Microbe Hunters

by Paul De Kruif

  Over the country went Grassi once more, chasing zanzarone, hoarding zanzarone: in his laboratory he tenderly raised zanzarone on winter-melons and sugar-water; and in the top of the hospital of the Holy Spirit, in those high mosquito-proof rooms, Grassi and Bastianelli (to say nothing of another assistant, Bignami) loosed zanzarone into the bedrooms of people who had never had malaria—and so gave them malaria.

  It was an itchy autumn and an exciting one. The newspapers became sarcastic and hinted that the blood of these poor human experimental animals would be on the heads of these three conspirators. But Grassi said: to the devil with the newspapers, he cheered when his human animals got sick, he gave them doses of quinine as soon as he was sure his zanzarone had given them malaria, and then “their histories had no further interest for him.”

  By now Grassi had read of those experiments of Ronald Ross with birds. “Pretty crude stuff!” thought this expert Grassi, but when he came to look for those strange doings of the circles and warts and spindle-shaped threads in the stomachs and saliva-glands of his she-anopheles, he found that Ronald Ross was exactly right! The microbe of human malaria in the body of his zanzarone did exactly the same things the microbe of bird malaria had done in the bodies of those mosquitoes Ronald Ross hadn't known the names of. Grassi didn't waste too much time praising Ronald Ross, who, Heaven knows, deserved praise, needed praise, and above all wanted praise. Not Grassi!

  “By following my own way I have discovered that a special mosquito carried human malaria!” he cried, and then he set out—“It is with great regret I do this,” he explained—to demolish Robert Koch. Koch had been fumbling and muddling. Koch thought malaria went from man to man just as Texas fever traveled from cow to cow. Koch believed baby mosquitoes inherited malaria from their mothers, bit people, and so infected them. And Koch had sniffed at the zanzarone.

  So Grassi raised baby zanzarone. He let them hatch out in a room, and every evening in this room, for four months, sat this Battista Grassi with six or seven of his friends. What friends he must have had! For every evening they sat there in the dusk, barelegged with their trousers rolled up to their knees, bare-armed with their shirt sleeves rolled up to their elbows. Some of these friends, whom the anopheles relished particularly, were stabbed every night fifty or sixty times! So Grassi demolished Robert Koch, and so he proved his point, because, though the baby anopheles were children of mother mosquitoes who came from the most pestiferous malaria holes in Italy, not one of Grassi's friends had a sign of malaria!

  “It is not the mosquito's children, but only the mosquito who herself bites a malaria sufferer—it is only that mosquito who can give malaria to healthy people!” cried Grassi.

  Grassi was as persistent as Ronald Ross had been erratic. He plugged up every little hole in his theory that anopheles is the one special and particular mosquito to bring malaria to men. By a hundred air-tight experiments he proved the malaria of birds could not be carried by the mosquitoes who brought it to men and that the malaria of men could never be strewn abroad by the mosquitoes who brought it to birds. Nothing was too much trouble for this Battista Grassi! He knew as much about the habits and customs and traditions of those zanzarone as if he himself were a mosquito and the king and ruler of mosquitoes. . .

  7

  What is more, Battista Grassi was a practical man, and as I have said, an excessively patriotic man. He wanted to see his discovery do well by Italy, for he loved his Italy faithfully and violently. His experiments were no sooner finished, the last good strong nail was no sooner driven into the house of his case against the anopheles, than he began telling people, and writing in newspapers, and preaching—you might almost say he went about, bellowing till he bored everybody:

  “Keep away the zanzarone and in a few years Italy will be free from malaria!”

  He became a fanatic on the best ways to kill anopheles: he was indignant (that man had no sense of humor!) because townspeople insisted on strolling through their streets in the dusk. “How can you be so foolish as to walk in the twilight?” Grassi asked them. “That is the very time when the malaria mosquito is waiting for you.”

  He was the very type of the silly sanitarian. “Don't go out in the warm evenings,” he told every one, “unless you wear heavy cotton gloves and veils!” (Imagine young Italians making love in heavy cotton gloves and veils.) So there was a good deal of sniggering at this professor who had become a violent missionary against the zanzarone.

  But Battista Grassi was a practical man! “One family, staying free from the tortures of malaria—that would be worth ten years of preaching—I'll have to show them!” he muttered. So, in 1900, after his grinding experiments of 1898 and '99, this tough man set out to “show them.” He went down into the worst malaria region of Italy, along the railroad line that ran through the plain of Capaccio. It was high summer. It was deadly summer there, and every summer the poor wretches of railroad workers, miserable farmers whose blood was gutted by the malaria poison, would leave that plain, at the cost of their jobs, at the cost of food, at the risk of starvation—to the hills to flee the malaria. And every summer from the swamps at twilight swarmed the malignant hosts of female zanzarone; at each hot dusk they made their meals and did their murders, and in the night, bellies full of blood, they sang back to their marshes, to marry and lay eggs and hatch out thousands more of their kind.

  In the summer of 1900 Battista Grassi went to the plain of Capaccio. The hot days were just beginning, the anopheles were on the march. In the windows and on the doors of ten little houses of station-masters and employees of the railroad Grassi put up wire screens, so fine-meshed and so perfect that the slickest and the slightest of the zanzarone could not slip through them. Then Grassi, armed with authority from the officials of the railroad, supplied with money by the Queen of Italy, became a task-master, a Pharaoh with lashes. One hundred and twelve souls—railroad men and their families—became the experimental animals of Battista Grassi and had to be careful to do as he told them. They had to stay indoors in the beautiful but dangerous twilight. Careless of death—especially unseen death—as all healthy human beings are careless, these one hundred and twelve Italians had to take precautions, to avoid the stabs of mosquitoes. Grassi had the devil of a time with them. Grassi scolded them. Grassi kept them inside those screens by giving them prizes of money. Grassi set them an indignant example by coming down to Albanella, most deadly place of all, and sleeping two nights a week behind those screens.

  All around those screen-protected station houses the zanzarone swarmed in humming thousands—it was a frightful year for mosquitoes. Into the un-screened neighboring station houses (there were four hundred and fifteen wretches living in those houses), the zanzarone swooped and sought their prey. Almost to a man, woman, and child, those four hundred and fifteen men, women and children fell sick with the malaria.

  And of those one hundred and twelve prisoners behind the screens at night? They were rained on during the day, they breathed that air that for a thousand years the wisest men were sure was the cause of malaria, they fell asleep at twilight, they did all of the things the most eminent physicians had always said it was dangerous to do, but in the dangerous evenings they stayed behind screens—and only five of them got the malaria during all that summer. Mild cases these were, too, maybe only relapses from the year before, said Grassi. “In the so-much-feared station of Albanella, from which for years so many coffins had been carried, one could live as healthily as in the healthiest spot in Italy!” cried Grassi.

  8

  Such was the fight of Ronald Ross and Battista Grassi against the assassins of the red blood corpuscles, the sappers of vigorous life, the destroyer of men, the chief scourge of the lands of the South—the microbe of malaria. There were aftermaths of this fight, some of them too long to tell, and some too painful. There were good aftermaths and bad ones. There are fertile fields now, and healthy babies, in Italy and Africa and India and America, where once the hum of the anopheles brought thin blo
od and chattering teeth, brought desolate land and death.

  There is the Panama Canal. . .

  Then there is Sir Ronald Ross, who was—as once he hoped and dreamed—given enthusiastic banquets.

  There is Ronald Ross who got the Nobel Prize of seven thousand eight hundred and eighty pounds sterling for his discovery of how the gray mosquito carries malaria to birds. . .

  There is Battista Grassi who didn't get the Nobel Prize, and is now unknown, except in Italy, where they huzzahed for him and made him a Senator (he never missed a meeting of that Senate to within a year of his death).

  All these are, for the most part, good, even if some of them are slightly ironical aftermaths.

  Then there is Ronald Ross, who had learned the hard game of searching while he made his discovery about the gray mosquito—you would say his best years of work were just beginning—there is Ronald Ross, insinuating Grassi was a thief, hinting that Grassi was a charlatan, saying Grassi had added almost nothing to the proof that mosquitoes carry malaria to men!

  There was Grassi—justifiably purple with indignation, writing violent papers in reply. . . You cannot blame him! But why will such searchers scuffle, when there are so many things left to find? You would think—of course it would be so in a novel—that they could have ignored each other, or could have said: “The facts of science are greater than the little men who find those facts!”—and then have gone on searching, and saving.

  For the fight has only just begun. The day I finish this tale, it is twenty-five years after the perfect experiment of Grassi, comes this news item from Tokio—it is stuck away down in a corner of an inside page of a newspaper:

  “The population of the Ryukyu Islands, which lie between Japan and Formosa, is rapidly dying off. . . Malaria is blamed principally. In eight villages of the Yaeyama group. . . not a single baby has been born for the last thirty years. In Nozoko village. . . one sick old woman was the only inhabitant. . .”

  11. WALTER REED:

  In the Interest of Science-and for Humanity!

  1

  With yellow fever it was different—there were no brawls about it.

  Everybody is agreed that Walter Reed—head of the Yellow Fever Commission—was a courteous man and a blameless one, that he was a mild man and a logical: there is not one particle of doubt he had to risk human lives; animals simply will not catch yellow fever!

  Then it is certain that the ex-lumberjack, James Carroll, was perfectly ready to let go his own life to prove Reed's point, and he was not too sentimental about the lives of others when he needed to prove a point—which might and might not be what you would call a major point.

  All Cubans (who were on the spot and ought to know) are agreed that those American soldiers who volunteered for the fate of guinea-pigs were brave beyond imagining. All Americans who were then in Cuba are sure that those Spanish immigrants who volunteered for the fate of guinea-pigs were not brave, but money-loving—for didn't each one of them get two hundred dollars?

  Of course you might protest that fate hit Jesse Lazear a hard knock—but it was his own fault: why didn't he brush that mosquito off the back of his hand instead of letting her drink her fill? Then, too, fate has been kind to his memory; the United States Government named a Battery in Baltimore Harbor in his honor! And that same government has been more than kind to his wife: the widow Lazear gets a pension of fifteen hundred dollars a year! You see, there are no arguments—and that makes it fun to tell this story of yellow fever. And aside from the pleasure, it has to be told: this history is absolutely necessary to the book of Microbe Hunters. It vindicates Pasteur! At last Pasteur, from his handsome tomb in that basement in Paris, can tell the world: “I told you so!” Because, in 1926, there is hardly enough of the poison of yellow fever left in the world to put on the points of six pins; in a few years there may not be a single speck of that virus left on earth—it will be as completely extinct as the dinosaurs—unless there is a catch in the fine gruesome experiments of Reed and his Spanish immigrants and American soldiers. . .

  It was a grand cooperative fight, that scotching of the yellow jack. It was fought by a strange crew, and the fight was begun by a curious old man, with enviable mutton chop whiskers—his name was Doctor Carlos Finlay—who made an amazingly right guess, who was a terrible muddler at experiments, who was considered by all good Cubans and wise doctors to be a Theorizing Old Fool. What a crazy crank is Finlay, said everybody.

  For everybody knew just how to fight that most panic-striking plague, yellow fever; everybody had a different idea of just how to combat it. You should fumigate silks and satins and possessions of folks before they left yellow fever towns—no! that is not enough: you should burn them. You should bury, burn, and utterly destroy these silks and satins and possessions before they come into yellow fever towns. It was wise not to shake hands with friends whose families were dying of yellow fever; it was perfectly safe to shake hands with them. It was best to burn down houses where yellow fever had lurked—no! it was enough to smoke them out with sulphur. But there was one thing nearly everybody in North, Central, and South America had been agreed upon for nearly two hundred years, and that was this: when folks of a town began to turn yellow and hiccup and vomit black, by scores, by hundreds, every day—the only thing to do was to get up and get out of that town. Because the yellow murderer had a way of crawling through walls and slithering along the ground and popping around corners—it could even pass through fires!—it could die and rise from the dead, that yellow murderer; and after everybody (including the very best physicians) had fought it by doing as many contrary things as they could think of as frantically as they could do them—the yellow jack kept on killing, until suddenly it got fed up with killing. In North America that always came with the frosts in the fall. . .

  This was the state of scientific knowledge about yellow fever up to the year 1900. But from between his mutton chop whiskers Carlos Finlay of Habana howled in a scornful wilderness: “You are all wrong—yellow fever is caused by a mosquito!”

  2

  There was a bad state of affairs in San Cristobal de Habana in Cuba in 1900. The yellow jack had killed thousands more American soldiers than the bullets of the Spaniards had killed. And it wasn't like most diseases, which considerately pounce upon poor dirty people—it had killed more than one-third of the officers of General Leonard Wood's staff, and staff officers—as all soldiers know—are the cleanest of all officers and the best protected. General Wood had thundered orders; Habana had been scrubbed; happy dirty Cubans had been made into unhappy clean Cubans—“No stone had been left unturned”—in vain! There was more yellow fever in Habana than there had been in twenty years!

  Cablegrams from Habana to Washington and on June 25th of 1900 Major Walter Reed came to Quemados in Cuba with orders to “give special attention to questions relating to the cause and prevention of yellow fever.” It was a big order. Considering who the man Walter Reed was, it was altogether too big an order. Pasteur had tried it! Of course, in certain ways—though you would say they had nothing to do with hunting microbes—Walter Reed had qualifications. He was the best of soldiers; fourteen years and more he had served on the western plains and mountains; he had been a brave angel flying through blizzards to the bedsides of sick settlers—he had shunned the dangers of beer and bottle-pool in the officers' mess and resisted the seductions of alcoholic nights at draw poker. He had a strong moral nature. He was gentle. But it will take a genius to dig out this microbe of the yellow jack, you say—and are geniuses gentle? Just the same, you will see that this job needed particularly a strong moral nature, and then, besides, since 1891 Walter Reed had been doing a bit of microbe hunting. He had done some odd jobs of searching at the very best medical school under the most eminent professor of microbe hunting in America—and that professor had known Robert Koch, intimately.

  So Walter Reed came to Quemados, and as he went into the yellow fever hospital there, more than enough young American soldiers passed h
im, going out, on their backs, feet first. . . There were going to be plenty of cases to work on all right—fatal cases! Dr. James Carroll was with Walter Reed, and he was not what you would call gentle, but you will see in a moment what a soldier-searcher James Carroll was. And Reed found Jesse Lazear waiting for him—Lazear was a European-trained microbe hunter, aged thirty-four, with a wife and two babies in the States, and with doom in his eyes. Finally there was Aristides Agramonte (who was a Cuban)—it was to be his job to cut up the dead bodies, and very well he did that job, though he never became famous because he had had yellow fever already and so ran no risks. These four were the Yellow Fever Commission.

  The first thing the Commission did was to fail to find any microbe whatever in the first eighteen cases of yellow fever that they probed into. There were many severe cases in those eighteen; there were four of those eighteen cases who died; there was not one of those eighteen cases that they didn't claw through from stem to gudgeon, so to speak, drawing blood, making cultures, cutting up the dead ones, making endless careful cultures—and not one bacillus did they find. All the time—it was July and the very worst time for yellow fever—the soldiers were coming out of the hospital of Las Animas feet first. The Commission failed absolutely to find any cause, but that failure put them on the right track. That is one of the humors of microbe hunting—the way men make their finds! Theobald Smith found out about those ticks because he had faith in certain farmers; Ronald Ross found out the doings of those gray mosquitoes because Patrick Manson told him to; Grassi discovered the zanzarone carrying malaria because he was patriotic. And now Walter Reed had failed in the very first part—and anybody would say it was the most important part—of his work. What to do? There was nothing to do. And so Reed had time to hear the voice of that Theorizing Old Fool, Dr. Carlos Finlay, of Habana, shouting: “Yellow fever is caused by a mosquito!”