Georg Letham (18 page)

Mosquitoes whine. An acetylene lamp comes on with a hiss, and the machinery in the engine room starts up.

I have never believed very deeply in prayer or making the sign of the cross. Where ultramicroscopy, where microbial culture, where pathologic physiology rule, traditional religion usually has no crucial role to play. Sad, but true. Tragic, but that is the fact.

Science is what is intuitively convincing, built upon factual evidence
free of assumptions. In order to do what it does, experimental natural science uses living material. In the area that interested me and people like Walter and Carolus, experimental pathology, intuitive conviction comes through vivisection of human beings and animals. Systematic experimentation–that is the only way. That is the only thing that counts. Suffering humanity is also helped in the process. But science leads the way.

Is it possible to combine science with affirmative faith in spite of everything? The world-renowned founder of the Pathology Institute, where I worked, could do it, he could, the man with the massive but smooth brow, with the crease at the root of his nose, with the penetrating yet humble gaze. He was a scientist who rocked the entire medical edifice of his time and built up a sublimely new structure–and was at the same time a devout Catholic. Revolutionary, bloody, and humane all at once. Pasteur.

At the Pasteur Institute, but long after Pasteur's death, I met the high-ranking medical officer who, wearing an open khaki-colored raincoat over his tropical uniform, has now emerged from his cabin below-decks and appears to be preparing to examine us. I look openly into his strange, long, worn, creased face, but he gives me only a fleeting glance out of the corner of his eye. I know you, Carolus, even if you don't know me.

The good man never was an observer of much distinction. He was a statistician, with a broad range of sources–a walking encyclopedia of the whole of bacteriology, pathology, epidemiology, and hygiene. Poring over heavy volumes, studying records, working with statistics, graphing incubation and epidemic control, this was what gladdened the heart of Dr. Carolus, this was where he earned his spurs. He was a major then,
a brigadier general now. His knowledge must be stupendous, for he wanted to find out about everything.

He had no interest in hands-on medicine and never wanted to get close to living flesh. Even in the Great War he was engaged with statistical matters of the same kind. The precautions recommended by his office usually reached us too late at the front or at the epidemic sites in Russia or Asia Minor, where we were concerned not with science but with action, with going out and proving things by their efficacy in the field. He never was at the front, I see, for although he has many decorations on his left breast, there is nothing for bravery at the front.

His face is even more somber than it was when he was my colleague at the Pathology Institute. He too will have to live for at least four weeks on this galley, he too will probably not have undertaken this voyage very happily, but only because he was ordered to.

But one would hardly have sought out a man like him, with the rank of general, for a convict transport. An intern with the rank of second lieutenant would have been fully adequate for that. So does Brig. Gen. Carolus have some other mission? Is it possible that he will be taking charge of the bacteriological research on yellow fever instead of someone like Walter, who worked so hard on it?

The good man has my blessing. I leave you in peace! And why don't you leave us in peace, too! Why examine us wrecks: we're tired and hungry, that's the only thing wrong with us and the only thing that can be cured here. Give us some food to eat, a corner to sleep in! What's the point of an examination? We'll be delivered fresh and wholesome to the port of C. But what for? We'll only be fodder for the yellow fever.

The epidemic has flared up. Of a thousand new arrivals coming to a yellow-fever region such as the sumps at the Panama Canal excavations
near the Central American city of Colón, five hundred are still alive six months later. But we are not even such unbroken freshmen. We are inferior material, we are broken.

If some unsuspecting person comes from a temperate climate to these swampy, torrid islands and beaches, which are drenched by daily downpours and have an average temperature of at least twenty-six degrees Réaumur, summer and winter, day and night, never changing, to these tropical regions where he must endure the most extreme precipitation on earth lashing down on him, an annual three meters of rainfall; yes, if he disembarks from the
Mimosa
, let us say, onto the soil of C., a place as intolerably humid as a steam bath, and if the possibility of infection exists at all (and would it not exist within the entire epidemic area?)–then it's a hundred to one that yellow fever will find that poor wretch so inviting that after two weeks nothing will remain of the silly boy but his death certificate, a lump of decomposed flesh, and the buttons from his prison trousers.

This fact does not keep a man like me up at night. I have been in mortal danger in a thousand experiments. For no one works with the most dangerous microorganisms that bacteriological science has been able to isolate without putting his life at risk: plague, tetanus, tuberculosis, glanders, cholera.

One must risk everything. One must think of everything. One must be equal to everything.

The great medical officer Carolus looks straight ahead, full of cares. The acetylene lamp above his bald head flickers, hisses, and reeks.

Behind his high, but not very domed, brow, are the lights on too? The good man glances toward the shoreline, receding farther and farther into the distance, and puts on his gold-embroidered uniform cap. A
little while ago, on the way from shore, he had a pith helmet on. But now he is on duty and we are to kowtow to the general's stripes. Or is he just cold? What's on your mind? Has all your thinking had some result, are you on the trail of the yellow-fever pathogen?

My boyhood friend Walter, of whom I spoke earlier, worked on this epidemic. He had a serum sent over to him and inoculated guinea pigs with it, successfully.

It is important to understand what serum is. Serum is simply slightly stale, coagulated human blood that has been purified. Or animal blood. It is clear, like water, or a bit yellowish, like cognac mixed with water. It has none of the direness, the grimness, of blood about it. Under the microscope, normal serum is free of organisms, of microbes that can be seen, stained, cultured. Fine. But if, under conditions of extreme cleanliness, infected serum is injected into the bloodstream of guinea pigs, they sicken, their internal organs show effects similar to those induced by the yellow-fever virus “in real life,” that is, in nature and in human beings, and the epidemic is transmitted with undiminished virulence from one guinea pig to another via the most direct route. If the blood of a dying animal is transferred to a healthy one, the mysterious illness goes with it. Could it not also strike a human being now and then? Certainly it could, if a human being possessed the superhuman courage to have a drop of infected guinea-pig blood or even human blood injected into his bloodstream.

But this
experimentum crucis
, as it is called, was never done at the Pathology Institute. Walter had to clear out his work space too soon, at a point when his experiments were still just beginning. The department head did not believe him–the compelling, unmistakable evidence was still lacking. And it is indeed possible that truly rigorous evidence can
be obtained only on the epidemic's home soil, not many thousands of kilometers from the scene. Walter, who had married young, bore everything with stoicism, indeed with humor.

Perhaps, as a special-duty medic, to use the officialese, he followed “his” epidemic, made the exodus with his wife and child to the tropics, possibly even to C.

What is known about yellow fever–what do the absolutely unassailable scientific facts look like in black and white? That page is still a virginal white. Yes, it's blank.

There are theories galore, innumerable experiments have been done.

But there is no certainty. The pathogen is unknown.

If it were at least known how the invisible yellow fever microbe spreads, where it resides, and how it travels–then a great deal would have been gained. No one knows the route by which the epidemic propagates from person to person, or from person to animal and back again. Just as little is known about how to save the sick. Let them perish! But to protect the healthy from yellow fever in the future at least–
that
is the task, and no one is yet equal to it.

And this old fellow with the long, narrow face, who brings to mind a six-story building with only two windows facing the street, this man with his exceptionally long, sleepy eyelids, with pendulous earlobes covered with hair like rough gray lichen on the trunk of an old olive tree, this sallow man whose tired eyes have to squint in the light from the acetylene lamp, is this man going to unravel nature's secrets?

He'd do better not to put himself out, or us, either. But he has no such thought. He has a little table brought, a worn-out card table, flimsy, shaken by the vibrations from the laboring engine. His factotums
have set up a nice chair for him and he makes himself comfortable, stretching his long, spindly legs in baggy trousers straight out in front of him and covering them with his coat.

He barely looks at us. In my day I would never have slighted the subjects of my experiments this way, the dogs, cats, rats, guinea pigs, and rabbits, even the white mice.

He lets his eyes wander into the distance.

Transparent colors appear at the horizon, the tops of gently rolling, bare hills magically washed in the first rays of the rising coppery moon, vegetationless hills on the windy seacoast.

On his knees, on the coat over his scrawny legs, he holds a voluminous register. Its pages catch the night wind.

A gentle salt breeze is blowing from the east. Or is it the west? It's night. We have lost our orientation.

The register, the grand inventory in which we are listed with all our vital statistics, along with our ancestry, criminal record, trial history, and personal evaluations by wardens and prison chaplains, rustles in the cool wind.

The brigadier general chews thoughtfully on a cigar. The night is fine. He is unable to tear his eyes away from a necklace of lights, evidently a small coastal city.

Cigar ash falls like dusting powder on the register. But it needs no blotting, the ink is long since dry.

At last the lights of the city sink back into the semi-twilight of the cloudless but somewhat misty moonlit night. The plume of smoke from the slanting funnel floats not far above our heads. Sparks glimmer in it for a few seconds, and the stars shine through faintly.

Our hunger is growing more acute. Are we going to spend the entire
night here outside, looking at the stars? That may be a welcome tonic to a satisfied mind, but not to an empty stomach or overstretched nerves. The grumbling among the convicts is becoming louder, they want to get to their sleeping quarters, their evening rations. No use thinking about it. The doctor is proceeding methodically. His objects of study, their spirits, their complaints and pains are of little concern to him. At last he decides to begin. He authoritatively calls for rubber gloves. The factotums quickly bring some from the sick bay. He inflates them, examines them very closely. They need to be leak-proof. He doesn't want to touch us with his bare hands. Does he fear contagion so very much? But as sound as they are, they are not adequate. He calls for a basin of disinfectant sublimate solution. Filled to the brim, it slops over with the languid rolling of the ship.

Carolus, enough dawdling, let's get to it! Some hundred men are waiting for you, so tired they are about to drop, as ravenous as dogs that have been starved for twelve or fourteen days in order to make an accurate test of their carbohydrate metabolism. A little dispatch, sir, please! Why do you even want to examine us? Certainly there may be all sorts of infectious material among us future penal colonists. No, no cholera, no plague, no abdominal typhus, to name some of the lovely inventions of the Almighty Creator. But venereal diseases? Possibly. Or Hansen's disease, leprosy? Some of the convicts come from the tropics, they are nonwhite, and leprosy may be clinging to someone. With such a manifold, mystical disease, who knows? But a microscope would be needed to identify the pathogen, Hansen's bacillus, and the idea of performing such a meticulous examination out in the open, on the deck of a steamer in passage, at night and without good light, can only be called grotesque.

But not all that grotesque. My left wrist was scraped raw by the handcuffs. Do I know who bumped me in the crush during the trip from shore? The skin at that spot will be especially receptive to infection.

Our hunger is becoming stronger and harsher. It has descended from the belly to the small of the back, I feel it as a pain between the shoulder blades too, the front of my throat is constricted, my temples are pounding, my fingers are cramping. I'm so intensely hungry now that I'm actually nauseous. And I'm trembling with rage–maybe if I stamped my feet I could work off some of my anger. What am I doing here among these lowlifes? Are they my own kind? What am I doing under the thumb of this most mindless of all mindless medical bureaucrats? What a monumental lummox! I want to stamp, to break loose. I can't bear any more of this endless waiting. No more! But–what can I do? I can be silent and grit my teeth. This man with all his book learning still hasn't got the most moronically simple examination method straight. He riffles through his papers, all of them entirely useless; he moistens his fingertips, highly unappetizingly, with spittle from his thin, pursed, stupid lips, nervously flipping page after page. Stop it, sir, what's the point of this idiocy? If anything really needs to be examined, it's not our past lives and our crimes and mistakes, but we ourselves, and fast, for pity's sake! You beast, don't you see us, this pitiful lot of tired, emaciated, famished wretches!