It was then that he, only a brash captain, went to the majestic Director-General, and I have just told how he was demolished. But even Directors-General cannot remember the uppish wishes of all of their pawns and puppets; directors may propose, but adroit wire-pulling sometimes disposes, and presently in 1894, Surgeon-Major David Bruce and Mrs. Bruce are in Natal, traveling by ox-team ten miles a day towards Ubombo in Zululand. The temperature in the shade of their double-tent often reached 106; swarms of tsetse flies escorted them, harassed them, flopped on them with the speed of express trains and stung them like little adders; they were howled at by hyenas and growled at by lions. . . They spent part of every night scratching tick bites. . . But Bruce and his wife, the two of them, were the First British Nagana Commission to Zululand. So they were happy.
They were commanded to find out everything about the disease called nagana—the pretty native name for an unknown something that made great stretches of South Africa into a desolate place, impossible to farm in, dangerous to hunt big game in, suicidal to travel in. Nagana means “depressed and low in spirits.” Nagana steals into fine horses and makes their coats stare and their hair fall out; while the fat of these horses melts away nagana grows watery pouches on their bellies and causes a thin rheum to drip from their noses; a milky film spreads over their eyes and they go blind; they droop, and at last die—every last horse touched by the nagana dies. It was the same with cattle. Farmers tried to improve their herds by importing new stock; cows sent to them fat and in prime condition came miserably to their kraals—to die of nagana. Fat droves of cattle, sent away to far-off slaughter-houses, arrived there hairless, hidebound skeletons. There were strange belts of country through which it was death for animals to go. And the big game hunters! They would start into these innocent-seeming thickets with their horses and pack-mules; one by one—in certain regions mind you—their beasts wilted under them. When these hunters tried to hoof it back, sometimes they got home.
Bruce and Mrs. Bruce came at last to Ubombo—it was a settlement on a high hill, looking east toward the Indian Ocean across sixty miles of plain, and the olive-green of the mimosa thickets of this plain was slashed with the vivid green of glades of glass. On the hill they set up their laboratory; it consisted of a couple of microscopes, a few glass slides, some knives and syringes and perhaps a few dozen test-tubes—smart young medical students of to-day would stick up their noses at such a kindergarten affair! Here they set to work, with sick horses and cattle brought up from the plain below—for Providence had so arranged it that beasts could live on the barren hill of Ubombo, absolutely safe from nagana, but just let a farmer lead them down into the juicy grass of that fertile plain, and the chances were ten to one they would die of nagana before they became fat on the grass. Bruce shaved the ears of the horses and jabbed them with a scalpel, a drop of blood welled out and Mrs. Bruce, dodging their kicks, touched off the drops onto thin glass slides.
It was hot. Their sweat dimmed the lenses of their microscopes; they rejoiced in necks cramped from hours of looking; they joked about their red-rimmed eyes. They gave strange nicknames to their sick cows and horses, they learned to talk some Zulu. It was as if there were no Directors-General or superior officers in existence, and Bruce felt himself for the first time a free searcher.
And very soon they made their first step ahead: in the blood of one of their horses, sick to death, Bruce spied a violent unwonted dancing among the faintly yellow, piled-up blood corpuscles; he slid his slide along the stage of his microscope, till he came to an open space in the jungle of blood cells. . .
There, suddenly, popped into view the cause of the commotion—a curious little beast (much bigger than any ordinary microbe though), a creature with a blunt rear-end and a long slim lashing whip with which he seemed to explore in front of him. A creature shaped like a panatella cigar, only it was flexible, almost tying itself in knots sometimes, and it had a transparent graceful fin running the length of its body. Another of the beasts swam into the open space under the lens, and another. What extraordinary creatures! They didn't go stupidly along like common microbes—they acted like intelligent little dragons. Each one of them darted from one round red blood cell to another; he would worry at it, try to get inside it, tug at it and pull it, push it along ahead of him—then suddenly off he would go in a straight line and bury himself under a mass of the blood cells lining the shore of the open space. . .
“Trypanosomes—these are!” cried Bruce, and he hurried to show them to his wife. In all animals sick with nagana they found these finned beasts, in the blood they were, and in the fluid of their puffy eyelids, and in the strange yellowish jelly that replaced the fat under their skins. And never a one of them could Bruce find in healthy dogs and horses and cows. But as the sick cattle grew sicker, these vicious snakes swarmed more and more thickly in their blood, until, when the animals lay gasping, next to death, the microbes writhed in them in quivering masses, so that you would swear their blood was made up of nothing else. . . It was horrible!
But how did these trypanosomes get from a sick beast to a healthy one? “Here on the hill we can keep healthy animals in the same stables with the sick ones—and never a one of the sound animals comes down. . . here on the hill no cow or horse has ever been known to get nagana!” muttered Bruce. “Why?. . .”
He began to dream experiments, when the long arm of the Authorities—maybe it was that dear old Director-General remembering—found him again: Surgeon-Major Bruce was to proceed to Pietermaritzburg for duty in the typhoid epidemic raging there.
3
Only five weeks they had been at this work, when they started back to Pietermaritzburg, ten miles a day by ox-team through the jungle. He started treating soldiers for typhoid fever, but as usual—thief that he was—he stole time to try to find out something about typhoid fever, in a laboratory set up, since there was no regular one, of all places—in the morgue. There in the sickening vapors of the dead-house Bruce puttered in snatched moments, got typhoid fever himself, nearly died, and before he got thoroughly better was sent out as medical officer to a filibustering expedition got up to “protect” a few thousand square miles more of territory for the Queen. It looked like the end for him, Hely-Hutchinson's wires got tangled—there seemed no chance ever to work at nagana again; when the expedition had pierced a couple of hundred miles into the jungle, all of the horses and mules of this benevolent little army up and died, and what was left of the men had to try to hoof it back. A few came out, and David Bruce was among the lustiest of those gaunt hikers. . .
Nearly a year had been wasted. But who can blame those natural enemies of David Bruce, the High Authorities, for keeping him from research? They looked at him; they secretly trembled at his burliness and his mustaches and his air of the Berserker. This fellow was born for a soldier! But they were so busy, or forgot, and presently Hely-Hutchinson did his dirty work again, and in September, 1895, Bruce and his wife got back to Ubombo, to try to untangle the knot of how nagana gets from a sick animal to a healthy one. And here Bruce followed, for the first time, Theobald Smith around that corner. . . Like Theobald Smith, Bruce was a man to respect and to test folk-hunches and superstitions. He respected the beliefs of folks, himself he had no fancy super-scientific thoughts and never talked big words—yes, he respected such hunches—but he must test them!
“It is the tsetse flies cause nagana,” said some experienced Europeans. “Flies bite domestic animals and put some kind of poison in them.”
“Nagana is caused by big game,” said the wise Zulu chiefs and medicine men. “The discharges of the buffalo, the quagga, and waterbuck, the koodoo—these contaminate the grass and the watering places—so it is horses and cattle are hit by the nagana.”
“But why do we always fail to get our horses safe through the fly country—why is nagana called the fly disease?” asked the Europeans.
“Why, it's easy to get animals through the fly belt so long as you don't let them eat or drink!” answered
the Zulus.
Bruce listened, and then proceeded to try out both ideas. He took good healthy horses, and tied heavy canvas bags round their noses so they couldn't eat nor drink; he led them down the hill to the pleasant-looking midday hell in the mimosa thickets; here he kept them for hours. While he watched to see they didn't slip their nose bags, swarms of pretty brown and gold tsetses buzzed around them—flopped on to the kicking horses and in twenty seconds swelled themselves up into bright balloons of blood. . . The world seemed made of tsetse flies, and Bruce waved his arms. “They were enough to drive one mad!” he told me, thirty years afterward. I can see him, talking to those pests in the language of a dock-foreman, to the wonder of his Zulus. Day after day this procession of Bruce, the Zulus, and the experimental horses went down into the thorns, and each afternoon, as the sun went down behind Ubombo, Bruce and his migrating experiment grunted and sweated back up the hill.
Then, in a little more than fifteen days, to the delight of Bruce and his wife, the first of those horses who had served as a fly-restaurant turned up seedy in the morning and hung his head. And in the blood of this horse appeared the vanguard of the microscopic army of finned wee devils—that tussled so intelligently with the red blood cells. . .
So it was with every horse taken down into the mimosa—and not one of them had eaten a blade of grass nor had one swallow of water down there; one and all they died of the nagana.
“Good, but it is not proved yet, one way or another,” said Bruce. “Even if the horses didn't eat or drink, they may have inhaled those trypanosomes from the air—that's the way the greatest medical authorities think malaria is passed on from one man to the next—though it sounds like rot to me.” But for Bruce nothing was rot until experiment proved it rot. “Here's the way to see,” he cried. “Instead of taking the horses down, I'll bring the flies up!”
So he bought more healthy horses, kept them safe on the hill, thousands of feet above the dangerous plain, then once more he went down the hill—how that man loved to hunt, even for such idiotic game as flies!—and with him he took a decoy horse. The tsetses landed on the horse; Bruce and the Zulus picked them off gently, hundreds of them, and stuck them into an ingenious cage, made of muslin. Then back up the hill, to clap the cage buzzing with flies on to the back of a healthy horse. Through a clever glass window in one of the cage-sides they watched the greedy brutes make their meal by sticking their stingers through the muslin. And in less than a month it was the same with these horses, who had never eaten, nor drunk, nor even inhaled the air of the plain—every one died of the nagana.
How they worked, Bruce and his wife! They post-mortemed dead horses; they named a sick horse “The Unicorn” and tried to keep him alive with arsenic. To find out how long a tsetse fly can carry the trypanosomes on his stinger they put cages of flies on sick dogs and then at intervals of hours, and days, let them feed on healthy ones. They fed dying heifers hot pails of coffee, mercifully they shot dogs thinned by the nagana to sad bags of bones. Mrs. Bruce sterilized silk threads, to dip in blood swarming with trypanosomes, then sewed these threads under the hides of healthy dogs—to find out how long such blood might remain deadly. . . There was now no doubt the tsetse flies, and only the flies, could carry the nagana, and now Bruce asked:
“But where do the tsetses of the plain get the trypanosomes they stick into cows and horses? In those fly belts there are often no horses or cattle sick with nagana, for months. Surely the flies [he was wrong here] can't stay infected for months—it must be they get them from the wild animals, the big game!” That was a possibility after his heart. Here was a chance to do something else than sit at a microscope. He forgot instantly about the more patient, subtle jobs that demanded to be done—teasing jobs, for a little man, jobs like tracing the life of the trypanosomes in the flies. . . “The microbes must be in game!” and he buckled on his cartridge belt and loaded his guns. Into the thickets he went, and shot Burchell's zebras; he brought down koodoos and slaughtered water-bucks. He slashed open the dead beasts and from their hot hearts sucked up syringes full of blood, and jogged back up the hill with them. He looked through his microscopes for trypanosomes in these bloods—but didn't find them. But there was a streak of the dreamer in him. “They may be there, too few to see,” he muttered, and to prove they were there he shot great quantities of the blood from ten different animals into healthy dogs. So he discovered that the nagana microbes may lurk in game, waiting to be carried to gentler beasts by the tsetse. So it was Bruce made the first step towards the opening up of Africa.
4
And Hely-Hutchinson saw how right he had been about David Bruce. “ 'Ware the tsetse fly,” he told his farmers, “kill the tsetse fly, clear the thickets in which it likes to breed—drive out, exterminate the antelope from which it sucks the trypanosomes.” So Bruce began ridding Africa of nagana.
Then came the Boer War. Bruce and Mrs. Bruce found themselves besieged in Ladysmith with nine thousand other Englishmen. There were thirty medical officers in the garrison—but not one surgeon. With each whine and burst of the shells from the Boer's “Long Tom” the rows of the wounded grew—there were moanings, and a horrid stench from legs that should be amputated. . . “Think of it! Not one of those medicoes could handle a knife! Myself, I was only a laboratory man,” said Bruce, “but I had cut up plenty of dogs and guinea-pigs and monkeys—so why not soldiers? There was one chap with a bashed-up knee. . . well, they chloroformed him, and while they were at that, I sat in the next room reading Treve's Surgery on how to take out a knee-joint. Then I went in and did it—we saved his leg.” So Bruce became Chief Surgeon, and fought and starved, nearly to death, with the rest. What a boy that Bruce was! In 1924 in Toronto, in a hospital as he lay propped up, a battered bronchitic giant, telling me this story, his bright eye belied his skin wrinkled and the color of old parchment—and there was no doubt he was as proud of his slapdash surgery and his sulky battles with the authorities, as of any of his discoveries in microbe hunting. He chuckled through phlegm that gurgled deep in his ancient air-tubes: “Those red-tape fellows—I always had to fight their red-tape—until at last I got too str-r-rong for them!”
5
Presently, two years after Ladysmith, he became stronger than they—and they came asking him to hunt microbes. . .
For death was abroad on the shores of Lake Victoria Nyanza, in Central Africa, on the Equator. It crept, it jumped, it kept popping up in new villages, it was in a way a very merciful death—though slow—for it was without pain, turning from a fitful fever into an unconquerable laziness strange to see in the busy natives of the lake shore; it passed, this death, from lethargy into a ridiculous sleepiness that made the mouths of the negroes fall open while they ate; it went at last from such a drowsiness into a delicious coma—no waking from this!—and into a horrible unnatural coldness that merged with the chill of the grave. Such was the African sleeping sickness. In a few years it had killed hundreds of thousands of the people of Uganda, it had sent brave missionaries to meet their God, and English colonial administrators home to their final slumber. It was turning the most generous soil on earth back into an unproductive preserve for giraffes and hyenas. The British Colonial Office was alarmed; shareholders began to fear for their dividends; natives—those who were left—began to leave their villages of shaggy, high-pitched, thatch-roofed huts. And the scientists and doctors?
Well, the scientists and doctors were working at it. Up till now the wisest ones were as completely ignorant of what was this sleeping death as the blackest trader in bananas was ignorant. No one could tell how it stole from a black father to his neighbor's dusky pickaninnies. But now the Royal Society sent out a commission made up of three searchers; they sailed for Uganda and began researches with the blood and spinal fluid of unhappy black men doomed with this drowsy death.
They groped; they sweat in the tropic heat; they formed different opinions: one was pretty sure a curious long worm that he found in the black men's blood was the cause
of this death; a second had no definite opinion that I know of; the third, Castellani, thought at first that the wee villain back of the sleeping death was a streptococcus—like the microbe that causes sore throats.
That was way off the truth, but Castellani had the merit of working with his hands, trying this, trying that, devising ingenious ways of looking at the juices of those darkies. And so one day—by one of those unpredictable stumbles that lie at the bottom of so many discoveries—Castellani happened on one of those nasty little old friends of David Bruce, a trypanosome. From inside the backbone of a deadly drowsy black man Castellani had got fluid—to look for streptococcus. He put that fluid into a centrifuge—that works like a cream separator—to try to whirl possible microbes down to the bottom of the tube in the hope to find streptococcus. Down the barrel of his microscope Castellani squinted at a drop of the gray stuff from the bottom of the fluid and saw—
A trypanosome, and this beast was very much the same type of wiggler David Bruce had fished out of the blood of horses dying of nagana. Castellani kept squinting, found more trypanosomes, in the spinal juices and even in the blood of a half a dozen doomed darkies. . .
That was the beginning, for if Castellani had not seen them, told Bruce about them, they might never have been found.
Meanwhile the smolder of the sleeping death broke into a flare that threatened English power in Africa. And the Royal Society sent the veteran David Bruce down there, with the trained searcher Nabarro, with Staff-Sergeant Gibbons, who could do anything from building roads to fixing a microscope. Then of course Mrs. Bruce was along; she had the title of Assistant—but Bruce paid her fare.
They came down to Uganda, met Castellani. He told Bruce about the streptococcus—and the trypanosomes. Back to the laboratory went these two; microscopes were unpacked, set up; doomed darkies carried in. Heavy needles were jabbed into these sad people's spines. Castellani, the young Nabarro, and Mrs. Bruce bent over their microscopes to find the yes or no of the discovery of Castellani. There they sat, in this small room on the Equator, squinting down the barrels of their machines at a succession of gray nothingnesses.
Microbe Hunters Page 27
