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PARTISAN REVIEW
by someone in the neighborhood.) The Boston Foundation for
Scientific Inquiries acted with alacrity, to commandeer the
boy's corpse, and to perform a careful autopsy: the somewhat
o'erdetailed results being enumerated, in Dr. Fuerst's lecture, yet
proving too fatiguing, I believe, for the general ear; and far too
Latinate, for my purposes. (I will content myself by observing only
that the rabies virus is an
obligate intracellular parasite;
that it is
neurotropic;
that it cannot grow, or reproduce, outside the proto–
plasmic tissue of a living host; that the autopsy of the black boy
yielded
encephalomyelitis with Negri bodies, in central motor neurons,
-the
which, evidently, always means
rabies.)
It
was, I should make clear, not the Foundation's research
assignment to experiment with a rabies vaccine, along the lines so
admirably, and ingeniously, set forth by Louis Pasteur and his
associates, at the Ecole Normale, in Paris; in fact, Dr. Fuerst briefly
alluded, with a chuckle, to an internecine rivalry of some sort,
betwixt the Foundation, and a team of pathologists connected with
the Massachusetts General Hospital, as to which group would first
lay hands upon those unfortunates, of the Negroid race, who, over
the next several years, were suspected of having contacted rabies.
(There was, I gather, many an instance of competitive spirit, and
some acts of bribery, and, most exciting of all, one or two actual
races, by motorcar, in the wee hours of the morning!-an amiable
rivalry that seems to have caused no permanent umbrage, betwixt
the two teams of scientists, as the spoils were more or less evenly
divided, in the long run.)
After the death of the twelve-year-old in Roxbury, there was a
lull of some months, before another case presented itself: this, a
forty-seven-year-old black woman, unemployed, residing in one of
the most impoverish'd, and indecent, areas, in the city of Newark,
New Jersey. (,Twas a measure ofthe slovenliness of the victim's way
oflife, that, whilst enjoying a lucid period, during the ravages of the
disease, she could tell Dr. Fuerst and his colleagues
naught of
value,
-having no clear notion of when she had been bitten, or by
what creature!-as if bites by frenzied animals were but a
commonplace of her life, and scarcely to be noted. Indeed, the
victim's reiterated plea, which grew very tiresome to the scientists,
was simply that they
save her life:
or, failing that,
put her out of
her
misery,
-which tearful plea displayed a most remarkable "native
wisdom," as to the true gravity of her plight, in that the Foundation,
