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!” he would cry, “that man
is a SHAMELESS BADGER!” Every few minutes, at the top of his voice he
yelled this, defying the indignant conductor 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 certainly 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
_Glück_--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 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 activities helped Ehrlich to prophesy the weather--it was Mr.
Kadereit’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 several 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 discovered 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 gnawed at them,
but not one of these mice ever got really better; 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. “Ho! 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 trypanosomes, 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 knowledge. It was the method of Trial and Sweating!
Ehrlich tried; Shiga sweat. Their mice turned blue from this dye 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 benzopurpurin
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 dissolve better in the blood of
the mouse!” Paul Ehrlich wrinkled 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 apparatus. 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-did!” 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 presently back from the dye
factory near by came that benzopurpurin color, with the sulfo-groups
properly stuck onto it, “changed a little.”
Under the skin of two white mice Shiga shot the evil trypanosomes 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 destruction--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 pitiful 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 confident 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 microbes are tough. And among the tough lot of them
there are super-hardy ones. These beasts, when a Jew and a Japanese
come along to have at them with a bright-colored dye, lap up that
dye. They like it! 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 sickness 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 results--so often--by being lavishly wasteful. And
then remember that Paul Ehrlich had learned one lesson: change an
apparently useless dye, a little, and it turns from a merely pretty
color into _something_ of a cure. That was enough to drive forward
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 Doktor Ehrlich had to write himself postal
cards several days ahead to remind himself of festive events in his
family. “What a human being!” they said. “What a deep thinker!” said
the cabbies 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 music and literature and art. “What a
democratic man, seeing how great he is!” said the good people of
Frankfort, and they named a street after him. Before he was old he
was legendary!
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 popping 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, laughing when he was told that his own assistants
said he was crazy. He was everywhere! But there was always one way
of tracking him down, for ever and again his voice could be heard,
bawling down the corridors:
“Ka-de-reit!... Ci-gars!” or “Ka-de-reit!... Min-er-al wa-ter!”
V
The dyes were a great disappointment. The chemists muttered 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 chemical journals like some Rosicrucian in
search of the formula for the philosopher’s stone, he came across a
wicked drug. It was called “Atoxyl” which means: “Not poisonous.” Not
poisonous? 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 thermometers 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: “Splendid!”,
growling: “Un-be-liev-a-ble!”, dictating to the long-suffering
Miss Marquardt, bawling for the indispensable Kadereit. 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 unheard-of compounds of arsenic,
without spoiling the combination 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!” he exclaimed.... “Now,
my dear Bertheim,” and he poured out a thousand fantastic schemes.
Bertheim? He could not resist that “Now my dear Bertheim!”
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 compounds 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
lives round and round they whirled, up and down they jumped. Satan
himself could not have schemed a worse torture for creatures just
saved from death. It seemed ridiculous, hopeless, to try to find a
perfect cure. But Paul Ehrlich? He wrote:
“It is very interesting that the only damage to the mice is that they
become dancing mice. Those who visit my laboratory 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 fastness. 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 trypanosomes 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, pictures 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 innumerable 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 indomitable 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 make because of the peril of
explosions and fire from those constantly present ether vapors, and
so hard to keep--the least 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 trypanosomes 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 zoölogist, Schaudinn, of a thin pale
spiral-shaped microbe that looked like a corkscrew 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 handle. 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 Schaudinn had said:
“This pale spirochete belongs to the animal kingdom, it is not like
the bacteria. Indeed, it is closely related to the trypanosomes....
Spirochetes may sometimes turn into trypanosomes....”
Now, it was hardly more than a guess of that romantic Schaudinn that
spirochetes had anything to do with trypanosomes, 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 microbe hunter, S. Hata. This S. Hata was
accurate. He was capable. He could stand the strain of doing the same
experiment 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. Flourishing 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 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 forwards
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 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 preparation, 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.
[Illustration: LAST PORTRAIT OF EHRLICH]
Came 1910, and that was Paul Ehrlich’s year. One day, that year, he
walked into the scientific congress at Koenigsberg, 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 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
compound 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 spirochetes 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 sufferers 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 modern microbe hunters
could come near to the beneficent slaughterings 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 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 enthusiastic letters to Martha Marquardt,
he read thousands of letters from every corner of the world, he
kept records, careful records 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 injections 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 correspondences 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 solitaire each evening, on the backs of those
blood-and-thunder murder mysteries that were the one thing he
read--so he imagined--to rest. But he never rested! Those disasters
pursued him and marred his triumph....
The wrinkles deepened to ditches on his forehead. The 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. “Compound
six hundred and six unites chemically with the spirochetes 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 forgiven him seeing the blessings he has
brought to men--his fault of not foreseeing that once in every so
many thousands 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 corner 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 Ehrlich, 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. 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 bullets, surer,
safer, bullets to wipe out for always the most malignant microbes of
which this history has told. Let us remember 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 remembering.
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
Académie Française, 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 microbe 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, 97, 98
Beethoven, 55, 175, 222, 236, 250
Behring E., 184-206;
attempts chemical cure of diphtheria, 195;
discovers 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 microbe Malta fever, 254;
discovers 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 yellow fever mosquito, 318;
death of, 332
Carter, H. R., 316
Castellani, A., 264, 265
Chaillou, M., 203
Chamberland, M., work with Pasteur 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;
Metchnikoff feeds microbes of, to self and assistants, 225
Cholera, of chickens, vaccine discovered for, 152-156
Claus, Prof., coins term “phagocyte” for Metchnikoff, 214
Cohn, F., 120, 122, 123
Cohnheim, J., 121, 122, 123, 128, 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,
61, 65
De Saussure, 51, 54
Diphtheria, 184-206;
antitoxin discovered by Behring, 198-206;
microbe 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 immunity, 339;
changes arsenic into magic bullet, 349-355;
cures syphilis 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 references to, 121, 194;
side-chain theory of immunity, 340;
worries over deaths from salvarsan, 356-357
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, 71, 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 _et seq._
Fraatz, Emmy, 105
Frederick, the Great, 45
Frémy, M., 99, 100, 101
Gaffky, G., 129, 131, 132, 138, 141
Galileo, 4, 26, 27, 63, 163
Gamaléia, Dr., 217, 219, 224
Garrè, Dr., injects self with dangerous microbes, 139
Germ theory, battle of, 124
Gernez, M., 94, 95
Gibbons, Staff-Sergeant, 264
Goethe, W., 198, 222
Gorgas, W. C., 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
Guérin, J., 155, 156, 157
Guitéras, 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 phagocytes, 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 animal 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, 110, 111, 300
Koch, Robert, 105-144;
dangerous experiments with tuberculosis, 136;
discovers microbe of cholera, 140-143;
experiments with anthrax, 108-128;
failure to cure tuberculosis with vaccine, 193, 194, 299;
first photographs microbes, 123;
invention of hanging-drop, 113, 114;
other references to, 24, 104, 145, 146, 147, 148, 166, 167, 168,
184, 185, 193, 194, 198, 200, 209, 211, 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 tuberculosis, 128-138
Laveran, A., discovers malaria parasite, 281;
microbe of, demonstrated by Manson to Ross, 282;
other references to, 296, 342, 343
Lavoisier, A., 77
Lazear, J., 311-333;
bitten by yellow fever mosquito, 318;
died of yellow fever, 320
Lazear, Mrs. J., 312
Leeuwenhoek, Antony, 3-24;
an admirer of God, 12;
discovers human sperm, 19;
discovers microbes, 10, 11, 12;
discovers microbes in mouth, 17, 18;
experiments on origin of microbes, 13;
failure to find disease microbes, 22;
letters to Leibniz, 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, 111, 114, 128, 137, 138, 209, 228, 250, 334,
358
Leibniz, Gottfried W., 23
Leucart, R., 209
Leupold, 349
Le Verrier, 83
Liebig, J., 70, 73
Linnæus, 59
Lister, J., 100, 106, 182
Loeffler, F., discovers diphtheria microbe, 185-187;
foretells diphtheria 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 mosquito, 301-306;
Manson’s theory mosquito carries, 283;
of birds carried by gray mosquito, 292-298;
prevention of practical demonstration of, by Grassi, 307
Mal de Caderas, 342-350;
Ehrlich cures by chemical, 343-345
Malta Fever, Bruce discovers microbe of, 254 ff.
Manson, Patrick, 282-298, 315;
announces Ross’s success at Edinburgh, 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, Sawtchenko, Wagner, 222, 223;
attempts 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 Metchnikoff,” 222;
nicknamed “Grandpa Christmas,” 228;
other references to, 187, 234;
starts circus at Pasteur Institute, 219-220;
syphilis, prevented by, 229-232
Metchnikoff, Ludmilla, 210, 211
Metchnikoff, Olga, 211, 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 discovered by Th. Smith, 244;
of the air, 83, 84, 85, 86;
of tuberculosis discovered by Koch, 128-138;
pure culture discovered, 125, 126;
spontaneous generation of, 31, 32, 33, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44,
78, 79, 86, 97
Molyneux, 16
Moran, John, 322, 327, 328;
volunteers for mosquito bite, 322, 323
Mosquito, gray carries bird malaria, 292-298;
anopheles carries human malaria, 301-306;
stegomyia carries 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, 58
Napoleon III, 86
Needham, John T., experiments on spontaneous generation of
microbes, 31 _et seq._
Newton, Isaac, 8, 19, 27, 36, 63, 64, 250, 280
Nocard, M., 177
Pasteur, Louis, 57-104, 145-183;
alcoholic 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 vaccine, 157-164;
discovers vaccine for chicken cholera, 152-156;
diseases of wines, 88, 89, 90;
experiments on spontaneous generation, 78, 79;
experiments with lactic fermentation, 64, 65, 66, 67;
experiments with microbes of the air, 83, 84, 85, 86;
inspirational letters to sisters, 59, 60;
last speech of, 182, 183;
other references to, 23, 24, 56, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 116,
121, 122, 123, 128, 132, 138, 139, 140, 141, 184, 187, 188,
193, 203, 211, 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 vaccine discovered by, 169-181;
religious 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, 177, 182
Park, W. H., 201, 206
Peronçito, Dr., 152
Peter, the Great, 19
Pettenkofer, Max, swallows Koch’s cholera culture, 133, 134
Phagocytes, discovered by Metchnikoff, 214-229;
immunity due to, 212-229
Pidoux, Dr., theory of consumption, 108
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
Réaumur, René, 25
Redi, Francesco, 30, 35
Reed, W., 311-333;
death of, 333;
disproves infected clothing theory, 324, 325, 326;
fails to find microbe 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, 285-291, 297, 298;
discovers gray mosquito carries bird malaria, 292-298;
discovers malaria pigment in mosquito stomach, 289;
meets Patrick Manson, 282;
other references to, 309, 315
Rossignol, Dr., 158
Roux, E., 184-206;
announces cures by antitoxin at Buda-Pesth, 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, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 24;
confirm Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of microbes, 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 Ehrlich, 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_, 351
Schwann, Th., experiments on putrefaction by microbes, 61, 76
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 microbe 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;
experiments cruelly on self, 41;
experiments on multiplication of microbes, 53, 54;
experiments on spontaneous generation of microbes, 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;
prevention of, by Roux and Metchnikoff, 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
Toxin, of diphtheria, 187-206;
discovered by Roux, 189-193;
foretold by Loeffler, 187
Trécul, 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, 267-270
Tuberculosis, 128-138;
Koch’s dangerous 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 spontaneous 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, 311-333;
disproof of infected clothing theory, 324-326;
failure of Reed to find microbe of, 314, 315;
Reed proves stegomyia mosquito carries, 317-329
Yersin, A., 188-192
Zanzarone, popular name for anopheles, 302-308
Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been
silently corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences
within the text and consultation of external sources. Some hyphens
in words have been silently removed and some silently added when
a predominant preference was found in the original book. Except
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Page 81: replaced “Chinaman’s cues” with “Chinaman’s queues”.
Page 163: replaced “anonymous genuises” with “anonymous geniuses”.
Page 179: replaced “Jules Verçel” with “Jules Vercel”.
Page 256: replaced “glades of glass” with “glades of grass”.
Page 361: replaced “letters to Liebniz” with “letters to Leibniz”.
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
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