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....”