MAP-CHANGING MEDICINE 



325 



light sent from the mirror to illuminate 

 the object can reach the eye, but only the 

 reflected rays that come from the illumi- 

 nated specimen, he was able to peer very 

 deep into the ghostly realms of the in- 

 finitesimal. 



A LIVING GHOST IN GERMDOM 



And there, in the droplets of blood 

 from yellow-fever patients, he was able 

 to detect a slim, shadowy, ghost-like, fila- 

 mental, spiral wiggler, almost as eerie as 

 a translucent phantom, twisting and ro- 

 tating its corkscrew-like way through the 

 blood. 



He then tried to breed this "ghost" of 

 germdom, for if he could do that he could 

 be sure that his eyes had not played him 

 false and caused him to imagine what 

 was not. Having previously studied and 

 cultivated its cousin, the germ of infec- 

 tious jaundice, he was the more readily 

 successful in providing it with an environ- 

 ment which, if not to its taste, was at least 

 according to its necessities. 



He found that he could grow colonies 

 at will in culture tubes filled with the 

 blood of human beings or of guinea pigs. 

 He could start one colony from another, 

 and then another from that, almost indefi- 

 nitely, thus growing successive genera- 

 tions as definitely as we might grow suc- 

 cessive crops of potatoes. 



Xot only so, but he found that from 

 these cultures, as well as by the direct 

 inoculation of the blood of a yellow-fever 

 patient, he could produce yellow fever in 

 guinea pigs, monkeys, and puppies. Even 

 by an examination of the tissues of the 

 animals taking the disease and a com- 

 parison of these tissues with those of 

 yellow-fever victims he was able to show 

 the identity of symptoms. 



It therefore became so plain that no one 

 could help seeing that the ghost of the 

 "dark field" was in very truth a micro- 

 scopic monster which, under normal con- 

 ditions, does to death three out of every 

 five people it attacks. Dr. Noguchi 

 named it Leptospira icteroides. 



SUCCESSFUL VACCINE AND SERUM 

 EVOLVED 



In his work Dr. Noguchi found that 

 artificially cultivated yellow-fever germs, 

 like those of many other diseases, lose a 



great deal of their virus-producing quali- 

 ties, although they are still virile enough 

 to hold their own in the blood against an 

 invasion of more toxic newcomers. 



With this fact in hand, he developed a 

 serum for the treatment of the disease. 

 Administered within the first four days 

 of the patient's illness, it has, wherever 

 tried, reduced the percentage of fatalities 

 to a surprising degree. 



Indeed, while three out of every five 

 yellow- fever patients die where the serum 

 treatment is not used, only one out of ten 

 cases terminates fatally where it is used, 

 the mortality rate being thus cut to one- 

 sixth its former proportions. 



But Noguchi did not stop with devel- 

 oping a serum. He also undertook to 

 make a vaccine that would render those 

 who used it immune from attack. Bor- 

 rowing a page from the experience of 

 those who made typhoid vaccine, he in- 

 troduced killed cultures of Leptospira 

 icteroides into the body. More than 

 8,000 people have been vaccinated, and, 

 barring a few who took the disease before 

 the vaccination had time to become ef- 

 fective, there has not been a single case 

 among them, although there have been 

 700 cases in the same areas among the 

 non-vaccinated. 



Conservative beyond a layman's com- 

 prehension, Dr. Noguchi refused to claim 

 that he had discovered the yellow- fever 

 germ until he had opportunity to make 

 further investigations and to check up his 

 Guayaquil experiments in other fields. 

 Since then he has gone to Yucatan and 

 elsewhere, and all of the results he ob- 

 tained at Guayaquil have been confirmed. 



A VICTIM OE OVERSPECIALIZATION 



It thus comes about that there are four 

 ways by which yellow fever may be corn- 

 batted — by eliminating Mrs. Stegomyia 

 fasciata, the deadly lady of the mosquito 

 tribe who carries it from person to per- 

 son ; by keeping persons with the disease 

 out of reach of any chance survivors of 

 the mosquito war ; by vaccinating the 

 non-immunes ; and by administering se- 

 rum to those who have gotten the disease 

 in spite of all precautions. 



So successful has been the combina- 

 tion of these methods that it is now be- 

 lieved Leptospira icteroides has come al- 

 most to the end of its rope. The hour of 



