HEROES WITHOUT THE VICTORS' LAURELS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 130, 10 September 1910, Page 9

HEROES WITHOUT THE VICTORS' LAURELS.

MEDICAL MEN'S SACRIFICE FOR iSCIENOE. It it easier to die to a drumbeat than to surrender glowly to the inside ous advances of disease. Dr. George W. Stoner, aurgeon of the Public Health and Marine Hospital service, in charge of Ellis Island, iNeW York, when he uttered the above words, was speaking of unnoted heroes of science like Dr. Howard L. Ricketts, who died on May 4 last, in tine City of Mexico, of tj'phus fever, contracted while he was studying the disease in the hope of finding a remedy for it or a means of preventing its communication. Mention had also been made of John R. Kissinger, the Spanish war veteran, who had the courage of both the field and the clinic, and who is now to receive from the United States Congress a pension of £25 a month for hopeleaa physical disabilities resulting from experiments to which he voluntarily submitted in the yellow fever hospital in Cuba ten years ago.

DR. RICKETTS LN MEXICO.

The case of Dr. Rioketts is typical of the risks run by the hundreds of men of science whose intrepidity, making so little superficial appeal to the imagination, goes almost unnoticed in the secords of moral courage. When he contracted typhus he was completing his study of the etiology of the disease in the suburbs of the City of Mexico. In that particular rone in the outskirts of the city it prevails to such an extent that the Mexican Government have offerod a high reward for the discovery of a cure. Dr. Ricketts- was in the very heart of this area of contagion when stricken! down. He was working not only among the patients themselves, but with the mieToscope in his laboratory. His experiments involved the injection of virulent blood and serum from man into monkeys as a means of determining the transmissability of tafbardillo (Mexican typhus) by means of the vermin on the animals. Such was the repellant work to which his scientific enthusiasm held him at such heavy ultimate cost. Dr. Ricketts was formerly on the faculty of the University of Chicago, and had but recently accepted a full professorship of pathology in the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania. In order to be free to carry out the programme he had outlined for this winter and summer, he had made a year's delay of active university work a condition of his acceptance. His work this summer was to have taken him back to Montana to resume his investigations into the pathology of Rocky Mountain 'spotted fever," begun in the same region several summers ago.

A COURAGEOUS MAN.

Dr. W. W. King, one of the members of the Ellis Island staff, said that for two summers he was in Montana engaged in the same study, and worked with Dr. Ricketts. He spoke warmly of hia brother physician's ability and courage.

"I should consider Ricketts to have been one of the prospective big men in his field," said Dr. King, "His education for the work was very thorough, and from my observation of the way he"carried it on I should say he was exceedingly aMe. He looked at things in the big way, always went straight to the gist of the matter, and accomplished good results. He took chances, very long chances sometimes, and fear seemed no part of'his composition. In appearance small, slight, and smooth-shaven, ag he was, he seemed almost a boy. You would never have seen in him at first glance the seriousminded scientist. I found nim a very good working mate, a little given to reticence about results he had obtained until ready to make them public, but a scientist to the core. His scientific work in the investigation of the pathology of Rocky Mountain spotted fever is probably the best that has been done. t We did our laboratory and observational work together in Bitter Root Valley, near Missoula, and in the Northern Pacific -Hospital. It had been his plan to take a tent and camp in the valley, but this was given up. It made little "difference where he was, however. He forgot his surroundings for his work." This is the way one scientific worker who has known the perils of his calling speaks of another who has succumbed to them.

BAFFLING PORTO RICO ANAEMIA. Dr. King himself a few years ago was assigned to Porto Rico, and with the cooperation of two other physicians developed a scientific knowledge of the anaemia prevailing in that island, and succeeded in reducing the death-rate from that cause from 30 per cent, to a fraction on 1 per cent. The nature of their studies in that climate exposed the three to no little danger, 20,000 cases having been treated in two years. Yet from Surgeon-General Walter Wymian, the commanding officer of the service' down, the men in the marine hospital service treat the risks of their work as virtually non-existent.

X-RAY VICTIMS. Professor Albert C. Geyser, of the Cornell Medical College, in 1908, by the discovery of what is known as the Cornell tube, largely did away with the danger of burns from X-rays, and made them a safe therapeutic agent. Tho invention had not been perfected, however, until one of the professor's hands had been rendered practically useless. He is said scarcely to have given it thought in his preoccupation with his discovery. Dr. Frederick P. Baltzer, a well-known physician of Baltimore, in 1!>(}8, experienced a shrivelling of one arm and hand, which 'baffled his brother physicians. Later one eye became affected and had] to ibe removed. His condition was finally j attributed to the persistency of his experimentation with the Rontgen rays, notwithstanding which he regarded the study of their potentialities, in which hel was engaged, as too important to be! given up, and refused to desist from it. J

DR. WETZEL'S TRAGIC END.

The most remarkable and tragic of the' 1 cases connected with this new instrument' of science at is experimental stage was that of Dr. Louis A. Weizol, of Rochester. l He had been an enthusiastic experimenter with the rays before their dangers' had been revealed. In 1906 lie developed' a strange disease, the nature of which i no doctor could define. The area first affected was the right shoulder, which; was finally removed, in tile effort to ar-.' rest the progress of- the singular malady.' It continued to spread, however, whereupon the muscles of the right breast were taken out. Finally the right hand' was sacrificed, and all but two fingers of the left. For a time, there was no improvement. «nd the physician, maimed as : lie was. resumed his practice and his; [scientific work. The betterment in hisj condition was short lived. The affection: once more manifested itself in a worse form than ever. I>r. Weizol, realising that lie could have no hope of subduing j a disease unknown to medical science, 1 again threw himself into his investiga-' tion, until he no'longer had strength to manipulate his instruments, /when he