The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (49 page)

Preface

The two insects
:
B. P. Olds et al., “Comparison of the Transcriptional Profiles of Head and Body Lice,”
Insect Molecular Biology
21 (2012): 257–68; J. E. Light et al., “What’s in a Name: The Taxonomic Status of Human Head and Body Lice,”
Molecular and Phylogenetic Evolution
47 (2008): 1203–16.

Both nourish themselves
:
Patrick A. Buxton,
The Louse
(London: Edward Arnold, 1947), 18–19.

“
They need particular temperature
”:
Olga Tarasyuk, interview with author, May 2011.

While working as Weigl’s assistant
:
Fleck,
Genesis
.

Thomas Kuhn, the famous
:
Kuhn,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
, 50th anniversary ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

Blood had always been
:
Goethe’s Faust
, ed. E. J. Turner et al. (London: Rivington’s, 1882), 79.

Introduction

It is a hostile wind
:
Shoah Foundation, 50467 Reidar Dittmann.

In the winter
:
Pierre D’Harcourt,
The Real Enemy
(London: Longman, 1967), 106.

Their primary target, the Gustloff-II
:
Stéphane Hessel,
Danse avec le siècle
(Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997), 83–91; David A. Hackett, trans. and ed.,
The Buchenwald Report
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 305–6.

The Nazis renamed the place
:
Buchenwald Concentration Camp, 1937–1945: A Guide to the Permanent Historical Exhibition
(Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005), 27.

“
Here Goethe rested
”:
Hackett,
Report
, 32.

As the war dragged on
:
Christian Pineau,
La simple vérité, 1940–1945
(Paris: René Julliard, 1960), 482.

“
Die, die you beast
”:
Ludwik Fleck, “The Goethe Oak,” accessed at http://www.elmalpensante.com/index.php?doc=display_contenido&id=1025.

The ideas and thinkers
:
Fleck,
Genesis
, 133.

Fleck, as a sociologist
:
Fleck, “Wissenschaft und Umwelt,” in Fleck,
Denkstile
, 329.

Those in the thought collective of Block 50
:
Fleck, “Problems of the Science of Science,” in
Cognition and Fact: Materials on Ludwik Fleck
, ed. Robert S. Cohen and Thomas Schnelle (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1986), 113–25.

Chapter 1: Lice/War/Typhus/Madness

The body louse evolved
:
D. Raoult and V. Roux, “The Body Louse as a Vector of Reemerging Human Diseases,”
Clinical Infectious Diseases
29 (1999): 888–90.

In one of the earliest
:
Exodus 8:17.

It has even been hypothesized
:
J. W. Maunder, “The Appreciation of Lice,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine
55 (1983): 1–31.

An account of the 12th-century funeral
:
Hans Zinsser,
Rats, Lice and History
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), 184–85.

Typhus “will continue to break into”
:
Ibid., 301.

At the end of World War I
:
K. David Patterson, “Typhus and Its Control in Russia, 1870–1940,”
Medical History
37 (1993): 361–63.

The Przemy
l complex
:
S. Ansky,
The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey through the Jewish Pale of Settlement during World War I
, ed. and trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), 123.

It was retaken three
:
Brigitte Biwald,
Von Helden und Krüppeln: Das österreichisch-ungarische Militärsanitätswesen im Ersten Weltkrieg
(Vienna: Haupt, 2002), 551. See also Franz Forstner,
Przemysl: Österreich-Ungarns bedeutendste Festung
(Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1987), 277–89.

After passing his
:
Szybalski, “Genius.” See also Stefan Kry
ski, “Rudolf Weigl,” at http://www.lwow.home.pl/Weigl/human.html.

Thus Weigl was simultaneously
:
Gabriel Brz
k,
Józef Nusbaum-Hilarowicz:
ycie, prace, dzielo
(Lublin: Wydawn. Lubelskie, 1984), 95–96.

While Fleck earned his doctorate
:
Summaries of Fleck’s life and work are contained in K. Leszczy
ska, “Ludwik Fleck: A Forgotten Philosopher,” in
Penser avec Fleck: Investigating a Life Studying Life Sciences
, ed. Johannes Fehr et al. (Zurich: Collegium Helveticum, 2009), 23–39; and Thomas Schnelle, “Microbiology and Philosophy of Science, Lwów and the German Holocaust: Stations of Life—Ludwik Fleck 1896–1961,” in
Cognition and Fact—Materials on Ludwik Fleck
, ed. Robert S. Cohen and Thomas Schnelle (Dordrecht: L. Reidel, 1986), 3–38.

Fleck liked to dress
:
A. D. Peterkin,
One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair
(Vancouver: Arsenal Pump Press, 2001), 180–81.

At the other end
:
Riza Durmaz et al., “Prevalence of Group A Streptococcal Carriers in Asymptomatic Children and Clonal Relatedness among Isolates in Malatya, Turkey,”
Journal of Clinical Microbiology
41 (2003): 5285.

Although it generally kills
:
Didier Raoult and Philippe Parola, eds.,
Rickettsial Diseases
(New York: Informa Healthcare, 2007).

More importantly, human
:
Zinsser,
Rats
, xiii.

“
Tell me, Sir, where
”:
Accounts of the conversation circulated among Weigl’s assistants and are recounted in, for example, Andrzej Wincewicz et al., “Rudolph Weigl, (1883–1957)—A Scientist in Poland in Wartime Plus Ration quam vis,”
Journal of Medical Biography
15 (2007): 112.

“
To watch him tenderly
”:
Hermann Eyer, “In Memoriam Rudolf Weigl,”
Zentralblatt für Bakteriologie, Parasitenkunde, Infektionskrankheiten und Hygiene
171 (1958): 379.

To add to the confusion
:
Jan O. Andersson and Siv G. E. Andersson, “A Century of Typhus, Lice and
Rickettsia
,”
Research in Microbiology
151 (2000): 143–50.

Typhus bacteria live
:
Michael W. Gray, “Rickettsia, Typhus and the Mitochondrial Connection,”
Nature
396 (1998): 109–10.

Sickness typically begins
:
David Walker and Didier Raoult, “Typhus Group Rickettsioses,” in
Tropical Infectious Diseases: Principles, Pathogens, and Practice
, ed. Richard L. Guerrant (Philadelphia: Churchill Livingstone 2006), 548–56; Walker and Raoult, “Rickettsia,” in
Mandell, Douglas and Bennett’s Principles and Practice of Infectious Diseases
, 7th ed. (Philadelphia: Churchill Livingstone, 2009), 252–53.

At the peak of illness
:
J. M. Mitchell et al.,
Typhus Fever, with Special Reference to the Russian Epidemics
(London: Bailliere Tindall and Cox, 1922), 16–17.

Another American, a volunteer
:
Peter Englund,
The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War
(New York: Knopf, 2011), 194, 215.

“
Although my memory
”:
Dmitri Pletnev, “Einige Bemerkungen über Flecktyphus nach Beobachtungen während der Moskauer Epidemie 1917–1920,”
Zeitschrift für klinische Medizin
(1922): 285–301.

Some hallucinatory motifs
:
“Ergebnisse der zweiten Beratendentagung Ost 11/30–12/3, 1942,” BA Militärdienst, RH1/23/246.

American famine relief
:
Bertrand M. Patenaude,
The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 239.

The journalist John Reed
:
“The Last Days with John Reed: A Letter from Louise Bryant; Moscow, Nov. 14, 1920,” courtesy of a. nora claypoole [
sic
].

Those who recovered
:
Anton Chekhov, “Typhus,” in
The Party and Other Stories
(Whitefish: Kessinger, 2004), 291–302.

The Grand Army marched
:
Linda Hohamdi and Didier Raoult, “Louse-Borne Epidemic Typhus,’’ in
Rickettsial Diseases
(Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2007), 51–62.

Napoleon’s benighted soldiers
:
Ludwik Gross, “How Charles Nicolle of the Pasteur Institute Discovered That Epidemic Typhus Is Transmitted by Lice,”
Procceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
93 (1996): 10539–40.

The hygienic corps of the
:
Arthur Allen,
Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver
(New York: Norton, 2007), 60.

In Turkey, where the enfeebled
:
Weindling,
Epidemics
, 105–12.

“Russia”, a Russian officer told
:
Ansky,
Enemy
, 83.

Even Aleksandra Piłsudska, wife of
:
Aleksandra Piłsudska,
Piłsudski: A Biography by His Wife
(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1944), 243–44.

In Erich Maria Remarque’s
:
Remarque,
All Quiet on the Western Front
(New York: Ballantine, 1987), 69.