Oakland where the glands were cut out; but not examined. ISO 

 Now the rest of his lymphatics swelled up but it was five days 

 before anybody suspected plague. Wherry was called and in 

 a newly excised gland found a lot of his pets, grew them out 

 in glass tubes and scratched them into guinea pigs and rats — 

 to make them die. The boy himself developed pustules all over 

 his body on the tenth day; and these showed plague bacilli. 

 Thus, on the sixteenth day of his disease he entered eternity. 



Autopsy showed, besides the generally poisonous effects of 

 acute infection, "bubonic, lobular pneumonic and pyemic 

 plague." The combination was new, for plague is usually con- 

 tent to express itself in but one of these ways. The crystal 

 gazers now said that Wherry's description was what they had 

 always recognized as squirrel plague. Wherry stated: "We have 

 never seen lesions of the same nature in any other case of 

 human plague; in fact, without knowledge of the previous 

 history of the case one would scarcely have suspected plague 

 infection at autopsy." 



He completed his literary year by describing with Wellman 

 (still in the Oakland college in California but soon to head 

 tropical diseases at Tulane) various external [27] and inter- 

 nal [32] parasites of that now so important ground squirrel. 

 In June, July and August, it was written, they carried a lot 

 of bedbug like creatures in their ruffs; and in all seasons of 

 the year another lot of protozoa, worms and mites in their little 

 insides. 



Free for a moment of the chains that bind the man of science 

 too closely to his shop, he made a general address to the medical 

 teachers of his newly adopted state [31]. "The chief function 

 of a medical school is to turn out competent practitioners," 

 he said. "Have the methods of instruction used in the past 

 yielded the ideal practitioner?" By no means, he thought, with 

 half their diagnoses proved wrong on the autopsy table. The 

 student had what Oliver Wendell Holmes called a "natural 

 incapacity for sound observation," and it was the purpose of 

 the medical teacher to train this out of him. His best way lay 

 in the use of that best of his tools, the laboratory. "We fail 

 to apply the laboratory method to the so-called practical 

 branches" of medicine, Wherry said. 



