Chapter IV: Koch (2)

Koch went on, precisely, with that efficiency of his, to staining tubercles from every part of the workman’s body, and everywhere his blue dye showed up these same slender crooked bacilli--strange creatures unlike any he had seen in all the thousands of animals or men, diseased or healthy, into whose insides he had pried. And now, sorry things began to happen to his inoculated guinea-pigs and rabbits. The guinea-pigs began to huddle disconsolately in the corners of their cages; their sleek coats ruffled and their bouncing little bodies began to fall away until they were sad bags of bones. They were feverish, their cavortings stopped and they looked listlessly at their fine carrots and their fragrant meals of hay--and one by one they died. And as these unconscious martyrs died--for Koch’s mad curiosity and for suffering men--the little microbe hunter pinned them down on his post-mortem board and soaked their sick hair with bichloride of mercury and precisely and with breathless care cut them open with sterile knives.

And inside these poor beasts Koch found the same kind of grayish-yellow sinister tubercles that had filled the body of the workman. Into the baths of blue stain on his eternal strips of glass Koch dipped them--and everywhere, in every one, he found the same terrible curved sticks that had jumped into his astounded gaze when he had stained the lung of the dead man.

“I have it!” he whispered, and called the busy Loeffler and the faithful Gaffky from their own spyings on other microbes. “Look!” Koch cried. “One little speck of tubercle I put into this beast six weeks ago--there could not have been more than a few hundred of those bacilli in that small bit--and now they’ve grown into billions! What devils they are, those germs--from that one place in the guinea-pig’s groin they have sneaked everywhere into his body, they have gnawed--they have grown through the walls of his arteries ... the blood has carried them into his bones ... into the farthest corner of his brain....”

Now he went to hospitals everywhere in Berlin, and begged the bodies of men or women that had died of consumption, he spent dreary days in dead houses and every evening before his microscope in his laboratory where the stillness was broken only by the eerie purrings and scurryings of guinea-pigs. He injected the sick tissue from the wasted bodies of consumptives who had died, into hundreds of guinea-pigs, into rabbits and three dogs, thirteen scratching cats, ten flopping chickens and twelve pigeons. He didn’t stop with these wholesale insane inoculations but shot the same kind of deadly cheesy stuff into white mice and rats and field mice and into two marmots. Never in microbe hunting has there been such appalling thoroughness.

“Ach! this is a little hard on the nerves, this work,” he muttered (thinking, perhaps of the lightning move of the paw of one of his cats jabbing the germ-filled syringe needle into his own hand). For Koch, hunting his invisible foes alone, there were so many disagreeable and always imminent possibilities of excitement--of something tragically worse than mere excitement....

But the hand of this completely unheroic looking little microbe hunter never slipped, it just grew drier and more wrinkled and blacker from its incessant baths in the bichloride of mercury--that good bichloride, with which in those old days the groping microbe hunters used to swab down everything, including their own persons. Then, week by week, in all of Koch’s meaouwing, crowing, barking, clucking menagerie of beasts those small curved bacilli grew into their relentless millions--and one by one the animals died, and gave eighteen-hour-days of work to Robert Koch in post-mortems and blear-eyed peerings through the microscope.

“It is only when a man or beast has tuberculosis that I can find these blue-stained rods, these bacilli,” Koch told Loeffler and Gaffky. “In healthy animals--I have looked, you know, at hundreds of them--I never find them.”

“That means, without doubt, that you have discovered the bacillus that is the cause, Herr Doktor----”

“No--not yet--what I have done might make Pasteur sure, but I am not at all convinced yet.... I have to get these bacilli out of the bodies of my dying animals now ... grow them on our beef-broth jelly, pure colonies of these microbes I must get, and cultivate them for months, away from any living creature ... and _then_, if I inoculate these cultivations into good healthy animals, and they get tuberculosis ...” and Koch’s sober wrinkled face smiled for a moment. Loeffler and Gaffky, ashamed of their jumping at conclusions, went back awed to their own searchings.

Testing every possible combination that his head could invent, Koch set out to try to grow his bacilli pure on beef-broth jelly. He made a dozen different kinds of good soup for them, he kept his tubes and bottles at the temperature of the room and the temperature of a man’s body and the temperature of fever. He cleverly used the sick lungs of guinea-pigs that teemed with bacilli, lungs that held no other stray microbes which might over-grow and choke out those delicate germs which he was sure must be the authors of consumption. The stuff from these lungs he planted dangerously into hundreds of tubes and bottles, but all this work ended in--nothing. In brief, those slim bacilli that grew like weeds in tropic gardens in the bodies of his sick animals, those microbes that swarmed in millions in sick men, those bacilli turned up their noses--that is, they would have if they had been equipped with noses--at the good soups and jellies that Koch cooked for them. It was no go!

But one day a reason for his failures popped into Koch’s head: “The trouble is that these tubercle bacilli will only grow in the bodies of living creatures--they are maybe almost _complete_ parasites--I must fix a food for them that is as near as possible like the stuff a living animal’s body is made of!”

So it was that Koch invented his famous food--blood-serum jelly--for microbes that are too finicky to grow on common provender. He went to string-butchers and got the clear straw-colored serum from the clotted blood of freshly slaughtered healthy cattle and carefully heated this fluid to kill all the stray microbes that might have fallen into it. Delicately he poured this serum into each one of dozens of narrow test-tubes, and placed these on a slant so that there would be a long flat surface on which to smear the sick consumptive tissues. Then ingeniously he heated each tube just hot enough to make the serum set, on a slant, into a clear beautiful jelly.

That morning a guinea-pig, sadly riddled with tuberculosis, had died. He dissected out of it a couple of the grayish yellow tubercles, and then, with a wire of platinum he streaked bits of this bacillus-swarming stuff on the moist surface of his serum jelly, on tube after tube of it. Then, with that drawing in and puffing out of breath that comes after a nasty piece of work, well done, Koch took his tubes and put them in the oven--at the exact temperature of a guinea-pig’s body.

Day after day Koch hurried in the morning to his incubating oven, and took out his tubes and held them close to his gold-rimmed glasses, and saw--nothing.

“Well, I have failed again,” he mumbled--it was the fourteenth day after he had planted his consumptive stuff--“every other microbe I have ever grown multiplies into large colonies in a couple of days, but here, confound it--there is nothing, nothing....”

Any other man would have pitched these barren disappointing serum-tubes out, but at this stubbly-haired country doctor’s shoulder his familiar demon whispered: “Wait--be patient, my master--you know that tubercle germs sometimes take months, years to kill men. Maybe too they grow very slowly in the serum tubes.” So Koch did not pitch the tubes out, and on the morning of the fifteenth day he came back to his incubator--to find the velvety surface of the serum jelly covered with tiny glistening specks! Koch reached a trembling hand for his pocket lens, clapped it to his eye and peered at one tube after another, and through his lens these glistening specks swelled out into dry tiny scales....

In a daze Koch pulled the cotton plug out of one of his tubes, mechanically he flamed its mouth in the sputtering blue fire of the Bunsen burner, with a platinum wire he picked off one of these little flaky colonies--they must be microbes--and not knowing how or what, he got them before his microscope....

Then he knew that he had got to a warm inn on the stony road of his adventure--here they were, countless myriads of these same bacilli, these crooked rods that he had first spied in the lung of the dead workman. They were motionless but surely multiplying and alive--they were delicate and finicky about their food and feeble in size, but more savage than hordes of Huns and more murderous than ten thousand nests of rattlesnakes.

Now Koch, in taut intent months, confirmed his first success--he went after proving it with a patience and a detail that made me sick of his everlasting thoroughness and prudence as I read the endlessly multiplied experiments in his classic report on tuberculosis--from consumptive monkeys and consumptive oxen and consumptive guinea-pigs Koch grew forty-three different families of these deadly rods on his slanted tubes of serum jelly!

And only from animals sick or dying of tuberculosis, could he grow them. For months he nursed these wee murderers along, planting them from one tube to another--with marvelous watchfulness he kept all other chance microbes away from them.

“Now I must shoot these bacilli--these pure cultivations of my bacilli--into healthy guinea-pigs, into all kinds of healthy animals. If then these creatures get tuberculosis, I shall know that my bacilli are necessarily and beyond all doubt the cause!”

That man with the terrible single-mindedness of a maniac driven by a fixed idea changed his laboratory into the weirdest kind of zoo. He became grouchy to every one--to curious visitors he was a sarcastic, spiteful little German ogre. Alone he sterilized batteries of shining syringes and shot the crinkly masses of microbes from the cultivations in his serum-jelly tubes--he injected these bacilli ground up in a little pure water into guinea-pigs and rabbits and hens and rats and mice and monkeys. “That’s not enough!” he growled, “I’ll try some animals that never are known to have tuberculosis naturally.” So he ranged abroad and gathered to his laboratory and injected his beloved terrible bacilli into tortoises, sparrows, five frogs and three eels.

Insanely Koch completed this most fantastic test by sticking his microbes from the serum cultivation into--a goldfish!

Days dragged by, weeks passed, and every day Koch walked into his workshop in the morning and made straight for the cages and jars that held these momentous animals. The goldfish continued to open and shut his mouth and swim placidly about in his round-bellied bowl. The frogs croaked unconcernedly and the eels kept all of their slippery liveliness; the tortoise now and then stuck his head out of his shell and seemed to wink an eye at Koch as if to say: “Your tubercle bugs are food for me--give me some more.”

But while his injections worked no harm to these creatures, that do not in the course of nature get consumption anyway--at the same time the guinea-pigs began to droop, to lie pitifully on their sides, gasping. One by one they died, their bodies wasting terribly into tubercles....

Now Koch had forged the last link of the chain of his experiments and was ready to give his news to the world: The bacillus, the true cause of tuberculosis, has been trapped, discovered! When suddenly he decided there was one more thing to do.

“Human beings surely must catch these bacilli by inhaling them, in dust, or from the coughing of people sick with consumption. I wonder, will healthy animals be infected that way too?” At once Koch began to devise ways of doing this experiment--it was a nasty job. “I’ll have to _spray_ the bacilli from my cultivations at the animals,” he pondered. But this was a more serious business than turning ten thousand murderers out of jail....

Like the good hunter that he was, he took a chance with the dangers that he couldn’t avoid. He built a big box and put guinea-pigs and mice and rabbits inside it and set this box in the garden. Then through the window he ran a lead pipe that opened in a spray nozzle inside the box, and for three days, for half an hour each day, he sat in his laboratory, pumping at a pair of bellows that shot a poisonous mist of bacilli into the box--to be breathed by the cavorting beasts inside it.

In ten days three of the rabbits were gasping, fighting for that precious air that their sick lungs could no longer give them. In twenty-five days the guinea-pigs had done their humble work--one and all they were dead, of tuberculosis.

Koch told nothing of the ticklish job it was to take these beasts out of their germ-soaked box--if I had been in his place I would rather have handled a boxful of boa-constrictors--and he makes no mention of how he disposed of this little house whose walls had been wet with this so-deadly spray. What chances for making heroic flourishes were missed by this quiet Koch!

VII

On the twenty-fourth of March in 1882 in Berlin there was a meeting of the Physiological Society in a plain small room made magnificent by the presence of the most brilliant men of science in Germany. Paul Ehrlich was there and the most eminent Professor Rudolph Virchow--who had but lately sniffed at this crazy Koch and his alleged bacilli of disease--and nearly all of the famous German battlers against disease were there.

A bespectacled wrinkled small man rose and put his face close to his papers and fumbled with them. The papers quivered and his voice shook a little as he started to speak. With an admirable modesty Robert Koch told these men the plain story of the way he had searched out the invisible assassin of one human being out of every seven that died. With no oratorical raisings of his voice he told these disease fighters that the physicians of the world were now able to learn all of the habits of this bacillus of tuberculosis--this smallest but most savage enemy of men. Koch recited to them the lurking places of this slim microbe, its strengths and weaknesses, and he showed them how they might begin the fight to crush, to wipe out this sub-visible deadly enemy.

At last Koch sat down, to wait for the discussion, the inevitable arguments and objections that greet the finish of revolutionary papers. But no man rose to his feet, no word was spoken, and finally eyes began to turn toward Virchow, the oracle, the Tsar of German science, the thunderer whose mere frown had ruined great theories of disease.

All eyes looked at him, but Virchow got up, put on his hat, and left the room--he had no word to say.

If old Leeuwenhoek, two hundred years before, had made so astounding a discovery, Europe of the Seventeenth Century would have heard the news in months. But in 1882 the news that Robert Koch had found the microbe of tuberculosis trickled out of the little room of the Physiological Society the same evening, sang to Kamchatka and to San Francisco on the cable wires that night, and exploded on the front pages of the newspapers in the morning. Then the world went wild over Koch, doctors boarded ships and hopped trains for Berlin to learn from him the secret of hunting microbes; vast crowds of them rushed to Berlin to sit at Koch’s feet to learn how to make beef-broth jelly and how to stick syringes full of germs into the wiggling carcasses of guinea-pigs.

Pasteur’s deeds had set France by the ears, but Koch’s experiments with the dangerous tubercle bacilli rocked the earth, and Koch waved worshipers away, saying:

“This discovery of mine is not such a great advance.”

He tried to get away from his adorers and to dodge his eager pupils, to snatch what moments he could for his own new searchings. He loathed teaching--that way he was precisely like Leeuwenhoek--but he was forced, cursing under his breath, to give lessons in microbe hunting to Japanese who spoke horrible German and understood less than they spoke, and to Portuguese, who could never, by any amount of instruction, learn to hunt microbes. He started a huge fight with Pasteur--but of this I shall tell in the next chapter--and between times he showed his assistant, Gaffky, how to spy on and track down the bacillus of typhoid fever. He was forced to attend idiotic receptions and receive medals, and came away from these occasions to guide his fierce-mustached assistant Loeffler, who was on the trail of the poison-dripping microbe that kills babies with diphtheria. It was thus that Koch shook the tree of his marvelous simple method of growing microbes on the surface of solid food--he shook the tree, as Gaffky said long afterward, and discoveries rained into his lap.

In all of his writings I have never found any evidence that Koch considered himself a great originator; never, like Pasteur, did he seem to realize that he was the leader in the most beautiful and one of the most thrilling battles of men against cruel nature--there was no actor in this mussy-bearded little man. But he did set under way an inspiring drama, a struggle with the messengers of death that turned some of the microbe-hunting actors into maniac searchers, men who went to nearly suicidal lengths, almost murderous extremes--to prove that microbes were the cause of dangerous diseases.

Doctor Fehleisen, to take one instance, went out from Koch’s laboratory and found a curious little ball-shaped microbe, hitched to its brothers in chains like the beads of a rosary--he cultivated these bugs from skin gouged out of people sick with erysipelas, that sky-rockety disease that used to be called St. Anthony’s Fire. On the theory that an attack of erysipelas might cure cancer--a mad man’s excuse!--Fehleisen shot billions of these chain microbes, now known as streptococci, into people hopelessly sick with cancer. And in a few days each one of these human experimental animals of his flamed red with St. Anthony’s Fire--some collapsed dangerously and nearly died--and so this desperado proved his case: That streptococcus is the cause of erysipelas.

Another pupil of Koch was the now forgotten hero, Doctor Garrè of Basel, who gravely rubbed whole test-tubes full of another kind of microbe--which Pasteur had alleged was the cause of boils--into his own arm. Garrè came down horribly with an enormous carbuncle and twenty boils--the tremendous dose of microbes he shot into himself might easily have finished him--but he dismissed his danger as merely “unpleasant” and shouted triumphantly: “I now know that this microbe, this staphylococcus, is the true cause of boils and carbuncles!”

Meanwhile, at the end of 1882, when Koch had finished his virulent and partly comic wrangle with Pasteur, who was just then with prodigious enthusiasm saving the lives of sheep and cattle in France, the discoverer of the tubercle bacillus started sniffing along the trail of one of the most delicate, the most easy to kill, and yet the most terribly savage of all microbes. In 1883 the Asiatic cholera knocked at the door of Europe. This cholera had stolen out of its lurking place in India and slipped mysteriously across the sea and over desert sands to Egypt; suddenly a murderous epidemic of it exploded in Alexandria and Europe across the Mediterranean was frightened. In Alexandria the streets were still with fear; the murderous virus--no one had the slightest notion of what kind of an invisible beast it was--this virus, I say, sneaked into healthy men in the morning, doubled them into knots of spasm-racked agony by afternoon, and put them to rest beyond the reach of all pain by night.

Then a strange race started between Pasteur and Koch, which meant between France and Germany, to search out the microbe of this cholera that flared threatening on the horizon. Koch and Gaffky went armed with microscopes and a menagerie of animals from Berlin; Pasteur--who was desperately busy struggling to conquer the mysterious microbe of hydrophobia--sent the brilliant and devoted Émile Roux and the silent Thuillier, youngest of the microbe hunters of Europe. Koch and Gaffky worked forgetting to eat or sleep; they toiled in dreadful rooms cutting up the bodies of Egyptians dead of cholera; in their muggy laboratory with the air fairly dripping with a steamy heat, sweat dropping off the ends of their noses on to the lenses of their microscopes, they shot stuff from the tragic carcasses of just-dead Alexandrians into apes and dogs and hens and mice and cats. But while these rival teams of searchers hunted frantically the epidemic began to fade away as mysteriously as it came. None of them had yet found a microbe they could surely accuse, and all of them--there is a kind of twisted humor in this--grumbled as they saw death receding, their chance of trapping their prey slipping from them.

Koch and Gaffky were getting ready to return to Berlin, when one morning a frightened messenger came to them and told them: “Dr. Thuillier, of the French Commission, is dead--of cholera.”

Koch and Pasteur hated each other sincerely and enthusiastically, like the good patriots that they were, but now the two Germans went to the bereaved Roux and offered their help and their condolences; and Koch was one of those that carried in a plain box to its last home the body of Thuillier, this daring young Thuillier whom the miserably weak--but treacherous--cholera microbe had turned upon and done to death before he had ever had a chance to spy upon and trap it. At the grave Koch laid wreaths upon the coffin: “They are very simple,” he said, “but they are of laurel, such as are given to the brave.”

The funeral of this first of the martyred microbe hunters over, Koch hurried back to Berlin with certain mysterious boxes that held specimens, that he had painted with powerful dyes, and these specimens had in them a curious microbe shaped like a comma. Koch made his report to the Minister of State: “I have found a germ,” he said, “in all cases of cholera ... but I haven’t _proved_ yet that it is the cause. Send me to India where cholera is always smoldering--what I have found justifies your sending me there.”

So Koch sailed from Berlin for Calcutta, with the fate of Thuillier hanging over him, drolly chaperoning fifty mice and dreadfully annoyed by seasickness. I have often wondered what his fellow-passengers took him for--probably they guessed that he was some earnest little missionary or a serious professor intent to delve into ancient Hindu lore.

Koch found his comma bacillus in the dead bodies of every one of the forty carcasses into which he peered, and he unearthed the same microbe in the intestines of patients at the moment the fatal disease hit them. But he never found this germ in any of the hundreds of healthy Hindus that he examined, nor in any animal, from mice to elephants.

Quickly Koch learned to grow the comma bacillus pure on beef-broth jelly, and once he had it imprisoned in his tubes he studied all the habits of this vicious little vegetable, how it perished quickly when he dried it the least bit, how it could sneak into a healthy man by way of the soiled linen of patients that had died. He dredged this comma microbe up out of the stinking water of the tanks around which clustered the miserable Hindu’s huts--sad hovels from which drifted the moans of helpless ones that were dying of cholera.

At last Koch sailed back to Germany, and here he was received like some returning victorious general. “Cholera never rises spontaneously,” he told his audience of learned doctors; “no healthy man can ever be attacked by cholera unless he swallows the comma microbe, and this germ can only develop from its like--it cannot be produced from any other thing, or out of nothing. And it is only in the intestine of man, or in highly polluted water like that of India that it can grow.”

It is thanks to these bold searchings of Robert Koch that Europe and America no longer dread the devastating raids of these puny but terrible little murderers from the Orient--and their complete extermination from the world waits only upon the civilization and sanitation of India....

VIII

From the German Emperor’s own hand Koch now received the Order of the Crown, with Star, but in spite of that his countrified hat continued to fit his stubbly head, and when admirers adored him he only said to them: “I have worked as hard as I could ... if my success has been greater than that of most ... the reason is that I came in my wanderings through the medical field upon regions where the gold was still lying by the wayside ... and that is no great merit.”

The hunters who believed that microbes were the chief foes of man, these men were brave, but there was careless heroism too among some of the ancient doctors and old-fogey sanitarians who thought that all this new stuff about microbes was claptrap and nonsense. Old Professor Pettenkofer of Munich was the leader of the skeptics who were not convinced by Koch’s clear experiments, and when Koch came back from India with those comma bacilli that he was sure were the authors of cholera Pettenkofer wrote him something like this: “Send me some of your so-called cholera germs, and I’ll show you how harmless they are!”

Koch sent him on a tube that swarmed with wee virulent comma microbes. And so Pettenkofer--to the great alarm of all good microbe hunters--swallowed the entire contents of the tube. There were enough billions of wiggling comma germs in this tube to infect a regiment. Then he growled his scorn through his magnificent beard, and said: “Now let us see if I get cholera!” Mysteriously, nothing happened, and the failure of the mad Pettenkofer to come down with cholera remains to this day an enigma, without even the beginning of an explanation.

Pettenkofer, who was foolhardy enough to try such a possibly suicidal experiment, was also sufficiently cocksure to believe that his drinking of the cholera soup had settled the question in his favor. “Germs are of no account in cholera!” shouted the old doctor. “The important thing is the _disposition_ (whatever that means) of the individual!”

“There can be no cholera without the comma bacillus!” said Koch in reply.

“But I have just swallowed millions of your alleged fatal bacilli, and have not even had a cramp in my stomach!” came back Pettenkofer in rebuttal.

As it is so often the case, alas, in violent scientific controversies, both sides were partly right and partly wrong. Every event of the past forty years has shown that Koch was right when he said that people can never have cholera without swallowing his comma bacillus. And the years that have gone by have revealed that Pettenkofer’s experiment pointed out a mystery behind the curtains of the unknown, and these obscuring draperies have not now even begun to be lifted by modern microbe hunters. Murderous germs are everywhere, sneaking into all of us, yet they are able to assassinate only some of us, and that question of the strange resistance of the rest of us is still just as much an unsolved puzzle as it was in those days of the roaring eighteen-eighties when men were ready to risk dying to prove that they were right.

For, make no mistake, Pettenkofer walked within an inch of death; other microbe hunters have since then swallowed cultures of virulent cholera microbes by accident--and died horribly.

But we come to the end of the great days of Robert Koch, and the exploits of Louis Pasteur begin once more to push Koch and all other microbe hunters into the background of the world’s attention. Let us leave Koch while his ambitious but well-meaning countrymen prepare, without knowing it, a disaster for him, a tragedy that, alas, has partly tarnished the splendor of his trapping of the microbes that murder animals and men with anthrax and cholera and tuberculosis. But before you read the perfect and brilliant _finale_ of the gorgeous career of Pasteur, I beg leave to remove my hat and make bows of respect to Koch--the man who really _proved_ that microbes are our most deadly enemies, who brought microbe hunting near to being a science, the man who is now the partly forgotten captain of an obscure heroic age.