Microbe Hunters, by Paul de Kruif (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1926)
Soap and Water & Common Sense, by Dr. Bonnie Henry (Toronto: Anansi, 2009)
De Kruif was born in Michigan. I’m not sure, but I suspect that fact is relevant. He was born in 1890 and saw this book published in 1926. Wikipedia notes that it “has remained high on lists of recommended reading for science and has been an inspiration for many aspiring physicians and scientists.” Probably the enduring popularity of his book has to do with the fact that he offers his accounts of major epidemiological breakthroughs as narratives. He is a story teller. He is as interested in the personalities behind the discoveries as he is in relating the discoveries themselves. However, after 94 years, it’s time to retire this book from the reading lists. There are better books out there.
Because the book presents itself as a series of narratives, one of the most prominent personalities it features is that of the narrator himself. Through offhand remarks which strike us today as thoroughly gratuitous, de Kruif allows his own personality to infect his stories with sexism, racism, anti-immigrant sentiments, and a wide assortment of other bigotries that, were he alive today, would make him the darling of Trump’s White House. One presumes that the only reason the book includes no homophobic remarks is that it predates the rise of HIV/AIDS.
Let’s conduct a little textual survey, shall we?
In the chapter on Robert Koch, we have this: “Virchow was very sniffish and cold to Koch, for he had come to that time of life when ageing men believe that everything is known and there is nothing more to be found out.”
In a similar vein, he writes: “Pasteur was fifty-eight years old now, he was past his prime …”
A 36 year old man writes that a 58 year old man is past his prime yet that “old” man goes on to develop a vaccine for rabies.
With ageism, we’re only warming up. Writing again about Robert Koch and his quest to eradicate cholera: “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 …”
India is uncivilized and dirty. De Kruif’s identification of the cholera bacteria as an Oriental murderer is reminiscent of Trump’s identification of SARS-CoV-2 as the China virus. As we are discovering in 2020, the identification of an infectious disease with a microbe’s alleged place of origin is a political act and not a reliable statement of fact. If anything, a higher burden rests on de Kruif because he claimed to be a scientist and his writing celebrates people who took nothing on faith but sought to establish claims as facts through the experimental application of scientific method.
Here is another lovely and utterly pointless passages, a description of Ernest Renan who welcomed Louis Pasteur to the Académie Française: “…the untroubled Renan with the massiveness of Mount Everest, such a dreadful skeptic that he probably was never quite convinced that he was himself alive, so firmly doubting the value of doing anything that he had become one of the fattest men in France.”
I don’t know what relevance fat-shaming French academics has to the matter at hand, but de Kruif thought it was important.
Then he hops across the ocean to give an account of Theobald Smith at the Bureau of Animal Industry at Washington whose staff includes “the ancient and redoubtable Alexander, a darky ex-slave who sat about solemnly, and when urged, got up to wash the dirty bottles or chaperon the guinea-pigs.” It’s unclear to me what it adds to the narrative to identify Alexander by his skin colour and former status in the social hierarchy of the American South. It is clear, however, that we are meant to draw an association between skin colour and lack of initiative.
In the chapter on David Bruce and sleeping sickness, de Kruif raises the mystery of its transmission. “No one could tell how it stole from a black father to his neighbour’s dusky pickaninnies.” I am reasonably certain that, even in 1926, there were any number of alternate ways de Kruif could have framed that statement.
His chapter on Walter Reed and the search for a cure for yellow fever is a veritable petri dish of bigoted claptrap, starting with his description of Walter Reed himself. Water Reed didn’t want to subject his experimental subjects to anything he wouldn’t risk himself, notwithstanding the fact “that, hearing his musical voice and looking at his chin that did not stick out like the chin of a he-man, you might think Walter Reed was wavering…” One must assume that de Kruif was a square-jawed exemplum of hyper-masculinity.
Among Reed’s experimental volunteers were a number of Spanish immigrants. “If they hadn’t been ignorant immigrants—hardly more intelligent than animals, you might way—they might have been bored, because nothing had happened to them excepting—the stabs of silver striped she-mosquitoes…” Later, two other investigators, either colleagues or working under Reed’s direction, conducted a further experiment infecting non-immune subjects with yellow fever. They performed their experiment on immigrants (and one American nurse). “The immigrants (of course they were very ignorant people) came; the immigrants listened and were told it was safe…” Safe? Five of them died. But no matter. They were immigrants, therefore expendable.
The book concludes with a chapter on Paul Ehrlich who developed Salvarsan, the arsenic-based treatment for syphilis. Along the way, Ehrlich considered other compounds, including atoxyl, which had successfully cured laboratory mice of sleeping sickness but was less successful on human subjects: “Atoxyl had been tried on those poor darkies down in Africa. It had not cured them, but an altogether embarrassing number of those darkies had gone blind, stone blind, from Atoxyl before they had had time to die from sleeping sickness.” De Kruif does not mention if the subjects of this experiment consented to their treatment nor does he mention why the number of deaths prompted no greater feeling than embarrassment.
As mentioned above, there are better books out there. By better, I mean: books that provide more current information while retaining an engaging narrative style, and without the taint of bigotry. One such book is Dr. Bonnie Henry’s Soap and Water & Common Sense: The Definitive Guide to Viruses, Bacteria, Parasites, and Disease. Bonnie Henry currently serves as Provincial Health Officer in British Columbia. She has also served with Toronto Public Health and was its operational lead during the SARS and H1N1 outbreaks.
Although first published in 2009, Anansi reissued it earlier this year with a new introduction because a) it is eminently readable, and b) the core message remains as relevant today as it did when first published: wash your hands, wash your hands, wash your hands. Although the book is not predominantly narrative-based like Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters, it does occasionally stray into narrative digressions that give us a sense of personalities and drama behind the scenes.
Read in the context of Covid-19, the book is instructive for the things it does not say. It assumes that readers will share a commitment to robust public health initiatives. Similarly, it assumes that readers understand the global reach of infectious disease and therefore understand the corresponding need for global health agencies like the World Health Organization. Had she written the book in 2020, she might have included a chapter on virulent ignorance, featuring Donald Trump as patient zero, and the way such ignorance eviscerates public health initiatives and undermines global disease management.
Finally, Dr. Bonnie Henry disclosed on Tuesday that she has been the recipient of online vitriol including everything from criticism of her shoes to death threats. As a consequence, she has to have a security detail at her house. The article goes on to quote Andrea Gunraj, vice-president of engagement at the Canadian Women’s Foundation: “It’s something we have seen over and over again, women in leadership positions being targeted because of their gender with sexist behaviour and comments.” There is a persistent view amongst certain men that it is acceptable to treat a woman this way. Some of the blame for its persistence must be laid at the feet of men like Paul de Kruif. Virulent ignorance indeed!
As for shoes, Dr. Bonnie Henry can frequently be seen wearing John Fluevogs.