Content area
Full Text
Typhus and tyranny
HISTORY OF MEDICINE Typhus and tyranny Tilli Tansey ponders a turbulent history of vaccine research in Nazi-occupied Europe. The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis ARTHUR ALLEN W. W. Norton: 2014.
Lice thrive in war. Overcrowded conditions, the large-scale movements of troops and displaced persons, and the breakdown of rudimentary hygiene are ideal for the survival and transmission of body lice (Pediculus humanus humanus) and their sinister bacterial loads: Rickettsia prowazekii, the cause of the deadly disease typhus. In 1918, more than 650,000 cases of typhus were recorded in newly independent Poland alone.
As writer Arthur Allen relates in The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl, it was this potent mix of geopolitical chaos and rampant disease that sealed the fates of two Polish biologists: Rudolf Weigl and Ludwik Fleck.
Weigl's laboratory in Lwów, Poland - now Lviv in Ukraine - is little remembered. But between the first and second world wars, it was a world centre of typhusvaccine research. With government support, Weigl was the first to culture Rickettsia by harnessing lice as experimental animals. He devised an anal-inoculation technique to infect the insects with the bacteria, and marshalled human volunteers to nourish them. The typhus-engorged midguts of the lice were...