Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World by Laura Spinney

Author:Laura Spinney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Science
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2017-06-01T05:00:00+00:00

PART SIX: Science Redeemed

René Dujarric de la Rivière in an army laboratory, Calais, 1915

13

Aenigmoplasma influenzae

In the dog days of August 1914, an ageing Ilya Mechnikov–Russian exile, Nobel laureate, ‘lieutenant’ of Louis Pasteur and mentor of Yakov Bardakh, Wu Lien-teh and others–battled his way across a Paris in the grip of mobilisation to reach the Pasteur Institute, one of the world’s leading centres for the study of infectious diseases and the production of vaccines. When he arrived, he found it under military command. Most of the younger scientists had left for active service and all of the experimental animals had been killed. The man who had renounced God at the age of eight, who believed fervently that the progress of civilisation depended on the advancement of science, surveyed his deserted empire and quaked.

In his novel Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline immortalised Mechnikov as Serge Parapine, an eccentric and demented genius who ‘always had enough hair on his cheeks to make him look like an escaped convict’, and who raged and muttered through the smelly corridors of the renowned Parisian institute where he worked. The institute’s other inhabitants were ‘grey-haired, umbrella-carrying schoolboys, stupefied by the pedantic routine and intensely revolting experiments, riveted by starvation wages for their whole adult lives to these little microbe kitchens, there to spend interminable days warming up mixtures of vegetable scrapings, asphyxiated guinea pigs, and other nondescript garbage’. But as Mechnikov intuited on that summer’s day, the era that Céline described so scathingly–his era, in which important battles had nevertheless been won against crowd diseases, and faith in science rode high–was about to end.

First, though, there was a war to be fought–and diseases to be kept at bay. One of the young scientists who had left the Pasteur Institute at the outbreak of war was René Dujarric de la Rivière, a twenty-nine-year-old aristocrat from the Périgord who, like others of his contemporaries, had been swallowed up by the army’s network of laboratories. Four years later, when the second wave of the Spanish flu broke out, he was working in the central army laboratory in the city of Troyes. ‘I was there in the Champagne region when an artillery troop came through on its way to the front. They never left. All of them, men and officers alike, were suddenly struck down and had to be hospitalised urgently.’1 The army launched a vaccination campaign, using a vaccine against pneumonia-causing bacteria that had been developed at the Pasteur Institute before the pandemic. Dujarric had spent time in Richard Pfeiffer’s lab in Breslau–where Pfeiffer, known to his colleagues as the ‘Geheimrat’ or privy counsellor, was treated with profound respect–but he had begun to doubt that Pfeiffer’s bacillus was really the cause of flu.

He wasn’t alone. Pfeiffer’s bacillus–Haemophilus influenzae, to give it its scientific name–is a real bacterium that lodges in the nose and throat and causes infections, some of them severe, but while it had been found in many of the flu cases analysed, it hadn’t been found in them all.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
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.