1 ^ Q reputations were to come to science later, but here was the 

 truth in 1907. Wherry saw the tragedy in the dumb martyrs 

 about him. "My laboratory animals/* he wrote, "stock guinea 

 pigs dead of general anasarca with muscular hemorrhages . . . 

 no bacteria . . . guinea pigs with scurvy." How often before 

 (and since) had they not gone down in the records of scientific 

 research as the victims of this or that experimental endeavor 

 when thoughtlessness or just crass ignorance of fundamental 

 dietary rules was the real answer ! 



There was further report on rat leprosy [26]. He had tried 

 to protect both white and gray rats against the disease by first 

 "vaccinating" them by the injection of dead organisms. Such 

 treatment, he said, did not materially affect the outcome when 

 subsequently inoculated with live organisms, even though in 

 one of his ever modest addenda he spoke of the "marked" delay 

 in development of disease symptoms in two of his animals over 

 the controls. Then he detailed a tricky way of getting leprosy 

 bacilli "concentrated." He ground up leprosy affected tissues 

 in salt water, covered the mixture with chloroform and shook 

 it. The chloroform grew cloudy, and evaporation of a drop of 

 it showed "millions" of lepra bacilli "free from all cellular 

 elements and other bacteria." To finish this essay, he added 

 notes on six lice that he had taken from a severely leprous rat. 

 He had ground them up, stained the mess, to find hundreds 

 of the bacilli in their intestinal tracts — thus leaving something 

 more for the epidemiologist to worry about. 



1909 closed with a description of the "first case of un- 

 doubted squirrel plague in man which has come to autopsy in 

 America" [28]. A (six-page!) paper detailed its manifesta- 

 tions in a thirteen-year-old Portuguese boy who had been 

 shooting ground squirrels near Niles (Dr W S Taylor's dis- 

 trict) in California. He had never been away from this inland 

 home — had never, in fact, seen a trolley car — so probability 

 that he had incurred the disease while visiting a water front 

 was obviously out. And anyway, no human or rat plague had 

 been seen in California for seven months past. But a plague 

 infected squirrel had been found in the region where the boy 

 hunted. He had sickened July 27, 1909. The next day there 

 was fever (104°) ; and enlarged axillary glands appeared. In 

 another twenty- four hours he was on his way to a hospital in 



