Microbe Hunters

by Paul De Kruif

  The Commission went to call on Dr. Finlay, and that old gentleman—everybody had laughed at him, nobody had listened to him—was very glad to explain his fool theory to the Commission. He told them the ingenious but vague reasons why he thought it was mosquitoes carried yellow fever; he showed them records of those awful experiments, which would convince nobody; he gave them some little black eggs shaped like cigars and said: “Those are the eggs of the criminal!” And Walter Reed took those eggs, and gave them to Lazear, who had been in Italy and knew a thing or two about mosquitoes, and Lazear put the eggs into a warm place to hatch into wigglers, which presently wiggled themselves into extremely pretty mosquitoes, with silver markings on their backs—markings that looked like a lyre. Now Walter Reed had failed, but you have to give him credit for being a sharp-eyed man with plenty of common sense—and then too, as you will see, he was extraordinarily lucky. While he was failing to find bacilli, even in the dreadful cases, with bloodshot eyes and chests yellow as gold, with hiccoughs and with those prophetic retchings—while he was failing, Walter Reed noticed that the nurses who handled those cases, were soiled by those cases, never got yellow fever! They were non-immunes too, those nurses, but they didn't get yellow fever.

  “If this disease were caused by bacillus, like cholera, or plague, some of those nurses certainly should get it,” argued Walter Reed to his Commission.

  Then all kinds of strange tricks of yellow fever struck Walter Reed. He watched cases of the disease pop up most weirdly in Quemados. A man in a house in 102 Real Street came down with it; then it jumped around the corner to 20 General Lee Street, and from there it hopped across the road—and not one of these families had anything to do with each other, hadn't seen each other, even!

  “That smells like something carrying the disease through the air to those houses,” said Reed. There were various other exceedingly strange things about yellow fever—they had been discovered by an American, Carter. A man came down with yellow fever in a house. For two or three weeks nothing more happened—the man might die, he might have got better and gone away, but at the end of that two weeks, bang! a bunch of other cases broke out in that house. “That two weeks makes it look as if the virus were taking time to grow in some insect,” said Reed, to his Commission who thought it was silly, but they were soldiers.

  “So we will try Finlay's notion about mosquitoes,” said Walter Reed, for all of the just mentioned reasons, but particularly because there was nothing else for the Commission to do.

  That was easy to say, but how to go on with it? Everybody knew perfectly well that you cannot give yellow fever to any animal—not even to a monkey or an ape. To make any kind of experiment to prove mosquitoes carry yellow fever you must have experimental animals, and that meant nothing more nor less than human animals. But give human beings yellow fever! In some epidemics—there were records of them!—eighty-five men out of a hundred died of it, in some fifty out of every hundred—almost never less than twenty out of every hundred. It would be murder! But that is where the strong moral nature of Walter Reed came to help him. Here was a blameless man, a Christian man, and a man—though he was mild—who was mad to help his fellow men. And if you could prove that yellow fever was only carried by mosquitoes. . .

  So, on one hot night after a day among dying men at Pinar del Rio, he faced his Commission: “If the members of the Commission take the risk first—if they let themselves be bitten by mosquitoes that have fed on yellow fever cases, that will set an example to American soldiers, and then—” Reed looked at Lazear, and then at James Carroll.

  “I am ready to take a bite,” said Jesse Lazear, who had a wife and two small children.

  “You can count on me, sir,” said James Carroll, whose total assets were his searcher's brain, and his miserable pay as an assistant-surgeon in the army. (His liabilities were a wife and five children.)

  3

  Then Walter Reed (he had been called home to Washington to make a report on work done in the Spanish War) gave elaborate instructions to Carroll and Lazear and Agramonte. They were secret instructions, and savage instructions, when you consider the mild man he was. It was an immoral business—it was a breach of discipline in its way, for Walter Reed then had no permission from the high military authorities to start it. So Reed left for Washington, and Lazear and Carroll set off on the wildest, most daring journey any two microbe hunters had ever taken. Lazear? You could not see the doom in his eyes—the gleam of the searcher outshone it. Carroll? That was a soldier who cared no damn for death or courts-martial—Carroll was a microbe hunter of the great line. . .

  Lazear went down between the rows of beds on which lay men, doomed men with faces yellow as the leaves of autumn, delirious men with bloodshot eyes. He bit those men with his silver-striped she-mosquitoes; carefully he carried these blood-filled beasts back to their glass homes, in which were little saucers of water and little lumps of sugar. Here the she-mosquitoes digested their meal of yellow fever blood, and buzzed a little, and waited for the test.

  “We should remember malaria,” Reed had told Lazear and Carroll. “In that disease it takes two or three weeks for the mosquito to become dangerous—maybe it's the same here.”

  But look at the bold face of Jesse Lazear, and tell me if that was a patient man! Not he. Somehow he collected seven volunteers, who so far as I can find have remained nameless, since the test was done in dark secrecy. To these seven men—whom for all I know he may have shanghaied—but first of all to himself, Lazear applied those mosquitoes who a few days before had fed on men who now were dead. . .

  But alas, they all stayed fit as fiddles, and that discouraged Lazear.

  But there was James Carroll. For years he had been the right-hand man of Walter Reed. He had come into the army as a buck private and had been a corporal and a sergeant for years—obeying orders was burned into his very bones—and Major Reed had said: “Try mosquitoes!” What is more, what Major Reed thought was right, James Carroll thought was right, too, and Major Reed thought there was something in the notion of that Old Theorizing Fool. But in the army, thoughts are secondary—Major Reed had left them saying: “Try mosquitoes!”

  So James Carroll reminded the discouraged Lazear “I am ready!” He told Lazear to bring out the most dangerous mosquito in his collection—not one that had bitten only a single case, but he must use a mosquito that had bitten many cases—and they must be bad cases—of yellow fever. That mosquito must be as dangerous as possible! On the twenty-seventh of August, Jesse Lazear picked out what he thought to be his champion mosquito, and this creature, which had fed on four cases of yellow fever, two of them severe ones, settled down on the arm of James Carroll.

  That soldier watched her while she felt around with her stinger. . . What did he think as he watched her swell into a bright balloon with his blood? Nobody knows. But he could think, what everybody knows: “I am forty-six years old, and in yellow fever the older the fewer get better.” He was forty-six years old. He had a wife and five children, but that evening James Carroll wrote to Walter Reed:

  “If there is anything in the mosquito theory, I should get a good dose of yellow fever!” He did.

  Two days later he felt tired and didn't want to visit patients in the yellow fever ward. Two days after that he was really sick: “I must have malaria!” he cried, and went to the laboratory under his own power, to squint at his own blood under the microscope. But no malaria. That night his eyes were bloodshot, his face a dusky red. The next morning Lazear packed Carroll off to the yellow fever wards, and there he lay, near to death for days and days. . . There was one minute when he thought his heart had stopped. . . and that, as you will see, was a bad minute for Assistant-Surgeon Carroll.

  He always said those were the proudest days of his life. “I was the first case to come down with yellow fever after the experimental bite of a mosquito!” said Carroll.

  Then there was that American private soldier they called “X.Y.”—these outlaw searchers called him �
�X.Y.,” though he was really William Dean, of Grand Rapids, Michigan. While James Carroll was having his first headaches, they bit this X.Y. with four mosquitoes—the one that nearly killed Carroll, and then three other silver-striped beauties besides, who had fed on six men that were fairly sick, and four men that were very sick with yellow fever and two men that died.

  Now everything was fine with the experiments of Quemados. Eight men had been bitten, it is true, and were fit as fiddles—but the last two, James Carroll and X.Y., they were real experimental guinea-pigs, those two, they had both got yellow fever—and James Carroll's heart had nearly stopped, but now they were both getting better, and Carroll was on the heights, writing to Walter Reed, waiting proudly for his chief to come back—to show him the records. Only Jesse Lazear was a little cynical about these two cases, because Lazear was a fine experimenter, a tight one, a man who had to have every condition just so, like a real searcher—and, thought Lazear, “It is too bad seeing the nerve of Carroll and X.Y.—but both of them exposed themselves in dangerous zones once or twice, before they came down. It wasn't an absolutely perfect experiment—it isn't sure that my mosquitoes gave them yellow fever!” So Lazear was skeptical, but orders were orders, and every afternoon he went to those rows of beds at Las Animas, in the room with the faint strange smell, and here he turned his test-tubes upside-down on the arms of boys with bloodshot eyes, and let his she-mosquitoes suck their fill. But September 13th was a bad day, it was an unlucky day for Jesse Lazear, for while he was at this silly job of feeding his mosquitoes, a stray mosquito settled down on the back of his hand. “Oh! that's nothing!” he thought. “That wouldn't be the right kind of mosquito anyway!” he muttered, and he let the mosquito drink her fill—though, mind you, she was a stray beast that lived in this ward where men were dying!

  That was September 13th.

  “On the evening of September 18th. . . Dr. Lazear complained of feeling out of sorts, and had a chill at 8 p.m.,” says a hospital record of Las Animas. . .

  “September 19: Twelve o'clock noon,” goes on that laconic record, “temperature 102.4 degrees, pulse 112. Eyes injected, face suffused. [That means bloodshot and red]. . . 6 p.m. temperature 103.8 degrees, pulse, 106. Jaundice appeared on the third day. The subsequent history of this case was one of progressive and fatal yellow fever” [and the record softens a little], “the death of our lamented colleague having occurred on the evening of September 25,1900.”

  4

  Then Reed came back to Cuba, and Carroll met him with enthusiasm, and Walter Reed was sad for Lazear, but very happy about those two successful cases of Carroll and X.Y.—and then, and then (brushing aside tears for Lazear) even in that there was the Hand of God, there was something for Science: “As Dr. Lazear was bitten by a mosquito while present in the wards of a yellow fever hospital,” wrote Walter Reed, “one must, at least, admit the possibility of this insect's contamination by a previous bite of a yellow fever patient. This case of accidental infection therefore cannot fail to be of interest—”

  “Now it is my turn to take the bite!” said Walter Reed, but he was fifty years old, and they persuaded him not to. “But we must prove it!” he insisted, so gently, that, hearing his musical voice and looking at his chin that did not stick out like the chin of a he-man, you might think Walter Reed was wavering (after all, here was one man dead out of three).

  “But we must prove it,” said that soft voice, and Reed went to General Leonard Wood, and told him the exciting events that had happened. Who could be less of a mollycoddle than this Wood? And he gave Walter Reed permission to go as far as he liked. He gave him money to build a camp of seven tents and two little houses—to say nothing of a flagpole—but what was best of all Wood gave him money to buy men, who would get handsomely paid for taking a sure one chance out of five of never having a chance to spend that money! So Walter Reed said: “Thank you, General,” and one mile from Quemados they pitched seven tents and raised a flagpole, and flew an American flag and called that place Camp Lazear (three cheers for Lazear!), and you will see what glorious things occurred there.

  Now, nothing is more sure than this: that every man of the great line of microbe hunters is different from every other man of them, but every man Jack of them has one thing in common: they are original. They were all original, excepting Walter Reed—whom you cannot say would be shot for his originality, seeing that this business of mosquitoes and various bugs and ticks carrying diseases was very much in the air in those last ten years of the nineteenth century. It was natural for a man to think of that! But he was by all odds the most moral of the great line of microbe hunters—aside from being a very thorough clean-cut experimenter—and now that Walter Reed's moral nature told him: “You must kill men to save them!” he set out to plan a series of airtight tests—never was there a good man who thought of more hellish and dastardly tests!

  And he was exact. Every man about to be bit by a mosquito must stay locked up for days and days and weeks, in that sun-baked Camp Lazear—to keep him away from all danger of accidental contact with yellow fever. There would be no catch in these experiments! And then Walter Reed let it be known, to the American soldiers in Cuba, that there was another war on, a war for the saving of men—were there men who would volunteer? Before the ink was dry on the announcements Private Kissenger of Ohio stepped into his office, and with him came John J. Moran, who wasn't even a soldier—he was a civilian clerk in the office of General Fitzhugh Lee. “You can try it on us, sir!” they told him.

  Walter Reed was a thoroughly conscientious man. “But, men, do you realize the danger?” And he told them of the headaches and the hiccups and the black vomit—and he told them of fearful epidemics in which not a man had lived to carry news or tell the horrors. . .

  “We know,” said Private Kissenger and John J. Moran of Ohio, “we volunteer solely for the cause of humanity and in the interest of science.”

  Then Walter Reed told them of the generosity of General Wood. A handsome sum of money they would get—two hundred, maybe three hundred dollars, if the silver-striped she-mosquitoes did things to them that would give them one chance out of five not to spend that money.

  “The one condition on which we volunteer, sir,” said Private Kissenger and civilian clerk John J. Moran of Ohio, “is that we get no compensation for it.”

  To the tip of his cap went the hand of Walter Reed (who was a major): “Gentlemen, I salute you!” And that day Kissenger and John J. Moran went into the preparatory quarantine, that would make them first-class, unquestionable guinea-pigs, above suspicion and beyond reproach. On the 5th of December Kissenger furnished nice full meals for five mosquitoes—two of them had bitten fatal cases fifteen days and nineteen days before. Presto! Five days later he had the devil of a backache, two days more and he was turning yellow—it was a perfect case, and in his quarters Walter Reed thanked God, for Kissenger got better! Then great days came to Reed and Carroll and Agramonte—for, if they weren't exactly overrun with young Americans who were ready to throw away their lives in the interest of science—and for humanity still there were ignorant people, just come to Cuba from Spain, who could very well use two hundred dollars. There were five of these mercenary fellows—whom I shall simply have to call “Spanish immigrants,” or I could call them Man 1, 2, 3, and 4—just as microbe hunters often mark animals: “Rabbit 1, 2, 3, and 4—” anyway they were bitten, carefully, by mosquitoes who, when you take averages, were much more dangerous than machine gun bullets. They earned their two hundred dollars—for four out of five of them had nice typical (doctors would look scientific and call them beautiful) cases of yellow fever! It was a triumph! It was sure! Not one of these men had been anywhere near yellow fever—like so many mice they had been kept in their screened tents at Quemados. It they hadn't been ignorant immigrants—hardly more intelligent than animals, you might say—they might have been bored, because nothing had happened to them excepting—the stabs of silver-striped she-mosquitoes. . .

  “
Rejoice with me, sweetheart,” Walter Reed wrote to his wife, “as, aside from the antitoxin of diphtheria and Koch's discovery of the tubercle bacillus, it will be regarded as the most important piece of work, scientifically, during the nineteenth century. . .”

  Walter Reed was so thorough that you can call him original, as original as any of the microbe hunters of the great line—for he was certainly original in his thoroughness. He might have called it a day—you would swear he was tempted to call it a day: eight men had got yellow fever from mosquito bites, and only one—what amazing luck!—had died.

  “But can yellow fever be carried in any other way?” asked Reed.

  Everybody believed that clothing and bedding and possessions of yellow fever victims were deadly—millions of dollars worth of clothing and bedding had been destroyed; the Surgeon-General believed it; every eminent physician in America, North, South and Central (excepting that old fool Finlay) believed it. “But can it?” asked Reed, and while he was being so joyfully successful with Kissenger and Spaniards 1, 2, 3, and 4, carpenters came, and built two ugly little houses in Camp Lazear. House No. 1 was the nastier of these two little houses. It was fourteen feet by twenty, it had two doors cleverly arranged one back of the other so no mosquitoes could get into it, it had two windows looking south—they were on the same side as the door, so no draft could blow through that little house. Then it was furnished with a nice stove, to keep the temperature well above ninety, and there were tubs of water in the house—to keep the air as chokey as the hold of a ship in the tropics. So you see it was an uninhabitable little house—under the best of conditions—but now, on the thirtieth of November in 1900, sweating soldiers carried several tightly nailed suspicious-looking boxes, that came from the yellow fever wards of Las Animas—to make this house altogether cursed. . .