The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (7 page)

Weigl had not been
in charge of the laboratory for long when he became ill, an experience that he would use as an important step toward the creation of a typhus vaccine. Accidentally smashing a petri dish, he stuck himself with glass that had been in contact with a container of typhus germs grown in six successive generations of lice. Soon Weigl developed the characteristic rash on his abdomen as well as a high fever, and his blood provided a positive Weil-Felix reaction. His new wife, Zofia Kulikowska Weigl, nursed him through the illness but also conducted experiments on her husband at his request. She placed matchbox-size cages on his body, each containing hundreds of lice, to feed upon his blood in different phases of the illness. One side of each tiny cage had a piece of wire mesh glued over a large oval hole, the mesh sturdy enough to stay in place but fine-grained enough for a louse to feed through. If his blood gave the lice typhus, Weigl reasoned, it would offer new proof that the organism he had been culturing in the lice through anal injections—the same organism with which he had infected himself—was the causative agent of typhus.

From time to time, Weigl emerged from a fitful sleep and jabbered in a psychotic fashion. Zofia had to pretend he was still giving the orders, or he became very angry and could not be calmed down. “
His determination to pursue
the agent of typhus fever,” said a close aide, “was so dominant that it did not leave him even when he was deeply ill.” The lice fed heavily upon Weigl and after several days they turned bright red and sluggish, and then died. The accidental experiment had been a success. “The lice set upon me during my feverish period,” wrote Weigl, “became thoroughly infected with
Rickettsia prowazekii
.” This was the best evidence he’d collected to date confirming the identity of the causative agent of typhus.

Weigl was cautious about publishing—he was never one to write up an experiment without repeating it many times, and he didn’t like to mark each baby step in print. Weigl called such research papers “duck shit.” They reminded him, as an outdoorsman, of what the feathered animals left behind while waddling along. In the view of others, Weigl took this publication shyness to extremes.
Even as a student
, he was always so thrilled to be doing science and excited by his discoveries that he couldn’t be bothered to publish anything, until his superiors threatened to withhold his stipends. But having emerged from his own rite of typhus passage,
Weigl published the first
exposition on his research methods, a 20-pager with graphics in a German medical publication,
Beiträge zur Klinik der Infektionskrankheiten und
ur Immunitätsforschung
(Clinical contributions to infectious disease and immunity research).

The paper outlined progress in typhus research to date and then explained the many painstaking steps and small technical details of Weigl’s work maintaining
R. prowazekii
in a colony of lice. Its implications were groundbreaking and immediately obvious to the international research community: for the first time, one could study a stable colony of typhus germs in vivo where there was neither a typhus epidemic nor human typhus patients.

World War I ended with the dissolution of the great empires of Europe and the emergence of an independent Polish state for the first time since the 18th century. Polish independence made Weigl’s struggle with the disease even more meaningful to him, for something in the happy childhood he experienced with his Polish stepfather had converted Weigl into a strong Polish patriot.
He and a friend were
discussing the famous scientist Marie Skłodowska-Curie once over drinks, and Weigl criticized Curie for raising her daughters as Frenchwomen, with no Polish identity at all. “Look at me, I’m a full-blooded German,” Weigl said, “but I identified with Poland when it wasn’t even on the map, and I’ll always be Polish.”

Health disasters were
among the greatest challenges that Poland faced in its first years of independence. The 28 million new citizens of the country underwent terrible hardships between 1914 and 1920 as armies clawed for control of their lands. Cities and towns were occupied, pillaged, and razed repeatedly. Hundreds of thousands starved to death. Millions were homeless. Industry was destroyed, agriculture in chaos. Pogroms ruined hundreds of Jewish towns. As disbanded White and Ukrainian armies and refugees fled into Poland, disease spread. According to the Polish government, the country suffered 673,000 cases of typhus, with 141,500 deaths, in 1918. Many of the victims were Russian POWs. At the armistice of 1918, there were 2 million Russians in German captivity, many of them on Polish territory. When Poland went to war with the Bolsheviks in February 1919, the repatriation of the Russian POWs stopped. American, British, Swedish, and International Red Cross relief teams arrived to try to help the Poles control the epidemic.
Herbert Hoover, whom Wilson
had appointed as his humanitarian czar for postwar Europe, directed Colonel Harry Gilchrist, a veteran of World War I campaigns in France, to offer his antityphus services to the Polish government. The Americans found appalling conditions in Poland. In teeming POW and refugee camps near Przemy
l, the new public health authorities were unable to provide decent conditions for the sick captives. Men slept on the mud in poorly built huts with broken windows. Prisoners who arrived at one camp after traveling for five days in November 1919 grabbed a dead horse lying by the side of the road and tried to eat its raw carcass. A typhus epidemic that began that month claimed 247 of the 1,100 prisoners there.

An army could forcibly delouse POWs, if it had the facilities, but it was not easy to persuade the “great unwashed” to submit to delousing. In some of the colder, poorer regions of Poland, winter bathing was still viewed with suspicion, though Jewish men and women had regular recourse to the ritual bath or mikveh that traditionally is attached to every Orthodox synagogue.
Perhaps because lice were
an inevitable part of life throughout most of human history, some traditions held that one’s lice protected one from disease; the great 18th-century biologist Linnaeus subscribed to this theory. In eastern Poland, the uneducated—Pole and Jew alike—were said to believe that lice were necessary body armor. But the new health authorities of Poland, and their Western allies, were determined to drive away pests and pestilent ideas. The Americans sent six delousing trains, each capable of cleaning 1,000 refugees per day, to the Polish–Russian border and other areas. The mobile plants consisted of a water tanker with hoses and tents.
Children were always the first
to volunteer for a bath. “If the older people were as enthusiastic as these children, typhus would no longer be a dread in Poland,” Gilchrist wrote. Town officials devised a plan requiring citizens to show a bath ticket in order to buy bread and potatoes. Forged tickets soon appeared. Over time, however, some warmed to the American cleaning teams. In the
Illustrated Daily Courier
of Kraków, an ad appeared on October 30, 1919, describing the appearance of American baths in central Lwów: “on a great square where many institutions are found . . . a passer-by sees an uncommon sight: By one entrance he sees people dirty as Satan; by other doors they come out clean like angels. . . . Oh magic bath! Come quickly to Kraków, for you are more necessary here than anywhere else!”

Western scientists were ready to believe the worst about the hygiene of Eastern European Jews, but came away with mixed opinions. “
The Jews were said to be
less cleanly than the Christians, and from what I saw of them I should say that this was true,” the British epidemiologist E. W. Goodall wrote in 1920. But in the same publication, he attributed the lower mortality rate of Jews in one district to their greater access to medical care. He concluded that although Jews in some places were more likely to get typhus, “it is doubtful, in my opinion, that they so suffered because they were Jews: the more probable reason is because they were more densely crowded together.”

Several of the medical
teams traveled to Lwów, which was beginning to gain recognition as a center of typhus research. Weigl had started work on his typhus vaccine. By 1921, the year he was appointed full professor in the Department of General Biology at Lwów University, he had something to show for it.

CHAPTER TWO

C
ITY ON THE
E
DGE OF
T
IME

W
eigl’s appointment was an unusual honor for a 38-year-old in the cramped, graying world of Polish academia. Weigl brought along Fleck and a few other members of his team from Przemy
l, and they settled into the department’s headquarters on the basement floor of a former Trinitarian monastery at 4 St. Nicholas Street, near the center of the city. Weigl’s team was part of a dynamic group of public health scientists, many of them officers in the Polish military. They put themselves at the service of the state by creating a brand-new health system, which offered universal insurance to its citizens and set about battling the diseases that had plagued the country over the ages. The bacteriologist Ludwik Rajchman was at the forefront of this effort. He led international efforts to fight typhus in Poland and the East, and in 1921 took charge of the new, Geneva-based League of Nations Health Organization, the forerunner of the World Health Organization.
Rajchman, an assimilated
Jew of left-wing tendencies, persuaded a cousin, the hematologist Ludwik Hirszfeld, to head the Polish National Institute of Hygiene, which the hyperactive Rajchman also had organized.
The health agency, known
by its Polish initials PZH, established branches throughout the country and set to work rebuilding the country’s shattered public health infrastructure—or in some cases, creating it from scratch. The worst typhus epidemics were in the southeast, in the region south of Lwów. During the end of the Habsburg Empire and the beginning of the Polish state, military scientists like Weigl worked closely with PZH epidemiologists to sort out the causes of the disease and crush it.
Soon after Weigl moved to Lwów
, Hirszfeld invited him to PZH headquarters in Warsaw to demonstrate his louse-inoculation techniques to British, French, German, and American scientists who were studying the disease in Poland.

After returning to Lwów, Weigl began a period of remarkable productivity that corresponded with a golden age of scientific and artistic creativity in the city, a time when Lwów grew rapidly. Between 1921 and the end of World War II, Weigl’s lab blossomed, expanded, and finally exploded in size, and then disappeared entirely, much like the population of Lwów itself. Weigl became famous, first in the research world, then in the city, and finally in Poland at large, until he, too, disappeared.

Like many successful
Polish academics of this period, Weigl had married a few rungs up the socioeconomic ladder. Zofia Kulikowska, whom Weigl had met when they worked together as students in Nusbaum-Hilarowicz’s laboratory, was the daughter of a lawyer who had become wealthy through his own practice after gambling away the family fortune at the craps tables of Monte Carlo.
She was beautiful
and intelligent and a talented scientist, and they worked side by side while raising their only child, Wiktor, born in 1921.