And now the sleeping death really disappeared from the shores of Lake Victoria Nyanza.
8
The ten thousand smaller microbe hunters who work at lesser jobs to-day, as well as the dozen towering ones whose adventures this book tells, all of them have to take some risk of death. But if the ten thousand smaller microbe hunters of today could by some chemistry be changed into death-fighters like Bruce! There was something diabolical in the risks he took, and something yet more devilish in the way he could laugh—with a dry humor—and wish other microbe hunters might have died to prove some of his own theories. But he had a right to wish death for others—
“Can young tsetse flies, bred in the laboratory, inherit the sleeping-sickness trypanosome from their mothers? Surely there was a chance of it (you remember that strange business of Theobald Smith's mother-ticks bequeathing the Texas fever microbe to their children). But analogies are for philosophers and lawyers. ”Are artificially hatched young tsetses dangerous?“ asks Bruce. ”No!“ he can answer. ”For two members of the commission“ [modestly he does not say which two members] ”allowed hundreds of tsetse flies, bred in the laboratory, to bite them. And the result was negative.“
But no man knew what the result would be—before he tried. And the deaths from sleeping sickness (according to the best figures) are one hundred out of one hundred. . .
How he enjoyed hearing of other men trying to kill themselves to find out! His last African foray was in 1911—he stayed until 1914. He was near sixty; his blacksmith's strength was beginning to crack from a nasty infection of his air-tubes got from I know not what drenching rains or chills of high tropic nights. But a new form of sleeping sickness—terrible stuff that killed in a few months instead of years—had just broken out in Nyassaland and Rhodesia. There was a great scientific quarrel on. Was the trypanosome causing this disease some new beast just out of the womb of Nature—or was it nothing else than Bruce's old parasite of nagana, tired of butchering only cows, dogs and horses, and now learning to kill men?
Bruce went to work at it. A German in Portuguese East Africa said: “This trypanosome is a new kind of bug!” Bruce retorted: “On the contrary, it is nothing but the nagana germ hopping from cows to men.”
Then this German, his name was Taute, took the blood of an animal about to die from nagana, and shot five cubic centimeters of it—it held millions of trypanosomes—under his own skin: to prove the nagana parasite does not kill men. And he let scores of tsetse flies bite him, flies whose bellies and spit-glands were crammed with the writhing microbes—he did these things to prove his point!
Was Bruce shocked at this? Listen to him, then: “It is a matter for some scientific regret that these experiments were not successful—though we can ill spare our bold and somewhat rash colleague—for then the question would have been answered. . . As it is, these negative experiments prove nothing. It may be that only one man in a thousand would become infected that way.”
Merciless Bruce! Poor Taute! He tried conscientiously to kill himself—and Bruce says it is too bad he did not die. He made the ultimate gesture—surely the God of searchers will reward him; then Bruce (and he is right) criticizes the worth of Taute's lone desperate experiment!
Nyassaland was the last battlefield of Bruce against the sleeping sickness, and it was his most hopeless one. For here he found that the Glossina morsitaw (that is the name of the tsetse carrier of the sickness) does not make its home only on the shores of lakes and rivers, but buzzes and bites from one end of Nyassaland to the other; there is no way of running away from it, no chance of moving nations out from under it here. . . Bruce stuck at it, he spent years at measurements of the lengths of trypanosomes—monotonous enough this work was to have driven a subway ticket chopper mad—he was trying to find out whether the nagana and this new disease were one and the same thing. He ended by not finding out, and he finished with this regret: that it was at present impossible to do the experiment to clinch the matter one way or the other.
That experiment was the injection of the nagana trypanosomes, not into one, or a hundred—but a thousand human beings.
9
But there was grisly hope left in the old Viking. “At present it is impossible,” he said, while he believed that somewhere, somewhen, men may be found, in the mass, who will be glad to die for truth. And as you will see, in a story of a band of American buck-privates in another chapter, there are beginnings of such spirit even now. But when great armies of men so offer themselves, to fight death, just as they now delight to fight each other, it will be because they are led on by captains such as David Bruce.
10. ROSS VS. GRASSI:
Malaria
1
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 though 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 Boophius 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.
2
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 Mo
zart, 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 malarial” 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!
3
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 bit
ten. 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.
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