Smith casually noted this and asked me to go over his obser- 205 

 vations. This was done." Which merely meant that scientific 

 progress needs to march back at moments — to 1902. 



A second interruption came as appeal to him to pass judg- 

 ment upon the findings and ideas of Charles Alfred Lee Reed. 

 This abdominal surgeon (ex-president of the American medi- 

 cal association and a doctor whose activities had carried the 

 name of medical Cincinnati far beyond its street-car termini) 

 had noted that three epileptics ceased in their attacks after 

 excision of the large bowel. The observation had led him to 

 conclude that the absorption of poisons from the bowel, or the 

 invasion therefrom of the blood stream by pathogenic bacteria, 

 reaching the brain, gave rise periodically to the convulsive seiz- 

 ures characteristic of the disease. A hopelessly ill contingent 

 was flocking to his doors ready to undergo the so serious opera- 

 tion if there was prospect even, of relief. Reed had long been 

 hated of his confreres; and his "success" in the newly created 

 operative field did naught to assuage this hate. 



To ground more scientifically his clinical deductions, he 

 had sought for a microorganismal cause in the blood stream 

 of his patients; and had found it — the Bacillus epilepticus. An 

 assistant had helped him to the discovery. Unhappily neither 

 of them knew much of the trickiness of bacteriology or of the 

 highly developed special knowledge required in 1916 of men 

 with opinion in the field. Reed had put his head in a noose, and 

 a mob was crying for someone to tighten it. Wherry was asked 

 to be the man. 



The story ended in a (two-page!) report [57]. In six 

 patients, picked of Reed, Wherry made cultures of the blood, 

 failing in all to isolate the organism which Reed had claimed 

 the causal factor. Whereafter he examined Reed's own culture 

 giving opinion that it was nothing but one of the ordinary air- 

 blown bacterial contaminators that harry the working hours 

 of every bacteriologist not always and completely onto his 

 curves. 



For Wherry it was the unhappy ending of a blue day; for 

 the crowd in general, a pretty hanging. What it did not see 

 was that in throwing out the dirty bath water (to use a Ger- 

 man figure) a pretty baby, too, perhaps, had been flung in the 

 gutter. 



