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
for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text and
inconsistent or archaic usage have been retained.
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_.
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
public domain.