• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 504 0

of tetanus in any of them. McFarland, who had made his name in the laboratory, did not present fresh laboratory evidence. What he did offer was evidence, gathered presumably from his correspondents, as to precisely which vaccines had been used in the ill-fated procedures. The rumors had been right. The “great majority of the cases” in 1901—thirty out of the forty cases that he was able to document—had followed the use of a single make of virus. Cleveland, Camden, Atlantic City, Philadelphia—in every locale, the closely clustered cases implicated “chiefly if not exclusively” one vaccine. McFarland named no names (he labeled the offending vaccine “virus E”), but as everyone in that room knew (and as McFarland’s personal papers confirm), the maker was his former employer, Mulford. McFarland was ready to stipulate that “no care or expense” had been spared to produce these products. But the evidence, he said, “leads me to conclude that tetanus bacilli may be contained in the virus and distributed with it.” In the Lancet version, McFarland would strike that “may be” and write “is.”87

McFarland’s most powerful piece of evidence—also epidemiological, rather than bacteriological—came from the Philadelphia Hospital. Small-pox had broken out among the hospital’s 4,500 “inmates.” Physicians went through the hospital vaccinating everyone, the sick and the well, with the exception of one section, the Men’s Insane Department. The inmates of that department “were obliged to wait until a new consignment of the virus arrived.” The new consignment was “virus E.” All of the men were vaccinated. Now, McFarland had done some digging in the hospital records. Not a single case of spontaneous traumatic tetanus had occurred in the Insane Department for at least twelve years. As vaccination proceeded, though, five men in the department developed tetanus. All of them died. The outbreak caused a great deal of alarm in the hospital, and afterward, the doctors took additional precautions in dealing with suspicious vaccination wounds. Eleven more men fell ill with tetanus; after receiving “enormous doses of antitoxin,” all recovered. With one possible exception, every patient who developed tetanus had been vaccinated with “virus E.” At this moment, McFarland must have looked out at his audience. “There is something about virus E,” he said.88

As to how the vaccine of one of the nation’s most reputable and scientific makers might have been so terribly corrupted, McFarland invoked the world of the biologics stables that he knew so well: the manure of the calves, the hay, the dusts. . . . Glycerin seemed powerless before tetanus, as the cases implicated all of Mulford’s vaccine products: dry points (unglycerinated), glycerinated points, and glycerinated lymph. (Later that year, Milton Rosenau would report that glycerin preserved tetanus spores.)89

Good scientist that he was, McFarland conceded to his audience that his argument had a “sole weakness.” And that was the incubation period. Tetanus usually set in within ten days after an injury. Everyone cited William Osler’s standard medical treatise on this point; McFarland had studied under the man at the University of Pennsylvania. In the vaccination cases, though, the average time elapsed between the procedure and the onset of tetanus was twenty-two days. But McFarland had a theory. He suggested that while the tetanus bacilli had been “ingrafted into the skin at the time of vaccination,” they did not start to grow until “the development of the vaccine lesion pave[d] the way by the local destruction of tissue.” This hypothesis would add about two weeks to the usual incubation period, for a total duration of about three weeks.90

We may never know for certain what caused the deadly outbreaks of postvaccination tetanus in Camden and other American communities in the fall of 1901. McFarland put forth compelling evidence to implicate Mulford’s vaccine, but the argument’s weak point—the incubation period—does leave a remainder of doubt. Still, there is no mistaking the political repercussions of these events.