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Great as is the credit to which bacteriologists are entitled for this splendid piece of scientific progress, there was another co-laborer, a silent partner, with them in all this triumph, an unsung hero and martyr of science who deserves his meed of praise the tiny guinea-pig.
The entire area was quarantined, and daily the quarantine was extended. No plane could land and take off again. No ship could enter and leave. An airlift of supplies dropped by parachute was being organized. Bacteriologists and doctors jetted to the area were dying with the rest, caught in disease for which there was no answer.
It is their absence of chlorophyll and their consequent dependence upon complex foods which has produced this anomaly. While it has generally been recognised that bacteria are plants, any further classification has proved a matter of great difficulty, and bacteriologists find it extremely difficult to devise means of distinguishing species.
With all these reasons for confusion, it is not to be wondered at that no satisfactory classification of bacteria has been reached, or that different bacteriologists do not agree as to what constitutes a species, or whether two forms are identical or not. But with all the confusion there is slowly being obtained something like system.
In fact, bacteriologists soon came to the consoling conclusion that the avian bacillus might be practically disregarded as a source of danger to human beings, so widely different were the conditions in their moist and moderately warm tissues to those of the dry and superheated tissues of the bird to which it had adjusted itself for so many generations.
In the three months that followed though not a word leaked out to the Allies, so careful were Protopopoff and the camarilla to suppress all the facts more than half the population of the two cities died from a disease which to this day is a complete mystery, and its bacilli known only to German bacteriologists. "I AM much grieved to hear of the disaster at Obukhov.
It is demonstrated that microorganisms, capable of development in the culture media usually employed by the bacteriologists, are only found in the blood and tissues of yellow fever cadavers in exceptional cases, when cultures are made very soon after death.
And in those same hospitals men are working night and day; the bacteriologists studying "smears" under microscopes, while the surgeons are classifying, operating, "dressing," marking temperature-charts, and annotating case-sheets.
This question as to whether bacteria remain constant in character for any considerable length of time has ever been a prominent one with bacteriologists, and even to-day we hardly know what the final answer will be. It has been demonstrated beyond peradventure that some species may change their physiological characters.
The physician's duty is to watch and guard, but he must depend upon the vital powers of his patient to carry on alone the actual battle with the bacterial invaders. In very recent times, however, our bacteriologists have been pointing out to the world certain entirely new means of assisting the body to fight its battles with bacterial diseases.
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