by Arthur Allen
The Allies came too late to stop typhus at Dachau, where the disease killed hundreds in April 1945, or at Bergen-Belsen. Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, were among 17,000 inmates of that camp who died of typhus in the final weeks of the war. Typhus killed hundreds of thousands of Jews and other inmates in hundreds of other concentration camps spread across Europe. These were the last major typhus epidemics in Europe. Everywhere the Allied troops went, they liberally dusted friend and foe with DDT. The miracle powder killed the vector and thus eliminated the spread of typhus, and practically eliminated the disease as a threat to mankind. The Cox vaccine surely had some efficacy, but it was never studied well enough for anyone to know how much. Giroud’s vaccine protected thousands of French POWs, and, according to Weigl, 5–6 million individuals were vaccinated with his vaccine, including 1 million civilians. The figure is certainly exaggerated. How many of those who received his vaccine survived because of it? Did the vaccine change the course of history? Perhaps only in small ways. Some hundreds or thousands of concentration camp and ghetto inhabitants, having passed through a thousand deadly threats, may have never known whether it was vaccine or something else that ultimately saved them.
Weigl’s lice live on. For 40 years, Henryk Mosing continued his master’s research on rickettsial diseases, working for the Ukrainian health ministry at the building on Zelena (formerly Zielona) Street in Lwów, now Lviv, where Fleck had been the boss under the Soviets, IG Farben during the Nazi occupation. He used Weigl’s methodology, but improved diagnostic tests and conducted research on the pathophysiology of louse-carried typhus. About 10,000 descendants of the Weigl lice first created in 1939 are kept alive, fed each day by lab workers for a small stipend. These lice are quite different from “wild” lice. Like the scientists who feed them, they have been entirely shaped by the culture of the laboratory.
Advances in knowledge on lice and typhus have come elsewhere in recent decades. In 1975, U.S. scientists discovered that in addition to humans and lice, the disease is carried by flying squirrels. About 40 percent of the flying squirrels in the southeastern United States are estimated to carry antibodies to Rickettsia prowazekii. The germ does not sicken the squirrels or their lice, however, and transmission to people is extremely rare—only a handful of squirrel-to-person transmissions have been documented over the past 35 years. Yet the easy carriage of the causative germ suggests that sometime in the past, the squirrel, or its lice or fleas, may have brought the disease into human circulation. This suggests that typhus was part of the Columbian exchange, traveling back to Europe with Spanish conquistadores.
Nowadays fewer people are lousy, and typhus, when it appears, can be controlled with a single dose of a common antibiotic like doxycycline. Typhus outbreaks still occur in a few cold, impoverished pockets of the world—in the Peruvian Andes, in the Atlas Mountains of North Africa, in Ethiopia, and even in Russia. In 1997, a deadly febrile disease broke out in Rwandan refugee camps in the highlands of Burundi, with 100,000 cases and 15,000 deaths. Its cause was mysterious until one of the victims, a Swiss nurse, was flown home sick and died of a hemorrhagic fever. An autopsy revealed she had typhus. A year later, typhus broke out in a Russian psychiatric hospital where the patients and nurses had not removed their clothes for months on account of freezing temperatures caused by a broken generator. Other rickettsial diseases continue to circulate more abundantly. About a million Asians each year sicken of chigger-borne scrub typhus, which is fatal in roughly 10 percent of diagnosed cases. Flea-carried murine typhus—Rickettsia typhi—strikes from time to time in the Americas; an outbreak hospitalized 23 people in 2008 in Austin, Texas. Tick-borne rickettsial diseases like Rocky Mountain spotted fever are still around.
Overall, classical typhus is so unusual that many of the world’s top experts on Rickettsia have never seen it. David Walker, a leading rickettsial expert who works at the University of Texas at Galveston, arrived in an Andean village in Peru at the tail end of an epidemic once, and found families where both parents had died. “But I’ve never seen an actual case of the disease,” he says. There are certainly many very poor people in cold places who still carry the typhus germ. The disease is much easier to control than it ever was. Yet in some remote corners of the globe, no doubt, it is only a single catastrophe away from returning.
Walker’s department in Texas was established by Ludwik Anigstein, a Polish émigré whom Fleck visited during a trip to the United States in 1954. Looking through Anigstein’s papers many years ago, Walker found the story of Fleck’s urine-based typhus vaccine and decided to investigate. He looked for Rickettsia prowazekii antigens in the urine of guinea pigs and other animals infected with the disease, but never found any. “Maybe I was incompetent,” he told me. “Or maybe it wasn’t there.”
Fleck’s scientific discoveries have not held up in a significant way, but his ideas about how to think remain very relevant. In the wake of the Nazi intellectual disaster, which festered in a pseudo-Darwinian mishmash of Nietzsche, Spencer, and Galton, scientists like Fleck and Hirszfeld were looking for new scientific metaphors, different ways of interpreting science and sharing its culture with the public. Fleck understood that the vast complexity of biology left room for new concepts and approaches. He wanted scientific thought collectives to be open, democratic communities that allowed in different streams of interpretation.
I visited Lwów recently and wondered at the vitality of a place with so many shattered and buried dreams. I watched smartly dressed Ukrainian men and women—ambling, strolling, trotting purposefully through the streets. Tourist shops sold posters and T-shirts celebrating anti-Semitic Ukrainian nationalists, and the street that once was Sapiehy, a major thoroughfare in a mixed Polish-Jewish part of town, has been renamed for the Ukrainian nationalist (and anti-Semite) Stepan Bandera. These things were troubling, but it struck me there was no denying the continuity of urban life, each and every inhabitant focused on his or her own worries and plans. All cities, even the most peaceful, are built upon the bones of the dead. The lack of memorials to Lwów’s Jewish and Polish forefathers is appalling, yet the dead are, in some sense, always forgotten. From time to time, we stop to share their stories and perhaps allow them to live through us on the streets they once walked. New thought collectives are born continually.
Everything passes, including greatness. “In my career,” the geneticist Wacław Szybalski told me, “many things I did were great at the time, but now they are passé. I think that if Weigl had lived much longer he’d have been unhappy to be honored for things that no longer had value, things of the past.” Yet the story of Weigl’s lab, for the filmmaker Andrzej uławski, was just as important as the story of the great battles of the war. “Maybe Hiroshima beats it,” he said. “But I’m alive because of those lice. I always say that the blood of those contaminated lice fills my veins, which accounts for part of my mad character.” He keeps a small wooden louse cage that his father used in Weigl’s laboratory. “All his life, my father carried this with him, and it was on his desk,” uławski says. “It was very, very important to him. Now I have it on my desk.”
There was no return to Lwów, but the exiles carried Lwów with them.
. . . people bade goodbye
without handkerchiefs, no tears, such a dry
mouth, I won’t see you anymore, so much death
awaits you, why must every city
become Jerusalem and every man a Jew,
and now in a hurry just
pack, always, each day,
and go breathless, go to Lvov, after all
it exists, quiet and pure as
a peach. It is everywhere.
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS
BA Bundesarchiv
Fleck, Denkstile Ludwik Fleck, Denkstile und Tatsachen: Gesammelte Schriften und Zeugnisse, ed. Sylwia Werner and Claus Zittel (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011)
Fleck, Genesis Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, ed. Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robe
rt K. Merton, trans. Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)
DGVG-Ding Direction Générale des Victimes de la Guerre (Brussels), Ding correspondence, 1934–44
Hirszfeld, One Life The Story of One Life, trans. and ed. Marta A. Balinska, ed. William H. Schneider (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2011)
HNOC, HLSL Harvard Nuremberg Online Collection, Harvard Law School Library item no.
IHTP Institut d’histoire du temps présent, Paris
IPN Instytut Pamici Narodowej (Institute of National Remembrance), Warsaw
IWM Imperial War Museum
Kew British National Archives–Kew Gardens
Kogon, Hell Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System behind Them, trans. Heinz Nordon (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950)
LFZ Ludwik Fleck Zentrum, in Archiv für Zeitgeschichte, Zurich
NA National Archives, Washington, DC
PIA Pasteur Institute Archives, Paris
RG record group
Shoah Foundation USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education
Szybalski, “Genius” Wacław Szybalski, “The Genius of Rudolf Stefan Weigl (1883–1957), a Lvovian Microbe Hunter and Breeder,” in International Weigl Conference . . . Programme and Abstracts, ed. R. Stoika et al. (Lviv: Sept. 11–14, 2003), accessed at http://www.lwow.home.pl/Weigl/in-memoriam.html
USHMM United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Weindling, Epidemics Paul Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)
YVA Yad Vashem Archive
Preface
The two insects: B. P. Olds et al., “Comparison of the Transcriptional Profiles of Head and Body Lice,” Insect Molecular Biology 21 (2012): 257–68; J. E. Light et al., “What’s in a Name: The Taxonomic Status of Human Head and Body Lice,” Molecular and Phylogenetic Evolution 47 (2008): 1203–16.
Both nourish themselves: Patrick A. Buxton, The Louse (London: Edward Arnold, 1947), 18–19.
“They need particular temperature”: Olga Tarasyuk, interview with author, May 2011.
While working as Weigl’s assistant: Fleck, Genesis.
Thomas Kuhn, the famous: Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 50th anniversary ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
Blood had always been: Goethe’s Faust, ed. E. J. Turner et al. (London: Rivington’s, 1882), 79.
Introduction
It is a hostile wind: Shoah Foundation, 50467 Reidar Dittmann.
In the winter: Pierre D’Harcourt, The Real Enemy (London: Longman, 1967), 106.
Their primary target, the Gustloff-II: Stéphane Hessel, Danse avec le siècle (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997), 83–91; David A. Hackett, trans. and ed., The Buchenwald Report (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 305–6.
The Nazis renamed the place: Buchenwald Concentration Camp, 1937–1945: A Guide to the Permanent Historical Exhibition (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005), 27.
“Here Goethe rested”: Hackett, Report, 32.
As the war dragged on: Christian Pineau, La simple vérité, 1940–1945 (Paris: René Julliard, 1960), 482.
“Die, die you beast”: Ludwik Fleck, “The Goethe Oak,” accessed at http://www.elmalpensante.com/index.php?doc=display_contenido&id=1025.
The ideas and thinkers: Fleck, Genesis, 133.
Fleck, as a sociologist: Fleck, “Wissenschaft und Umwelt,” in Fleck, Denkstile, 329.
Those in the thought collective of Block 50: Fleck, “Problems of the Science of Science,” in Cognition and Fact: Materials on Ludwik Fleck, ed. Robert S. Cohen and Thomas Schnelle (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1986), 113–25.
Chapter 1: Lice/War/Typhus/Madness
The body louse evolved: D. Raoult and V. Roux, “The Body Louse as a Vector of Reemerging Human Diseases,” Clinical Infectious Diseases 29 (1999): 888–90.
In one of the earliest: Exodus 8:17.
It has even been hypothesized: J. W. Maunder, “The Appreciation of Lice,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 55 (1983): 1–31.
An account of the 12th-century funeral: Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), 184–85.
Typhus “will continue to break into”: Ibid., 301.
At the end of World War I: K. David Patterson, “Typhus and Its Control in Russia, 1870–1940,” Medical History 37 (1993): 361–63.
The Przemyl complex: S. Ansky, The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey through the Jewish Pale of Settlement during World War I, ed. and trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), 123.
It was retaken three: Brigitte Biwald, Von Helden und Krüppeln: Das österreichisch-ungarische Militärsanitätswesen im Ersten Weltkrieg (Vienna: Haupt, 2002), 551. See also Franz Forstner, Przemysl: Österreich-Ungarns bedeutendste Festung (Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1987), 277–89.
After passing his: Szybalski, “Genius.” See also Stefan Kryski, “Rudolf Weigl,” at http://www.lwow.home.pl/Weigl/human.html.
Thus Weigl was simultaneously: Gabriel Brzk, Józef Nusbaum-Hilarowicz: ycie, prace, dzielo (Lublin: Wydawn. Lubelskie, 1984), 95–96.
While Fleck earned his doctorate: Summaries of Fleck’s life and work are contained in K. Leszczyska, “Ludwik Fleck: A Forgotten Philosopher,” in Penser avec Fleck: Investigating a Life Studying Life Sciences, ed. Johannes Fehr et al. (Zurich: Collegium Helveticum, 2009), 23–39; and Thomas Schnelle, “Microbiology and Philosophy of Science, Lwów and the German Holocaust: Stations of Life—Ludwik Fleck 1896–1961,” in Cognition and Fact—Materials on Ludwik Fleck, ed. Robert S. Cohen and Thomas Schnelle (Dordrecht: L. Reidel, 1986), 3–38.
Fleck liked to dress: A. D. Peterkin, One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair (Vancouver: Arsenal Pump Press, 2001), 180–81.
At the other end: Riza Durmaz et al., “Prevalence of Group A Streptococcal Carriers in Asymptomatic Children and Clonal Relatedness among Isolates in Malatya, Turkey,” Journal of Clinical Microbiology 41 (2003): 5285.
Although it generally kills: Didier Raoult and Philippe Parola, eds., Rickettsial Diseases (New York: Informa Healthcare, 2007).
More importantly, human: Zinsser, Rats, xiii.
“Tell me, Sir, where”: Accounts of the conversation circulated among Weigl’s assistants and are recounted in, for example, Andrzej Wincewicz et al., “Rudolph Weigl, (1883–1957)—A Scientist in Poland in Wartime Plus Ration quam vis,” Journal of Medical Biography 15 (2007): 112.
“To watch him tenderly”: Hermann Eyer, “In Memoriam Rudolf Weigl,” Zentralblatt für Bakteriologie, Parasitenkunde, Infektionskrankheiten und Hygiene 171 (1958): 379.
To add to the confusion: Jan O. Andersson and Siv G. E. Andersson, “A Century of Typhus, Lice and Rickettsia,” Research in Microbiology 151 (2000): 143–50.
Typhus bacteria live: Michael W. Gray, “Rickettsia, Typhus and the Mitochondrial Connection,” Nature 396 (1998): 109–10.
Sickness typically begins: David Walker and Didier Raoult, “Typhus Group Rickettsioses,” in Tropical Infectious Diseases: Principles, Pathogens, and Practice, ed. Richard L. Guerrant (Philadelphia: Churchill Livingstone 2006), 548–56; Walker and Raoult, “Rickettsia,” in Mandell, Douglas and Bennett’s Principles and Practice of Infectious Diseases, 7th ed. (Philadelphia: Churchill Livingstone, 2009), 252–53.
At the peak of illness: J. M. Mitchell et al., Typhus Fever, with Special Reference to the Russian Epidemics (London: Bailliere Tindall and Cox, 1922), 16–17.
Another American, a volunteer: Peter Englund, The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War (New York: Knopf, 2011), 194, 215.
“Although my memory”: Dmitri Pletnev, “Einige Bemerkungen über Flecktyphus nach Beobachtungen während der Moskauer Epidemie 1917–1920,” Zeitschrift für klinische Medizin (1922): 285–301.
Some hallucinatory motifs: “Ergebnisse der zweiten Beratendentagung Ost 11/30–
12/3, 1942,” BA Militärdienst, RH1/23/246.
American famine relief: Bertrand M. Patenaude, The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 239.
The journalist John Reed: “The Last Days with John Reed: A Letter from Louise Bryant; Moscow, Nov. 14, 1920,” courtesy of a. nora claypoole [sic].
Those who recovered: Anton Chekhov, “Typhus,” in The Party and Other Stories (Whitefish: Kessinger, 2004), 291–302.
The Grand Army marched: Linda Hohamdi and Didier Raoult, “Louse-Borne Epidemic Typhus,’’ in Rickettsial Diseases (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2007), 51–62.
Napoleon’s benighted soldiers: Ludwik Gross, “How Charles Nicolle of the Pasteur Institute Discovered That Epidemic Typhus Is Transmitted by Lice,” Procceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 93 (1996): 10539–40.
The hygienic corps of the: Arthur Allen, Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver (New York: Norton, 2007), 60.
In Turkey, where the enfeebled: Weindling, Epidemics, 105–12.
“Russia”, a Russian officer told: Ansky, Enemy, 83.
Even Aleksandra Piłsudska, wife of: Aleksandra Piłsudska, Piłsudski: A Biography by His Wife (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1944), 243–44.
In Erich Maria Remarque’s: Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (New York: Ballantine, 1987), 69.
“The only way to obtain”: Accounts of lousiness among British World War I troops were collected by John Simkin at http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWlice.htm.
Though no typhus: Wilhelm His, A German Doctor at the Front (Berkeley: National Service, 1933), 75.
