Avoman supplanted Mrs. Thomas as laboratory scrubwoman that we 

 managed to clean the place up and get rid of the roaches by means 

 of a roach food rather than a spray. 



These remarks may sound a bit exaggerated, but it is a fact that 

 when in fearful heat I was cleaning out the storeroom in the attic 

 immediately under the roof on a very hot day with both Charlies, 

 Charlie Drain was about to toss me a rather large, wooden box when 

 Charlie Kamphaus shouted at him in a horrified manner and he 

 stopped. It turned out that this was a box of T.N.T. which had 

 been put aside and forgotten after a few experiments by Professor 

 Abel. There was enough there to have removed not only the Depart- 

 ment of Pharmacology but the entire Medical School as well. 



A great deal of Professor Abel's charm was due to his intense in- 

 terest in his work and, as I have said, his behaving as though every- 

 thing that went on in the laboratory was on a plane far removed 

 from everything else on this earth. I shall never forget his experi- 

 ment on plasmapheresis which I saw when I first went to the labora- 

 tory. He had already carried out his preliminary work on dogs and 

 asked me to join Dr. Marshall and Dr. Turner in further experiments 

 which he wished to have done. Dr. Marshall was at that time an 

 expert organic chemist with several years' training with Dr. Jones in 

 biochemistry, but he had not yet had any pharmacology or medicine. 

 Dr. Turner was a physical chemist from England who appealed to 

 Dr. Abel's soul by calculating everything that went on, no matter 

 what it might be. They had just bought a large centrifuge Avith which 

 to centrifuge the blood taken from the dogs, and Dr. Turner proceeded 

 to calculate just what would happen if the centrifuge should break 

 while running at full speed. Each day, with his sleeves rolled up and 

 a stop watch in his hand, he would push up the starting lever step by 

 step, which took him the greater part of an hour, and calculate just 

 where in Baltimore the different parts of the machine would land if 

 things went to pieces. As Dr. Marshall and I were interested in get- 

 ting these experiments done and as it took almost an hour to speed 

 up the centrifuge, we were not so interested in these calculations, but 

 the Professor, much to my surprise, put the utmost faith in them and 

 told us never to use the centrifuge except under Turner's directions. 

 Finally, we slipped in one day when Dr. Turner was away and found 

 that speed could be obtained in from three to five minutes with 

 perfect safety, a procedure which was adopted in the future. 



After many preliminary trials Professor Abel decided to carry out 

 one of his plasmapheresis experiments on a patient in the hospital 



28 



