Sleep Scourge (Cont'd)

By last week the plague of epidemic encephalitis (sleeping sickness) sweeping St. Louis County had become the most virulent in U. S. history. Four hundred and seventy-five cases had been reported, 60 victims were dead. Encephalitis continued to strike sporadically throughout the nation (56 deaths from it outside St. Louis in recent months) but nowhere else was the disease epidemic. Nor were the peculiar symptoms of St. Louis' variety of encephalitis duplicated elsewhere. No St. Louis patient fell into the deep stupor which occurs in 80% of encephalitis cases.

Last week Dr. James Payton Leake, Federal epidemiologist, declared it too early to estimate the extent of the disease's aftereffects, commonly tragic, in St. Louis. But its active ravages were enough to bring U. S. Surgeon-General Hugh Smith Gumming to St. Louis, and for him to order twelve more of his U. S. Public-Health Service experts to join the three already there. It made him decide to ask President Roosevelt for $25,000 from the $400,000 Federal fund for combating epi- demics. In the laboratories of Washington and St. Louis Universities medical scientists worked desperately to find the disease's cause, carrier, cure.

In the midst of this strenuous activity Dr. Margaret Gladys Smith, assistant pathologist at Washington University School of Medicine, strolled into the laboratory of her superior, Dr. Howard Anderson McCordock, and casually picked up some slides of kidney tissue from dead encephalitis victims. Dr. Smith popped the slides under a microscope.

Some of the cells were abnormally large. By means of stains she discovered inside these oversized cells small bodies called intranuclear inclusions. These are the only visible evidence of the presence of a disease-causing virus, so subtle that it passes readily through a porcelain filter.

Dr. Smith, 36, is a Johns Hopkins graduate, small, shy and darkly attractive. When newshawks besieged her day after the announcement of her discovery, she made Dr. McCordock answer most of their questions. He carefully explained that she had not, as the Press first leaped to announce, isolated the virus of the disease. She had simply demonstrated the presence of a virus. To establish that it was the virus of encephalitis, it would have to be isolated and passed through a series of animals. If these developed the disease's symptoms, then would come the work of producing a serum.

Chief stumbling-block so far has been Medicine's failure to transmit encephalitis among experimental monkeys, rabbits and guinea-pigs. Last week Superintendent William George Patton of the St. Louis County Hospital cautiously suggested that man alone may be susceptible to epidemic encephalitis. In Baton Rouge, La., Herbert Brown, tuberculous ex-soldier, promptly offered himself as a human subject. Said he: "I cannot hope to be an old man. I cannot work and would like to do something useful for the world before I die."

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