The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [102]
The commission’s lab was located in Yaba, not far from Lagos, Nigeria. Africa at the start of the twentieth century was still very much the “Dark Continent”—dark primarily because of colonial Europe’s inability to understand it. For centuries Europeans and Americans had landed on the coast of Africa to enslave Africans; now, they landed on the same shores to enlighten them. The white man, it seemed, would not stay out of Africa; but Africa would not have him. In The Coming Plague, Laurie Garrett wrote of the song African children sing championing yellow fever: “Only mosquito can save Nigeria, Only mosquito can save South Africa, Only mosquito can save Zimbabwe, Only Mosquito can save Africa, Only malaria can save Africa, Only yellow fever can save Africa.”
By the 1920s, after Reed’s proof of the mosquito vector and the vigorous campaign by Gorgas to eliminate yellow fever in urban environments, yellow fever, it seemed, would soon be conquered. Paul De Kruif, in his popular book, Microbe Hunters, wrote: “Because, in 1926, there is hardly enough of the poison of yellow fever left in the world to put on the points of six pins; in a few years there may not be a single speck of that virus left on earth.” Hubris. Arrogance. The lessons of the previous century diminished in the distance as the wheels of the Progressive Era rolled forward.
The same year that De Kruif wrote that statement, 1,000 people in an African village of only 5,000 became infected with yellow fever. Although the fever routinely hit nonimmune populations like British and French colonials, the colonial doctors had never seen an epidemic among native Africans before. It was as though an ember had been left smoldering in the jungle, and now fires were beginning to erupt.
America had entered the Progressive Era. Gone were Victorian ideals, heavy-laden tradition, elaborate ceremony and sentimentality. This was the age to move forward. Everything from home life to education to medicine took on a rational precision. For the first time in American history, more people lived in urban environments than on farms. Ideas, people and governments were compartmentalized—there were experts to lead the masses. Medicine had finally become a profession, and science was at the center of progressive thought. Greer Williams wrote that the old bacteriologist was not dead; he had merely “shaved his beard, put on horn-rimmed glasses, changed hats, and reappeared in a new branch of microbiology as a virologist.”
The Rockefeller Institute embodied all the ideas of the Progressive Era. Johns Hopkins had been the premier place for the study of medicine since the 1870s, and it had made monumental discoveries, much like the European institutions before it. They lifted the veil and unraveled the mystery around disease, adding name after name to the list of famous scientists. The Rockefeller Institute, which opened its first lab in 1904, would take a more aggressive tack. It would not model itself after European research and individual scientists, but instead make a departure from it, moving beyond the study of disease to the eradication of it. Like the Progressive Era itself, the institute would take the offensive, its mission “to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world,” its vision “to cure evils at their source.” Over thirty years, the Rockefeller Foundation would spend fourteen million dollars in an effort to eradicate yellow fever. It would seek out the fever and control the natural world. And there was no place where the natural world was still so unconquered as in Africa, no place where the well-being of mankind was more at stake.
A large cast of American and British doctors was sent to Nigeria by various organizations, including the Rockefeller Foundation, to eradicate yellow fever. The Rockefeller team needed a good pathologist, and in 1927, Adrian Stokes was assigned to work with them. They were the plague hunters, and their aim