1 S 9 O ut °^ $ an Francisco and Oakland, Wherry's one-time col- 

 leagues continued to plaster him with letters of regret. What 

 he wanted more were the rats he had left behind, inoculated 

 with leprosy. Geo W McCoy promised (January 18, 1910) : 

 "I will see that they are forwarded right away, ... it seems 

 to me that there might be some danger of their dying in the 

 long cold trip back to the barbarous East. ..." 



The chief of the Institute for the research of infectious dis- 

 eases in Tokyo, the great S Kitasato (co-worker with von 

 Behring in the discovery of diphtheria antitoxine) , had been 

 stirred by Wherry's leprosy studies. January 24, 1910 he 

 asked: "... send ten white rats newly inoculated with your 

 bacilli. I have asked the Toyo Kisen Kaisha to carry them 

 aboard its ship to Japan. . . . Ask the agent of the Toyo 

 Kisen Kaisha to carry them to me. All the expenses will be 

 paid as soon as your accounts arrive. Thanking you in advance 

 for the great trouble incurred upon you ..." 



Wherry delegated this request to McCoy who reported 

 (March 9, 1910) that a telephone communication from the 

 Toyo Kisen Kaisha had declared it willing to take the rats 

 only after assurance from him that there was "no danger to 

 the ship. I will send them as soon as I can," he continued, "but 

 leprosy rats have grown pretty scarce in Butchertown." 



Return is now made to some other letters of McCoy, each 

 of which reported autopsy findings in rats that had died, 

 inoculated with leprosy. In his original paper on the subject 

 Wherry had declared: "Owing to accident, my wild rat and 

 guinea pig inoculation experiments were failures." McCoy's 

 reports showed that all Wherry's subsequent inoculations had 

 been successful, that, in other words, the leprosy had been 

 transmitted to rats and that it had spread into their bodies 

 from the site of original inoculation. Since these findings were 

 never published, two of McCoy's reports are quoted in 

 extenso: 



Rat No 1: Died February 26, 1910; an infiltration 6 cm long 

 by 2 cm wide, over the front middle of the abdomen, yellow- 

 ish, granular and entirely characteristic of rat leprosy; smears 

 filled with acid-fast bacilli; the inguinal glands a little 



