by Arthur Allen
that I have never seen surpassed, equaled or approximated anywhere, except perhaps at Los Alamos during the war years. I recall a session with Mazur and Banach at the Scottish Café which lasted 17 hours without interruption except for meals. There would be brief spurts of conversation, a few lines would be written on the table, occasional laughter would come from some of the participants, followed by long periods of silence during which we just drank coffee and stared vacantly at each other. The café clients at neighboring tables must have been puzzled by these strange doings.
It was out of such discussions that delirious formulas such as the Banach-Tarski paradox were born. Alfred Tarski was a Warsaw-based mathematician whose Jewish ancestry had cost him a professorship in Lwów that was instead given to the equally famous Leon Chwistek (this failure, indirectly, led to Tarski’s escape from Nazism to a safe haven at the University of Calfornia at Berkeley). The paradox, an arcane set geometry theorem, proved that a solid ball in three-dimensional space could be divided into a finite number of pieces that could be put back together in a way that yielded two identical copies of the original ball. In the Scottish Café, an orange could become two oranges.
Frequently, the equations written on the Scottish Café’s marble tabletops were erased by unwitting waiters. At his wife’s insistence, Banach in 1933 brought in a simple black-and-white composition book, which was kept behind the counter. When the table scribbling got intense, the mathematicians called for the notebook to be brought out, and wrote important theorems and problems in it. The Scottish Book, it was called. When the cafés closed, Banach wandered over to the train station, where he could spend the early morning hours over a drink at the all-night cafeteria. In his requirement of music and noise to lubricate mental gears, Banach embodied what was unnatural and noble about city life—the concatenation of clashing smells, languages, accents, flavors, the mixture of rudeness and formality that somehow inspired thoughts both original and humane in what was, after all, a small city. The mathematicians in their cafés, working at their apparently important yet impenetrable problems, added an ethereal element to the life of a city known for its hustlers and beggars, speculators and traders, vodka producers and oilmen (the first refinery in the world had been built near Lwów in 1856).
The Scottish Café (right) and the Roma (left). (Courtesy of the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe.)
Café life brought together intellectuals from different milieus, offering an ideal setting for intellectual cross-fertilization. Everyone at the Roma knew Weigl—in fact, he regularly forgot his umbrellas and coats there on his way to and from the office. Sometimes the talk at the Scottish Café focused on science, or the mathematicians gossiped about peers, grumbled and shouted about Nazis or Bolsheviks. Professorial jobs were hard to come by in interwar Poland—especially, but not exclusively, for Jews. The tables at the Szkocka were full of professors, learned unemployables like the Jewish mathematician Juliusz Schauder, and café creatures of all types. The Roma had a character named Ostap Ortwin, a literary critic who was president of the Lwów Literary Club. Ortwin was tall and broad-shouldered, with thick eyebrows and a black Cossack-style mustache—not a typical look for a Jew. He was outspoken and loud, his opinions rattling the Roma’s windows, wrote his friend Józef Wittlin, and “the anti-Semitic idiots retreated in reverence” when he strode the streets.
Of course, daily existence was not always as romantic as these café reminiscences suggest. Increasingly, anti-Semitism impinged on public and private life. Despite being an outré bastard, Banach possessed such absurd talent that he could make it in academia, but his Jewish colleagues had few chances. Schauder, who had equations named for him, was forced to work as a private tutor. There was a saying in Polish academia, “talent is passed on from father to son-in-law.” Jobs were few, marriage to another professor’s daughter was a common ramp to success, and Jewish scholars—with rare exceptions—had to teach high school.
Ludwik Fleck took a number of steps to deal with these disadvantages. He worked from 1921 until 1923 in Weigl’s laboratory, where he developed a method of typhus diagnosis involving a weak suspension of typhus antigens injected under the skin, similar to the method doctors around the world still use to test for exposure to tuberculosis. Fleck called it the exanthin reaction. Yet after receiving his doctorate for this work, Fleck found he had no options in academia. There were a few Jewish scientists in Weigl’s laboratory—Karolina Reisowa, who had been a colleague of Weigl’s in Nusbaum-Hilarowicz’s lab, worked on amphibian development; Adam Finkel was a specialist in the blood problems of louse feeders—but both had won their positions under the Habsburgs. Professional advancement in the new Polish republic grew increasingly difficult in the years between 1920 and 1939. Weigl tried hard to help his erstwhile assistant. His best friend was the leading dermatologist in town, Jan Lenartowicz, who hired Fleck in 1923 as a bacteriologist in the Department of Skin and Venereal Diseases at Lwów’s General Hospital. In the footnotes of Fleck’s scientific papers from this period, one finds frequent expressions of thanks to Weigl for materials and guidance, an indication that the two scientists maintained a connection. In 1923, Fleck married Ernestyna Waldman, a scientific technician and the daughter of a wealthy Stryj merchant. With her dowry, he bought himself a private laboratory that he would use to enhance his earnings from the state jobs he held over the next 12 years. Perhaps Weigl attended the wedding, or at least sent a gift, but all evidence of this sort disappeared in the turbulent decades that followed. Indeed, practically the only memorabilia we have of Fleck’s interwar life are the papers he published in scientific journals, mostly in Polish and German.
A few of his contemporaries state that Fleck had a difficult personality in these years—they remark on a degree of sarcasm and bitterness at his exclusion from the mainstream. But bitterness seems to have stimulated rather than discouraged his intellectual curiosity. He assembled a network of friends from various intellectual arenas, and their discussions helped him create a new philosophy of science. The mathematician Steinhaus was one of Fleck’s closest friends; they often worked together and published papers using statistical analyses of serological problems—an approach very much ahead of its time. It is amusing to imagine their discussions in the Roma or the ałewski, which was Steinhaus’s favorite café. But Fleck was notoriously stingy with his money and was clearly pressed for time, so it’s possible that he was the rare Lwów professional who lacked a café Stammtisch. Fleck also had regular contact with philosopher Kazimierz Twardowski, the artist-mathematician-philosopher Leon Chwistek, and the psychiatrist Jakob Frostig, an insightful and amusing conversationalist who knew most of the leaders of psychiatry in Europe, including Freud and Jung. Frostig, who treated schizophrenics with bold but dangerous treatments such as insulin coma and malaria therapy, fled Nazism in 1939 and eventually landed in California, where for several years he worked at the Camarillo State Asylum.
Fleck could get books at the Lwów university library, one of the best in Poland, and his colleagues were available to explain the latest developments in Einsteinian physics, logic, and math.
In 1927, Fleck, then 31, won a six-week fellowship at the State Institute of Serotherapy in Vienna. After completing his work there, he did an intellectual tour d’horizon of Western Europe, attending lectures by Freud in Vienna and Henri Bergson in Paris. According to one source, he visited the Pasteur Institute and the Frankfurt laboratory of the great immunologist Paul Ehrlich. Upon returning to Lwów, he took over the bacteriological lab at the Social Security Hospital, where the pediatrician Dr. Franciszek Groër—another close friend of Weigl’s—was his mentor.
Groër, the leading pediatrician in town, was a nutrition expert, organizer of the first pediatric bone marrow transplant in Poland, and an extremely cultivated individual. The son of an attorney and an actress, he also wrote poetry and took beautiful photographs of the city, spoke eight languages fluently, and for a while directed the Lwów opera. The example
of his polyglot boss encouraged Fleck’s budding absorption in the philosophy of science.
Fleck’s early work in this area was inspired by observing how Weigl had maneuvered around what was known and unknown about typhus. One of the key attributes of R. prowazekii at the time was its incapacity to grow in artificial broths. Yet, Weigl acknowledged in a 1924 paper, another scientist who worked for a while in his lab had managed to get the bacteria to flourish in a dish. When Weigl injected lice with these cultures, however, they did not become ill with typhus. If R. prowazekii was growing in the dish, he said, it probably had adopted a mutated form that no longer caused the disease. Could it still be properly called R. prowazekii? At the time, Weigl was one of the only microbiologists of any renown who continued to doubt the fixity of bacterial species. Fleck shared his skepticism. Their confusion stemmed from the fact that mutation is rapid and extensive within bacterial species—an idea whose time had not yet come. In the early decades of bacteriology, the techniques of microbial genetics belonged to the future. Identification of organisms depended on rough postulates and simple observation. Since physical appearance was one of the only ways scientists had to identify a germ, they became frustrated when these organisms eluded definitions by assuming shifting forms.
By the mid-1920s, when Fleck began working on his philosophical examinations of science, Weigl had learned to grow R. prowazekii in the intestines of successive generations of lice, to remove the bacteria from the insects and kill the typhus germs. He tested the formulation as a vaccine on animals throughout the 1920s. Occupied as he was with these pragmatic issues, and under increasing pressure from the Polish state to begin vaccinating people, Weigl had no time for philosophical matters related to the morphing of R. prowazekii. But they continued to fascinate Fleck, who had been present in Weigl’s lab when the science was being born. Fleck’s Jewishness excluded him from some circles of academic life in Lwów. But as a hands-on diagnostician he confronted the complexities of bacterial forms on a daily basis, and this led him to new insights into the nature of scientific discoveries and categories. The problems with R. prowazekii, Fleck would argue, showed how scientific truths were contextual, depending in part on what society was asking science to do.
Shortly after returning from Vienna late in 1927, Fleck appeared before the Lwów Society for the History of Medicine—a club that was attended by doctors and biologists, but also by geologists, mathematicians, and others of an intellectual turn of mind—to present his first philosophical paper, “On the Specific Characteristics of Medical Thinking.” In the paper, Fleck noted that “there is no specific border between sickness and health, and a sickness never really presents exactly the same way.” Yet the purpose of medicine was to make all the variations of illness fit into a single framework and give it a single name. “How do we find a law for lawless phenomena?” Fleck asked. “This is the basic question of medical thinking. Only statistical observations allow us to create a type out of the many individual cases.”
Mugshot of Ludwik Fleck. (Courtesy of Archiv für Zeitgeschichte, Zurich.)
The specificity of disease was a rapidly evolving concept in Fleck’s time; in no other field were there so many entities described as “pseudos” (i.e., typhoid fever as opposed to typhus), “paras” (e.g., parainfluenza), and other subtypes, which often had nothing to do with each other. Imagine the bearded family house doctor in three-piece suit and watch chain arriving at a Polish bedside in the late 1920s, confronted at once by the habitual terror of serious illness and by the confusing welter of contradictory scientific information arriving in the medical journals—if he bothered to keep up with them. Despite the profusion of new observations in this period of the medical sciences, there were scant new effective disease treatments. In Fleck’s learned view, the doctor was probably better off ignoring the literature. Intuition and experience, rather than logic, were the keys to diagnosis, because even the presence of a particular bug didn’t mean anything definitive—the patient might merely be a carrier. “Only a combination of symptoms and even appearances, Habitus (attitude), the entire status of the patient, decides [the diagnosis]. It is precisely the best diagnosticians who are most frequently unable to explain why they have given a particular diagnosis, but can only say that the whole picture fits such and such an illness.” Doctors were constantly confronted with “illogical” or “impossible” medical conditions that could not be effectively broken down, but only attacked as a total picture, on the basis of the clinician’s experience and instincts. Quacks, homeopaths, and psychoanalysts were the only practitioners who claimed to have precise, logical systems of classification, Fleck said: “In medicine we have the rather unique circumstance that the worse a doctor is, the more ‘logical’ his therapy. In medicine you can find evidence of anything, while to date we’ve clarified almost nothing.”
Fleck’s work was “probably the first sociological investigation of the production of scientific knowledge,” according to the sociologist Thomas Schnelle. And though unheralded, it launched an entirely new way of looking at the activities of science, viewing them as a collective activity that was just as subject to human foibles as any other endeavor. Ironically, Fleck launched his ideas shortly after the American writer Paul de Kruif published Microbe Hunters, a 1926 bestseller that put the “great man” squarely at the center of scientific history and inspired a generation of youthful scientists with its profiles of heroism. Fleck did not respond directly to this book (which became very popular in a 1938 Polish edition), but his writing in these years attacked the legends of heroism that de Kruif and others wove around new discoveries. Fleck portrayed scientific progress as the work of thought collectives, not supermen. This had to be so, because the scientist saw only what he was trained to see: “What actually thinks within a person is not the individual himself but his social community,” Fleck wrote. “His mind is structured under the influence of this ever-present social environment.”
Fleck’s work anticipated the idea that scientific understandings are shaped by their cultural and historical context. One writer has described him as “a Gregor Mendel of the history and philosophy of science.” But his ideas are probably most similar to those of anthropologist contemporaries like Franz Boas. Fleck, like the physicist Thomas Kuhn, was deeply invested in science and tremendously excited by its future. The culturally determined aspect of science was not, for Fleck, a detriment to its advance. What worried him most was the divorce of science and the humanities, for he saw science as the ultimate democratic activity. Unlike religions, in which priests or the “saved” held secrets that gave them power over the masses, science discovered truths that could be shared with everyone. But though society provided scientists with the problems it wanted solved, Fleck wrote, the methods and thoughts of each discipline grew steadily less accessible to the public. Scientists tried to simplify explanations of their activity in order to gain funding, fame, and popular sympathy, yet their work itself was opaque. The ideas popularly understood to be the meat and potatoes of science—“human genome,” “brain chemistry,” and “global warming,” might be good examples in our time—were understood by scientists to be shorthand for infinitely more specific and difficult processes, which required more and more specialized scientific craft and know-how. Wrote Fleck,
We used to think that science one day would somehow open to our understanding in a clear and simple way that secretive complex that we call nature. Instead, science itself has become a model that is more difficult and complex than nature itself and even more difficult to penetrate. It is easier to find yourself in the woods than to understand botany. It’s easier to heal a sick person than to really understand what is wrong with him.
In debunking the view that scientific truths were fixed and eternal, Fleck partook of the avant-garde spirit of his age and place. His ideas echoed those of the surrealist artist and writer Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885–1939), who was close to Fleck’s friend Leon Chwistek. Fleck and Witkiewicz grasped the essential void
of meaning in a universe in which science was viewed, by the intelligentsia at least, as the new arbiter of truth, yet an impossibly incomplete (not to say misunderstood) system, and one that lacked an intrinsic morality. Fleck looked forward with a humanist’s optimism to the shades of color and light that science would gradually reveal. Witkiewicz, on the other hand, mourned the holes that science punched in holistic versions of the world. He extolled art over science because it “did not cut the umbilical cord that links it to the whole. [Art] pulsates with the blood of mystery, the vessels float into the surrounding night, and come back filled with a dark fluid.” As the historian of science Ilana Löwy has written, both Fleck and Witkiewicz “strived to unsettle the existing concept of reality and to construct a different one, developing new, original conceptual or material tools that could enable this to happen.”
Witkiewicz, who had seen the Bolshevik revolution close-up in St. Petersburg in 1917, committed suicide in response to the 1939 invasion of Poland, an event predicted in his novel Insatiability. Fleck’s fate would be far more difficult and complex.
CHAPTER THREE
THE LOUSE FEEDERS
As Fleck developed his private laboratory practice in the early 1930s, Rudolf Weigl’s work also began to take on a more routinized rhythm. Weigl had assembled a team of talented investigators, among them Zbigniew Stuchly, Jan Starzyk, and Henryk Mosing, a farsighted epidemiologist with spiritual inclinations who organized expeditions to the remotest Carpathian villages. The public health authorities of Poland had taken a growing interest in Weigl’s vaccine, but he was in no hurry to test it, let alone push the vaccine into production. He insisted on carrying out hundreds of passages of typhus from louse to louse to various animals and back to lice again. He even tried adapting pigs as lice feeders. Weigl was extremely mindful of past experiences in which pathogens kept alive via serial passage through different animals underwent a genetic shift and a change in virulence—becoming either weaker or more dangerous.
