I 2 r\ m September, he could recover but one in May, the beginning 

 of the flea breeding period. 



Of the flea catch from men he wrote: "Those from human 

 beings were collected from themselves by medical inspectors 

 visiting plague-infested houses." The drama of this situation, 

 daily repeated, can be clear only to those who know what 

 plague means and the manner of its spread. To be bitten by 

 an infected sample of any of the several types hunted down 

 by Wherry meant the probable death of the unhappy bitee. 

 Thus the wife of one of the inspectors had been sickened. 

 Standing in the middle, Wherry knew all this. After his bath 

 in the morning, he would go to work in clothes plastered with 

 a defense barrage of his own composition — pyrethrum powder 

 mixed with naphthalin. Fellow passengers in the street cars 

 moved away from the animated moth ball. At night he 

 would fly past his wife for another bath and fresh clothes 

 before taking a look at her. Many times would Wherry 

 commend his unbemedalled heroes. Particularly dear to him 

 was his Diener of the old school, A Venzke. Wherry had 

 inherited him out of surgeon D H Currie's public health lab- 

 oratory and was to own him for the rest of his days in this 

 business. He stood daily by Wherry's side — to stretch out the 

 dead rats, to make first necropsy upon them, to make those 

 hair-raising inoculations. A year later in forwarding a dead 

 Norwegian rat to Cincinnati, Venzke called it a specimen that 

 Wherry "had make mit immunity." 



More of Wherry's time went into an examination of the rats 

 themselves, brought in by the trappers. Mere statement [27] 

 that of the 14,1 84 rats autopsied to date, one percent had the 

 plague would have sufficed — but Wherry never worked that 

 way. Instead, (in a seven-page paper!) he went into a sta- 

 tistical inquiry of the population levels of their several species 

 (Mus decumanus accounted for more than ninety-eight per- 

 cent), the incidence of plague in each (against one percent 

 in all other varieties, Mus alexandrinus showed four) , and the 

 biology of their civil warfare. To this he added a description 

 of the pathology and bacteriology of diseases uncovered in 

 rats that looked like plague. Under separate head ( a two-page 

 paper! ) he reported on one of these in particular [ 1 8 ] . He had 



