248 



A A Draper (the aerial growth of yeasts is favored by the 

 presence of phosphate in the nutriment) and Frank E 

 Stevenson ( the skin reacts better to a dose of tuberculin after 

 the childhood fevers than while they are on) . 



At least the half of all students to come out of Cincinnati's 

 medical school capable of any type of independent thinking 

 or work owed this start to Wherry. They drew their stimulus 

 from the air that enveloped his working quarters. He pub- 

 lished relatively little in his own name. To the day of his death 

 commentators were necessary to expand his Aristotelian 

 paragraphs into chapters. 



I WENT to Mexico in 1925, protected against typhoid by 

 a vaccine according to Wherry. Many more organisms 

 were thus injectable without undue systemic effects; and their 

 immunizing properties better, because not heat-killed. Wherry 

 wrote me (July 6, 1925) : 



I hope you are enjoying the Moctezuma [a famous brand of 

 Mexican beer]. I tried to estimate the number of bacilli in the 

 vaccine I gave you and got counts varying from 45 to 103 

 billion bugs per cc. So I think you are getting at least 9 billion 

 bugs in each 0.2 cc. 3 or 4 doses ought to be the equivalent of 

 the commercial stuff. Your two Cincinnatians had such severe 

 reactions to the second dose of the commercial variety you 

 gave them, that both had chills & went to bed — so, for the last 

 dose, I gave them my vaccine. Inoculated the rest of my family 

 yesterday and I myself have taken 3 shots without anything 

 worse than local redness & tenderness. 



He had been using the new vaccine not only for the protec- 

 tion of travellers about to invade typhoid-ridden countries 

 but for the therapy of the disease in man as well. Since 1925 

 he had treated thirteen patients, succeeding in shortening by 

 many days their four weeks of fever; and in suppressing the 

 "relapses" so common to the disease. But there had not been 

 enough typhoids in Ohio to make these conclusions binding — 

 so the "biometricists" said. Would not someone step forward 

 with a few thousand, Wherry asked, to send him to Mexico 

 where negligible hygiene still allowed plenty of the population 



