Microbe Hunters

First published in 1924, Microbe Hunters is divided into 12 profiles of men obsessed with tracking down and conquering specific microbes. It starts off with a bang, describing Leeuwenhoek and his fanatical devotion to his primitive, but world-changing microscope. It goes on to tell the dramatic stories of Pasteur, Walter Reed, Paul Erlich and other giants of microbiology. Truly thrilling, the one downside is the overt racism exhibited by de Kruif. He refers to "darkies" and in one section (I can't recall) he described someone as being so non-european that he could "hardly be called human" or something along those lines. (I would appreciate it if someone could find the part I'm talking about here and email me exactly what he wrote.)

Excerpt:

Anthrax was a strange disease which was worrying farmers all over Europe, that here and there ruined some prosperous owner of a thousand sheep, that in another place sneaked in and killed the cow - the one support - of a poor widow. There was no rime or reason to the way this plague conducted its maraudings; one day a fat lamb in a flock might be frisking about, that evening this same lamb refused to eat, his head drooped a little - and the next morning the farmer would find him cold and stiff, his blood turned ghastly black. Then the same thing would happen to another lamb, and a sheep, four sheep, six sheep - there was no stopping it. And then the farmer himself, and a shepherd, and a woolsorter, and a dealer in hides might break out in horrible boils - or gasp out their last breaths in a swift pneumonia.

Koch had started using his microscope with the more or less thorough aimlessness of old Leeuwenhoek; he examined everything under the sun, until he ran onto this blood of sheep and cattle dead of anthrax. Then he began to concentrate, to forget about making a call when he found a dead sheep in a field - he haunted butcher shops to find out about the farms where anthrax was killing the flocks. Koch hadn't the leisure of Leeuwenhoek; he had to snatch moments for his peerings between prescribing for some child that bawled with a bellyache and the pulling out of a villager's aching tooth. In these interrupted hours he put drops of the blackened blood of a cow dead of anthrax between two thin pieces of glass, very shining bits of glass. He looked down the tube of his microscope and among the wee, round, drifting greenish globules of this blood he saw strange things that looked like little sticks. Sometimes these sticks were short, there might be only a few of them, floating, quivering a little, among the blood globules. But here were others, hooked together without joints - many of them ingeniously glued together till they appeared to him like long threads a thousand times thinner than the finest silk.

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