This Young Englishwoman Risked Death in a Hideous Form to Save the
Lives of Others
The serene courage of self-devotion to the service of humanity does
not have the acclaim of the world very often. We have not learned how
to measure the values of quiet heroism—the heroism that works in the
solitude. We thrill to feats of daring, we are rather complacent to the
bravery of scientific experiment, though the risk of life be great.
There is the story of a young Englishwoman, Miss Mary Davies, who,
far behind the front with its stimulating excitement and without the
inspiration of approving and emulous comrades, calmly, deliberately
challenged death in one of its most horrible forms. She had seen
the victims of one of the most terrible of war scourges—gaseous
gangrene—suffering a loathsome death, and knew how hopelessly the
surgeons in the laboratories of the American Ambulance where she
served, worked to combat the plague. She realized that if inoculation
with the bacilli of the disease could be successfully employed,
thousands of wounded men would be saved, and she resolved to make the
experiment.
She had seen many examples of the horrible results of this infection
and had observed the invariably fatal course of the disease in
animals inoculated with the bacilli. She watched and assisted in the
experiments in which guinea-pigs were inoculated with gangrene bacilli.
She had become convinced of the efficacy of injections with quinine
hydrochlorid and had concluded that the experiments on small animals
had given all the results of which they were capable and that the time
had come for an experiment on a normal human body, and not one from
the battlefield, fatigued and wounded and possibly infected by other
bacilli.
Well aware that her plan would be prevented if it became known, she
determined without a word to any one, to risk her life in an attempt
to demonstrate the efficacy of the treatment, which she was convinced
would cure the victims of this dread disease.
Her preparations deliberately and completely made, she waited until she
was about to leave for a holiday, so that her absence would not disturb
the work in the laboratory. She chose the deadliest strain of bacilli
in the laboratory, obtained from the latest fatal case, of which two
drops of culture sufficed to kill a guinea-pig. Then she inoculated
herself in a manner most certain to produce the disease in animals,
injecting fifty times the amount used to kill a guinea-pig, making one
injection deep into the muscles of her thigh, the other just beneath
the skin. Two hours later she quietly came to the laboratory and asked
to be treated in the same manner as the animals under experiment.
The surgeons and attendants were greatly alarmed for her. Their
experience had taught them the rapidity and horribleness of the effects
of gangrene, the most dreaded and the most baffling of the diseases
produced by the war. They began treatment of her at once, apprehensive
and doubtful of results.
Injections with a quinine solution were made at the points where she
had inoculated the deadly bacilli. She was sent to the nearest hospital
for observation and further treatment. Quinine injections were given
a second time. Symptoms of a slight degree of infection developed
within twenty-four hours, but they subsided without operation becoming
necessary, and it is more than gratifying to know that recovery was
rapid and complete.
Miss Davies has been named a “heroine of science” and her brave and
self-sacrificial deed will be properly recognized in medical science;
but surely she has won a place in the world’s esteem and memory as a
heroine of humanity.