The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (3 page)

In the modern world, though, the body louse is the louse of refugees, soldiers, and other desperate people. Typhus epidemics occur when a population is at the end of its tether. Starvation, cold, fear, and exhaustion are the normal prerequisites. Typhus corresponds with social collapse.
Typhus “will continue to break into
the open,” wrote Hans Zinsser, author and Harvard typhus researcher, “whenever human stupidity and brutality give it a chance.” By the time Zinsser wrote these lines in his famous book
Rats, Lice and History
, published in 1935, typhus was a distant memory to most Americans and Western Europeans, who were too clean for permanent louse infestation. Yet there were parts of the world where it was still an acute danger.
At the end of World War I
, the worst epidemic in history swept across Russia from Siberia all the way through Poland, causing 30–40 million cases of disease, and killing perhaps three million people. It was in the anteroom of this great catastrophe that Dr. Rudolf Weigl and his assistant Ludwik Fleck earned their stripes as typhus researchers. Working on the basis of new evidence that lice were the vectors of the disease, Fleck and Weigl were on the cutting edge of scientific efforts to tame it.

When the Austro-Hungarian Empire called up its male subjects to fight in 1914, Weigl was 31 years old, Fleck just 18. Both left their homes in the city of Lviv—which was known to the Poles as Lwów, to German speakers as Lemberg—to become medics in the kaiser’s army. After some training in Vienna, they quickly joined the fight against typhus, which they encountered mostly in Russian prisoner-of-war camps in Bohemia and in western Galicia—around the cities of Lwów, Tarnów, and Przemy
l. From 1917 to 1921, Weigl was in charge of a military laboratory—at first under the Habsburgs, and from 1919 for the Polish state—in Przemy
l, which straddled the San River. This was a fortress town, now located at the border between Poland and Ukraine, and by some cultural maps a dividing line between Eastern and Western Europe.
The Przemy
l complex
of forts, the third largest in Europe in 1914, fell to the czar’s army in March 1915, after a six-month siege that led to starvation among the poor Jews who lived there.
It was retaken three
months later, then lost its strategic significance and became something of a warehouse and a way station for troop movements and a center of military medicine, including a modern microbiological laboratory.

Rudolf Stefan Weigl was born in 1883 in P
erov, a picturesque Moravian town now located in the Czech Republic, and was the child of ethnic Germans. His father, who designed and produced vehicles of various sorts, died after crashing a large-wheeled bicycle of his own invention when Weigl was seven. His mother remarried a few years later to a Polish schoolteacher named Józef Trojnar. The family moved frequently from town to town until Trojnar became director of a middle school in Stryj, a wealthy town south of Lwów. The marriage was a happy one, and Rudolf, his older brother, Friedrich, and sister, Lilly, grew up in an atmosphere in which Polish language and culture predominated.
After passing his
examinations, Weigl enrolled at the University of Lwów, where in 1907 he received his doctoral degree under the zoologist Józef Nusbaum-Hilarowicz, a leading Polish proponent and translator of Darwin’s ideas.

In the waning years of the Habsburg realm, the monarch had granted Polish autonomy to Galicia, a district stretching from Kraków in the west to east of Lwów and including areas of plains, forests, and mountains. The majority of peasants in the countryside were Ukrainians, the cities inhabited mostly by Poles and Jews. Those who chose to assimilate often learned Polish, the language of government and culture. This contrasted with the Russian- and Prussian-occupied areas of Poland, where assimilated Jews tended to speak German. Perhaps because of the light hand of the Austrian kaiser, the anti-Semitism and ethnic conflict that would characterize Poland following its independence in 1919 were not as close to the surface in wartime Galicia. Anti-Semitism was evident in the professions, but had not been codified, and was not universal.
Thus Weigl was simultaneously
a Czech, an Austrian, and a Pole, while his doctorate adviser, Nusbaum-Hilarowicz, was a Jew who had decided to accept a Catholic baptism in 1907, viewing it as a necessary step to achieve promotion to full professor. Weigl’s boss in the military service, Filip Pincus Eisenberg, was also Jewish. A Pasteur Institure–trained bacteriologist, Eisenberg ran a laboratory that was as multiethnic as the empire it served. In 1919, Weigl hired Fleck, who had begun his studies of medicine in Lwów before the war, as his assistant in Przemy
l. Fleck was also from an assimilated background. He was the son of Sabina Herschdörfer and of Maurycy Fleck, a craftsman with socialist tendencies who owned a small house-painting business. Though not rich, the Fleck parents were ambitious for their children and sent them to Polish rather than Hebrew high schools, with hopes of offering them a way into the mainstream of Polish society. Maurycy earned enough money to send Fleck and his two sisters, Antonina and Henryka, to university.
While Fleck earned his doctorate
at Lwów University under Weigl, the girls studied arts and pedagogy in Vienna.

Eisenberg’s expertise was microscopy, and he was skilled at identifying bacteria in their confusingly variable forms. Weigl, who was extremely adept in the laboratory arts, had already invented a device for improving microscopic lenses—a secondary focus adjustment knob. Fleck would also gain a reputation as a razor-sharp practitioner. In visible terms, the three of them represented the evolution of fashions in facial hair. Eisenberg was balding, with a long beard of the type seen on the waistcoat-with-tails-wearing professors in movies like
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
and
The Blue Angel
. From his 20s, Weigl had sported a distinctive goatee in the manner of
The Three Musketeers
, and sartorially he favored open-necked, wide-collared shirts.
Fleck liked to dress
in neatly pressed suits. He was clean-shaven, increasingly the style as the century went on, in part because of the nascent popular obsession with germs, which were thought to favor beards over smooth skin (an idea encouraged by Gillette and other razor makers).

Their prey, typhus, was an extremely difficult organism to understand and manipulate. Most successful human pathogens are relatively benign. Cold viruses, to give a classic example, spread far and wide because the humans they infect remain hardy enough to distribute them among their fellow men and women. Malaria doesn’t kill mosquitoes, and
Borrelia
bacteria, the cause of Lyme disease, harm neither the deer tick nor the deer. Over time, pathogenic organisms generally become less virulent, or they fade away, or have limited success. (Or, as in the case of HIV and tuberculosis, they infect slowly, giving the patient plenty of time to transmit the germ before becoming incapacitated.) The deadly Ebola virus sowed terror when it appeared in Africa in the 1980s, but has proven of little global significance because it infects and kills quickly, before the patient has time to spread it efficiently. This trait is characteristic of new pathogens that haven’t yet adapted to their hosts.
At the other end
of the spectrum is, for example,
Streptococcus pyogenes
, known also as Group A strep, which can cause strep throat, toxic shock, rheumatic fever, and scarlet fever, but usually colonizes, quietly, the throats of healthy three- to five-year-old children—at least 15 percent of whom harbor the organism in any given year.

Rickettsia prowazekii
, according to this logic, must be a young disease, for it has not “learned” to occupy a sturdy ecological niche. Experts believe that American natives may have transmitted the disease to Spanish colonists in the 16th century, although some argue it was already present in Europe.
R. prowazekii
has definite shortcomings.
Although it generally kills
fewer than 20 percent of the humans it infects, leaving plenty of others alive to transmit it, typhus relies upon a single avenue—the louse—for its spread. And lice not only spread typhus—they are its victims. Sick insects can transmit the disease to humans for up to 10 days. Then they die, and they do not pass along the disease to their eggs. When there are no typhus patients around to sicken the lice, they stop transmitting the disease. The end of a typhus epidemic should thus mean the end of typhus. However, the germ has a few more survival tricks. First, a contaminated louse’s feces contain high concentrations of
R. prowazekii
and remain infectious for several months.
More importantly, human
typhus survivors sometimes maintain latent infections for years. Just as a case of chicken pox in childhood can reappear as shingles in old age, typhus patients sometimes experience recurrences as their immune systems weaken. An American physician, Nathan Brill, first discovered such cases among Eastern European immigrants in New York’s Lower East Side in 1913. They seemed especially common among elderly men and women mourning the death of a spouse, which led Brill to call it “bereavement disease.” Hans Zinsser isolated the organism and indentified it as typhus. As old typhus patients die off, Brill-Zinsser disease becomes increasingly rare. But a senior with Brill-Zinsser who became lousy could infect his or her lice, and thus begin the cycle once again. This mechanism keeps typhus alive between epidemics. And if, as scientists believe, these are the only ways that typhus spreads, then the disease will disappear from earth when the last person who ever had it passes away.