Georg Letham (47 page)

Act I–curtain. Curtain up for Act II. Namely, the bite on March's bared upper arm. The insect now had ample Y.F. blood in its body, in its salivary glands, its biting apparatus. A bite should thus carry blood to the strong, healthy March.

I carefully brought the little creature, holding it with the wad of cotton wool from the test tube on one side and the scrap of
Hamlet
on the other, to March's upper arm, and we all waited tensely (even the patient, despite his fever, was looking on with interest now that the mosquito was gone; his somnolence had diminished) for the
Stegomyia
mosquito to bite a second time and transmit the microorganism–from the blood, through the blood, into the blood?

It sat there. The last pair of legs did not jiggle. It had lowered its head; the tiny stinger, finer than the finest needle, touched March's skin. But it did not sting. Is it biting? one of the gentlemen kept asking. They smiled, perhaps only out of nervousness, but I was furious. Evidently they had doubts about our experiments deep down, or perhaps I was imagining it. I often had doubts before an experiment and just as often afterward, but never while I was putting my plans into effect. Carolus, that dry fellow, could not refrain from making the silly joke that the mosquito, a female, would certainly find such a delicious man irresistible. March was, in fact, a handsome man, comely if somewhat effeminate, whose well-cared-for and presentable appearance, even now, was always certain to awaken the sympathies of others.

But the fact was that the mosquito perched there motionless for
almost two minutes without biting. Suddenly the door opened and the matron came in. The wretched Carolus had again forgotten to lock the door behind resident P. as Walter had expressly directed. The dignified lady could not suppress an exclamation of surprise, and, truly, what a sight! Here was the youth, sitting up in bed, eyes blazing with fever and curiosity, glad that now one of the doctors (he took March for a doctor) was going to be bitten as he had been. Then March and Carolus and the chaplain and I, all gathered around a tiny, blood-engorged insect, imploring it to pluck up its courage and bite.

I had now entrusted the test tube to Walter, to hold over the insect so that it could not escape. But, as I have said, the nasty family saga had unmanned him, he was not even competent to act as a proper assistant, and as soon as the old nun or matron or whatever she was came into the room, he forgot himself, looked up, and involuntarily lifted the test tube; the beast flitted away, its precious cargo inside it, without having bitten March. What confusion! Now we all went chasing after the mosquito. It whirred back and forth in the unbearably stuffy room, zigzagging and making hairpin turns like an old-timer, young as it was. With us right behind it, to the amusement of the matron, who put her lovely, manicured nun's hands in the pocket of her freshly starched habit and laughed heartily.

Needless to say, we did not catch the beast. We turned on the light (the sun was going down), we shone flashlights into every nook and cranny, but the creature must have had enough of us, it had holed up in a dark corner to digest its meal, was safe from us there in its minuteness and did not emerge. What to do? I asked the nun very politely, very ingratiatingly and firmly, to give us another fifteen minutes, and ran
up against more regulations. I realized now that either we would have to abandon the entire series of experiments–but I would rather have committed suicide than let go of my idea–or else I would have to take matters into my own hands.

What was I? A condemned criminal exiled for life, an entity without rights, an obedient subject of the penal administration. But, oddly enough, as soon as I worked up my energy (and there was still a remnant of the old strength of will in me), circumstances yielded to me, as did people far above me both socially and in the eyes of the law. For I still possessed something else besides my energy, namely, a logical mind, unbounded intellectual curiosity, and undimmed judgment. I am able to say this in all modesty, for my view has proven itself. Perhaps only a man like me, the son of my father and the product of the upbringing he gave me, could have done the job.

What was at issue was simply the following. Should we break off the experiment? And if not, should we now have other hungry young female mosquitoes feed on the little lad here? Or under these circumstances would it be better to use other patients?

I was in favor of sticking with the youth. And for the following reasons. This was a fresh case. I had the notion (based frankly not on logical considerations but on intuition) that the dangerous, pathogenic, contagious virus would be found most reliably in the blood of those who had recently fallen ill. If any blood was suitable for causing an infection to spread from one person to another in an experiment, theirs was. The business with the little Portuguese girl had been not only a sentimental romance but also a close medical study.

I have discussed how an apyretic period follows the period of onset, and is in turn followed by a kind of intoxication. I said: intoxication
rises, detoxication falls. I remembered the ascending lines for temperature and pulse and the falling curve for urine output. Every observer to date had noticed these facts, or rather had not noticed them. For only I drew from this remarkable behavior the conclusion that the microorganism must necessarily be circulating in the blood in a fresh and active form
only until
the initial defervescence (which, in a good many cases with felicitous courses, can be followed by full recovery). Then they are killed by antitoxins in the body, and these killed Y.F. microorganisms, the mortal remains of the microorganisms disintegrating in the blood, only these produce toxins. The patient suffers from this intoxication in the third stage. And thus he perishes with symptoms of intoxication like the poor Portuguese girl.

But if one wants to have living microorganisms fresh from the source, if one needs them for transmission as we did, then one must stick with the fresh cases, and such a one was the youth. He was tired? The matron was knocking on the door after twenty minutes exactly? He did not want to be bitten by one mosquito after another? He wanted to sleep, satisfy his needs, get an ice bag for his forehead, have some cooling lemonade or ice cream? Swallow his medicine?

So sleep, eat, drink, see to your needs, but later! Anything you want, but don't interfere with us!

I was adamant. Walter shook his head in annoyance. He did not agree with me. I saw it clearly. The brigadier general offered passive resistance. Spending any time in this room under the roof was dreadful. For everyone. But I did not rest until I had brought no fewer than ten young mosquitoes to the well to drink. Then we slaved for hours more trying to induce one of those ten mosquitoes to bite March's upper arm. Not one did our will. But that was the least of my worries. Hunger was
the best cook. And if today it was satiated and snubbed us, tomorrow it would be ravenous and bite.

I advised March to consume plenty of sugar, fruit, and the like, in order to sweeten his blood.

The first experiment had, to some extent, begun in failure, and the skin of the good March, who had put it on the line so bravely, remained unpunctured by a mosquito on the evening of the first day. Thus we had to change our plans after we had already begun, which is never very pleasant. Carolus could always be counted on. He did his best to give up his self-will and submit to our dictates. But who was going to be doing the dictating, Walter or me? Would Walter still be the equal of the youthful Walter I have described, my neighbor on the lecture-hall bench that June morning, who had ended the failed dog experiment the way it had to end? If so, I would have put my hands quietly in my lap and done nothing, or submitted to the will of God and held them out to be bitten by the
Stegomyia
. But I doubted that Walter's vitality was unbroken. I did not know whether he had thrown off the burden of his soft heart and the bourgeois atmosphere around his wife to such a degree that he would be able to act with authority.

I would have bowed to discipline at once had I known for a certainty that system and method lay behind the orders Walter gave. But it appeared to me that he was wavering. Not that he ever would have refused to work with us, either actively, as a research bacteriologist, or passively, as an experimental subject. He was too much a man of duty for that; he had given us his word. He kept it. But when I saw him looking out the laboratory window at another small coastal steamer laboring
through rough swells, picking its way among the many craggy islands into the city's marshy harbor, when I saw how longingly he was waiting for news from his family (which never came), I made up my mind to take charge myself. I may have been only a déclassé lawbreaker and he an impeccable, ideal character, but this was irrelevant at the moment.

And the little experiment I conducted told me I had made the right decision. I proposed to my comrades that we depart radically from the original plan. Even before I could explain what I thought this change should entail, Walter stood up, mouth working, began to pace back and forth in front of the window, still gazing at the coastal steamer, and at last said I could give the orders, fine. But in that case I would also have to take responsibility for everything. Of course I would! Why wouldn't I? Anywhere, anytime. If we worked
within
the law, that was fine with me. But I was game even if our human experiments went outside the law. Since the Portuguese girl's death, nothing frightened me anymore. Walter was astonished that I had accepted his proposal at once. And that was where the matter rested.

I found it no more than an odd surprise later when Walter reproached me for usurping the supreme command, which he had after all suggested that I do. Not that he would have interfered with my plans. They were too practical, too much in line with the facts. But at a personal level he withdrew from me. He no longer shook my hand. He always used “Herr” in addressing me, that is, using neither my old academic title (I may have forfeited it, the world may have been that silly, but he was just now recognizing my abilities as an experimenter) nor my name, Georg Letham. But why agonize over such trivialities? No matter that he banished me now from the common table, forcing me to gulp down my meals by artificial light down in the oil-and-vinegar room in the
often puerile company of no one but March (even if this did permit me to read one of my two books at my leisure, while March merrily did his best to disturb me), no matter that his only response to my innocently friendly greeting was to look away. Of much greater importance was the change in the battle formation, if I may put it that way, in the midst of the battle, which always gives one pause, though it was only a battle against mosquitoes. First I changed the sequence in which we were to be inoculated. Now I wanted to put myself at the end of this initial but most important series of experiments. No one will be able to call me cowardly on that account. I maintain that waiting to be inoculated was much more of a psychological strain. I endured it. The waiting nearly shattered me. Anyone facing an important, risky decision will want it to come
at once
, if come it must.

But I knew why I was saving myself until later. I had to arrange everything down to the most inconspicuous detail and be constantly on hand to supervise, until I delivered myself over to the disease. I had to map out everything, preferably in writing, so that the experiment would be able to proceed systematically after my demise or while I was ill.

The second change was that we would do the inoculation by mosquito bite at intervals of at least two days, not twenty-four hours at most as previously planned. There were not many of us. We had to make the best use of our material.

The blood-engorged mosquitoes were now being kept in separate jars. Later we put them together if the experimental conditions were the same and labeled the jars precisely with grease pencil.

They could be seen through the walls of the test tube, some of them whirring up and down in steep spirals in their narrow prison, others sitting down at the tip and calmly jiggling their hind legs. We fed them,
but only with very small quantities of sugar, so that they would not lose their appetite for human blood. Sugar and the like could never satisfy them anyway; since they were true bloodsuckers, particularly the females we were using in the experiments, blood attracted them more than anything else.

This experimental design proved its worth. On the third day after we had begun the entire undertaking, March was finally bitten by three specimens one after another, and very substantially. Whether it was because he had eaten a lot of fruit or because the mosquitoes were ravenous or because, having unfortunately learned in the course of their lives what hunger is and what blood is, they wanted more of it–no matter, they were unable to tear themselves away from his soft skin with its blond down, they fed and fed, fluttering their antennae, and would perhaps have liked to remain till the end of their days on March's upper arm, ever beefier as he continued to put on flesh here in captivity. For March had gained weight despite the tropical heat, as had Carolus, while Walter and I had lost weight. This was irrelevant.

We allowed the mosquitoes to bite Carolus on the fifth day, and on the seventh it was Walter's turn.

He had now finally received word from his wife on one boat or another. But he was silent about what the fat letter contained. Or was it from his lawyer? It was not our concern. But if the mosquito or its appetite was any measure of the “sweetness” of his blood, much had to be laid at the door of the wife, who had made his life a bitter thing. The mosquito sat morosely on his wasted upper arm, wagged its head back and forth, jiggled its last pair of legs, and would not bite for all the tea in China however hungry it may have been. This was taking too long and we killed it with a drop of chloroform, replacing it with another that
was evidently as hungry as a lion in the jungle. Whether poor Walter's blood was bitter or sweet, it swooped down on his arm, drilled in with its stinger, and fed until it was full, so that its bloated abdomen was like a tiny ruby. Thus it ingested blood, healthy blood. But in this blissful feeding did it also discharge any? Infected blood? Blood containing the Y.F. microorganism in pure culture? One would have to assume so with fair certainty if our logically constructed theory was correct. Give blood, take blood–this was the only way the disease could spread according to our theory. Was it true? Was it not true? No gambler has ever waited with greater anxiety to see where the roulette ball rolls. And here our lives were also in play.