Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif
Author:Paul de Kruif
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
6
Roux and Behring
Massacre the Guinea-Pigs
1
It was to save babies that they killed so many guinea-pigs!
Emile Roux, the fanatical helper of Pasteur, in 1888 took up the tools his master had laid down, and started on searches of his own. In a little while he discovered a strange poison seeping from the bacillus of diphtheria—one ounce of the pure essence of this stuff was enough to kill seventy-five thousand big dogs. A few years later, while Robert Koch was bending under the abuse and curses of sad ones who had been disappointed by his supposed cure for consumption, Emil Behring, the poetical pupil of Koch, spied out a strange virtue, an unknown something in the blood of guinea-pigs. It could make that powerful diphtheria poison completely harmless.
These two Emils revived men’s hopes after Koch’s disaster, and once more people believed for a time that microbes were going to be turned from assassins into harmless little pets.
What experiments these two young men made to discover this diphtheria antitoxin! They went at it frantic to save lives; they groped at it among bizarre butcherings of countless guinea-pigs; in the evenings their laboratories were shambles like the battlefields of old days when soldiers were mangled by spears and pierced by arrows. Roux dug ghoulishly into the spleens of dead children—Behring bumped his nose in the darkness of his ignorance against facts the gods themselves could not have predicted. For each brilliant experiment these two had to pay with a thousand failures.
But they discovered the diphtheria antitoxin.
They never could have done it without the modest discovery of Frederick Loeffler. He was that microbe hunter whose mustache was so militaristic that he had to keep pulling it down to see through his microscope; he sat working at Koch’s right hand in that brave time when the little master was tracking down the tubercle bacillus. It was in the early eighteen eighties, and diphtheria, which several times each hundred years seems to have violent ups and downs of viciousness—diphtheria was particularly murderous then. The wards of the hospitals for sick children were melancholy with a forlorn wailing; there were gurgling coughs foretelling suffocation; on the sad rows of narrow beds were white pillows framing small faces blue with the strangling grip of an unknown hand. Through these rooms walked doctors trying to conceal their hopelessness with cheerfulness; powerless they went from cot to cot—trying now and again to give a choking child its breath by pushing a tube into its membrane-plugged windpipe. . . .
Five out of ten of these cots sent their tenants to the morgue.
Below in the dead house toiled Frederick Loeffler, boiling knives, heating platinum wires red hot and with them lifting grayish stuff from the still throats of those bodies the doctors had failed to keep alive; and this stuff he put into slim tubes capped with white fluffs of cotton, or he painted it with dyes, which showed him, through his microscope, that there were queer bacilli shaped like Indian clubs in those throats, microbes which the dye painted with pretty blue dots and stripes and bars.
Download
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari(13933)
The Tidewater Tales by John Barth(12379)
Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova(6902)
Do No Harm Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh(6669)
The Thirst by Nesbo Jo(6418)
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker(6316)
Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Tegmark Max(5160)
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari(5100)
The Longevity Diet by Valter Longo(4841)
The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson(4550)
The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy(4500)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot(4233)
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker(4179)
Animal Frequency by Melissa Alvarez(4133)
Yoga Anatomy by Kaminoff Leslie(4092)
The Hacking of the American Mind by Robert H. Lustig(4063)
All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot(3963)
Barron's AP Biology by Goldberg M.S. Deborah T(3928)
Double Down (Diary of a Wimpy Kid Book 11) by Jeff Kinney(3888)
