The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [105]
Ten days after Noguchi’s death, William Young died of yellow fever, presumably from the mosquitoes in Noguchi’s lab.
Yellow fever would also kill another famous physician. Dr. Paul Lewis was a quiet, brilliant doctor who had discovered that a virus was responsible for polio and had been one of the main doctors in the fight against the 1918 influenza epidemic. Lewis, on assignment for Simon Flexner, would die of yellow fever in a tropical lab in Brazil.
And, finally, the virus would take its last victim: Theodore B. Hayne. Hayne was a researcher working for the Rockefeller Foundation in 1930 when he was sent to Lagos, Nigeria. He was thirty-two years old when he died there.
Yellow fever had always been and always would be a disease that countered every gain with a substantial loss.
It seems only natural that a virus should fight for its own survival, and yellow fever had been hunting down and killing the scientists attempting to destroy it. First, the fever killed Jesse Lazear outright, and later, James Carroll from presumed complications. It had indirectly weakened the health of Walter Reed, who died within two years of his study linking yellow fever to mosquitoes.
When the plague hunters turned their attention to West Africa, the virus’s natural habitat, it struck again with just as much violence. Adrian Stokes, Hideyo Noguchi, William Young and Theodore B. Hayne died of yellow fever, even as they studied ways to control it. Then, Paul Lewis died in Brazil. During the Rockefeller Foundation’s fight to eradicate yellow fever, five doctors in all died of the fever, and a total of thirty-two scientists and technicians would contract the fever in the lab.
One doctor would later write: “I can think of no other disease that killed so many scientists studying it.”
CHAPTER 26
The Vaccine
The yellow fever virus, from its earliest beginnings in the African forests and savannah, to its widespread epidemics on the other side of the world, to the hundreds of thousands of its victims, has been connected by one thing: blood. It is blood in monkeys that harbors the virus. It is blood that passes the virus into the body of a mosquito. It is blood that connected 5,000 deaths in Memphis to Walter Reed’s human experiments twenty years later. Blood is the medium that allows the virus to travel distance and time, passing from species to species. And it was in the blood that science finally found a way to fight the virus.
Max Theiler did not look like a man who would achieve greatness. He did not have the English charm and graciousness of Adrian Stokes. He did not have the larger-than-life self-confidence of Hideyo Noguchi. For one thing, Theiler was five two. For another, he did not have a stellar academic record. Theiler had been born to Swiss parents in South Africa; he was schooled in London and lived in New York. Theiler never actually received a degree as a doctor in medicine or science, in spite of attending courses at the Royal College of Physicians and the London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. When colleagues mistakenly called him “doctor,” he never bothered to correct them, not because it embarrassed him, but because it didn’t. “You can’t educate a person; you can only create an environment in which he can educate himself,” Theiler once said of his background.
Theiler was young, shy and kept to himself. His lab was littered with ashtrays and boxes of Chesterfields. He loved to read, enjoyed art galleries and found no interest in practicing medicine because