Georg Letham (3 page)

It happened during a long lecture on the optical properties of the human eye. As the old physiology professor was speaking, a small door opened to one side of the large blackboard. Through this door the lecture hall communicated with the rest of the physiology department.

At first we paid no attention. We were focused on the difficult calculations and formulas that the professor was writing with squeaking chalk on the blackboard, now dazzlingly illuminated by the midday sun.

I can still see my comrade's hand, shapely, slender, yet masculine in its strength and sinewiness, copying down the formulas in a somewhat
disorderly notebook; while the dark gray, shining eyes with their expression of total, I might even call it joyful, intelligence were fixed on the blackboard, the hand transcribed the figures almost autonomously, the lines wandering up and down.

There was a sudden stir. The students near the lectern began to laugh, to stamp, to get up out of their seats. Something not even knee-high, shaggy, outlandish, reddish white, was wriggling and squirming among them. What was it? A dirty-white poodle with a bushy, frantically waving tail, its head covered with blood down to the bare light brown nose, a large, square wound on one side of its head, its tongue, bruised at the edges, hanging out, its eyes rolling, was weaving silently past the feet of the horrified–no, not horrified!–only astonished professor. Gnawed-through narrow leather straps dragged from the handsome pasterns of the thin legs. No barking or whining was heard. Only raspy breathing.

My father had inured me, I will tell the tale later in great detail, to the ghastliness of life as it really is. Otherwise I would never have chosen to study medicine, I would have resisted the temptation to learn the secrets of physical life. Would have had to resist! So I thought I was impervious to even the most dreadful sights. I wanted to be. That was how I wanted to be. I actually seemed to be. I had dissected cadavers with total composure like every other first-semester medico, even smoking a cigarette as I worked. I had also been present at vivisection experiments, which are performed for third-semester students for purely pedagogical purposes. In the interest of scientific inquiry for the betterment of mankind, I had always been mentally prepared for this dark side of life and had endured it, if not easily. But I was unprepared now and was horrified when the animal scrambled higher and higher
up the steps of the amphitheater, its tail swishing, and looked up at us with terrified madness in its eye. Now the beast breathed deeply and noisily through its tow-colored, somewhat bloody nostrils, to let out its anguish finally in a howl. My neighbor quickly got to his feet. The animal was running up in a quick zigzag, possibly toward a door to the outside that had been left open in the summer heat, and was already up to our bench at the very top of the amphitheater. From this distance the wound on its skull was clearly visible. The skin had been neatly removed, the milk white cerebral membrane was incised in the shape of a rhombus, and two very small, silvery instruments, I no longer remember exactly what kind, perhaps hypodermic syringe tips, still hung in the open wound, which was pulsating plainly.

The tumult around us was very loud. But it was merry. The students took the thing as a lark and the professor followed suit. He erased the figures on the board with a large sponge as though trying to wipe away this little episode of the puppy dog on the run from the embrace of science. The students, men and women, surrounded him; he fended them off, sweating and gesticulating. I especially remember the laughing face and fine teeth of a female student who wore her blonde hair in the madonna style of the time. Hitching up her long skirt, she skipped lightly after the animal. She followed it up to where the two of us were, cajoling it as young girls do their lapdogs when they have escaped the leash and trying to coax it back with blandishments such as “precious,” “sweetie,” “baby,” “you bad boy,” and so on and so forth. The upper part of its body was pressed against our feet, its wounded head turned toward the pretty young woman. It was ghastly the way the howl died in the unfortunate animal's throat at the sound of this deep, cooing, coaxing human voice, the way it suddenly deceived itself, eternally trusting in its god, man.

But it did not return to its tormentors. My friend crushed what was left of the animal's cranium from behind with the silver handle of his walking stick. He had raised his left hand, had aimed, had struck. A thud–and that was that. The animal went over without a sound and was no more.

The student stood up, descended to the lectern holding the walking stick by its other end, washed the bloody handle there, dried it on the towel next to the blackboard. And returned to his seat. The most peculiar thing was that no one, neither the professor nor the female student, found anything remarkable in what he did. The professor rang for the lab attendant to remove the carcass, the female student, after fruitlessly fluttering her blue eyes in the direction of my neighbor, sat back down in her front-row seat, which, thanks to her punctuality, she had occupied from the first lecture on, my neighbor turned back to his disorderly notebook, instantly a jumble of writing, and that was the end of it. I found out later that the experimenter who was working with the dog had been called to the telephone. Then the lab attendant had slipped out of the hot experiment area for a cigarette, and the unusually strong, intelligent, unanesthetized animal had freed itself–no one knew how–and in its misery had trotted toward the lecture hall, for which it was not yet entirely ready. It should not have been brought out until some weeks later, when the paralytic effects of the partial lobotomy had developed properly.

In the strangest way, for which there are no words, I felt attracted toward this student Walter. As the patient beyond saving is to the doctor, perhaps. But what does one have to do with the other? Nothing. Beyond saving . . . doctor. God couldn't make sense of it.

Walter passed his exams at about the same time as I did. He was hearty, strong, the picture of blooming health. Originally he had been
bound for the service; his father was a high-ranking military officer. But he had preferred the university. And he had taken up experimental pathology and bacteriology–the same fields as mine. He was left-handed, and, like many left-handed people, unusually clumsy. Everything went wrong for him sometimes. But he persevered.

I made many attempts to get closer to him. They never succeeded. He was a constitutionally cheerful, athletic person. He seemed to me to be tough inside and out, in a way that was not without humor–to be a “man without nerves.” He appeared to be fairly free of excessive humane sentiments or compassion. Rightly interpreted, his
coup de grâce
had been administered not out of compassion for the animal's suffering, but because, once it had broken loose and come into contact with the students, infectious matter must in all likelihood have entered the artificial opening in its cranium; he, Walter, had therefore been forced to regard the dog as doomed and in any event useless for the purposes of the experiment.

I avoided the beautiful student, who was often around us later and who in all innocence exhibited a provocative nature. I paid no further attention to her. My wife was physically and mentally her exact opposite, if there are different types among females.

I saw Walter often. The very look of him was a source of joy. I found his captivating, boyish laugh contagious. I liked to laugh, I even imitated other people's laughs. But he always avoided personal conversation. I apparently did not interest him–and in this he was unlike many women, upon whom I made an impression without wishing to, who became a burden on me in one way or another, and who usually took me much more seriously than I did them.

One might have thought that an experience such as this, the poodle fleeing in the middle of a scientific experiment, would have made me give up medical school in general and animal experiments in particular. What could have been more natural? I had an innate sense of the aesthetically interesting. As an art historian or the like, I would always have been able to hold my own. But I was driven to experiments (perhaps as a consequence of childhood experiences that I have yet to recount). I wanted to pit myself against a Walter, against this classical type of the excessively practical man who, for example, could see the animal in question as simply a piece of material, the way a carpenter does a piece of dense, nicely dry, knot-free wood.

But so long as it was animals that were the subjects of my experiments, all was well. The civilized world gladly shuts its eyes to this practice, as it does to war and so on. It was not until a human being met her maker that society got up in arms and had nasty things to say about my character. The fact is that if one day I decided to send my wife to her grave, and made this decision as coolly as I might have selected a laboratory animal for an experiment, that does not mean I undertook these two actions with total composure, with a completely clear conscience. There was thus consistency in that I never made these decisions
without scruples
.

But this scrupulousness was not a religious fear of sin. I did not believe in God. I was unable to countenance a world that included supernatural explanation. I would have liked to. It was not possible.

We are too young for godless anarchism. Thousands of generations before us have lived under the shadow of faith and, if they really had to suffer, at least suffered believing in a higher order and suffered for
its sake. Perhaps a future generation will be equal to a life without faith. Will be able to look life in the eye, to see it for what it is. Will not lurch one way, then another, in benighted uncertainty. But I was not so fortunate. I was benighted from childhood on. Only from the outside did my career seem to run in a purposeful straight line–in reality it did not. Would I have lived only in and by experiments otherwise? When not performing an experiment, I felt no pleasure, indeed no connection with life at all. But
in
the experiment? Did I obtain satisfaction here at least? I must answer no.

The experimenter is like God, but on a small scale. He is as immeasurably small as God is great.

So it was with the animals. So it was with my wife. The animals were mine to do with as I pleased. I had paid cash for them, on one occasion four hundred rhesus monkeys for a transmission experiment that required that species. No one could stop me from doing what I did–there are so few moral impediments to the investigator anywhere in today's world.

The animal has no inkling of its fate. The investigator does, of course, the experimenter knows what is coming. He alone knows what must come. He has long since weighed his basic interest in the matter against the animal's interest in being alive and staying healthy and untormented, and found the weight of the suffering creature to be wanting. Perhaps he deigns to take the condemned animal, a dog, say, out of its cage himself. It barks merrily, lifts its head high, looks around with curiosity. It tries to run, stiff from lying down so long. It is cheerful. It needs him, too. Did I make the world the way it is? It sniffs the air with its moist, dark nostrils and supposes that the man in the white lab coat is going to lead it outside on the grimy cord about its neck,
or to a feeding dish. The man now lifts the animal up by the scruff of the neck and lays it out. On the table. On the plank, which has been well sluiced down. He grasps the rib cage. He feels the little creature's heart thumping excitedly against its ribs. A monkey is another matter. A monkey is a caricature of a man. Or is a man a caricature of a monkey? But in the way they react to great pain, man and monkey are much alike. An older, well-nourished rhesus monkey–especially the male, whose system is more finely tuned than the female's . . . I will not go on with this here. Perhaps later I will get around to describing what happens in a scientific experiment in which hundreds and thousands of animals are sacrificed one after another
ad majorem hominis gloriam
. Many experiments have had a positive outcome; thousands of times as many have yielded nothing positive whatever. And for the subjects of the experiments, the animals destined to suffer, the service they were objectively rendering for science was a matter of indifference.

Perhaps we mean no more and no less to the higher power above us (I cannot believe in it and yet it is in my thoughts sometimes) than our cats and dogs, rats, guinea pigs, monkeys, horses–even bedbugs and lice do to us. I have experimented on bedbugs and lice, too. Science has long known that body lice transmit a very dangerous infectious disease, which, during wartime especially, has caused tremendous loss of life, namely, epidemic typhus, typhus exanthematicus. I believed I had found the pathogen of this disease in a certain bacillus. (Unfortunately this was not an error.) In 1917 I carried out experiments with body lice in the military epidemiology laboratory at the Russian-Polish front. This insect is so minute that the technical difficulties will be appreciated. What is the task? One must infect the insect with typhous blood, so that it becomes infectious. Is this clear? It is not easy. Nevertheless I
was able to give the animal a stab with an exquisitely fine needle. But another researcher, a Pole, was even more resourceful. He was able to employ a very beautiful method to fill the gut of the millimeter-small insect with infectious material from behind. This procedure is not child's play either, of course. It needs to be mastered in the same way as other bacteriological research methods. The result in any case is that a body louse fed with a certain pathogen becomes ill and dies. If its mortal remains are now smeared onto the skin of an ape and the ape licks the spot, it too becomes ill and dies quickly. And so it goes, first here, then there, from warm-blooded creature to cold-blooded creature. Lice, monkeys, lice, monkeys. It sounds grotesque, comical, but it is not.