T. B. in a Tube

In 1882 a solemn, nearsighted little German with a genius for laboratory detection made an international sensation by announcing that he had isolated the thin, curved bacillus which causes tuberculosis. Eight years later he sent another thrill around the world by telling about a substance, tuberculin, which he thought would destroy the bacillus, cure its human victims. But black days were ahead. Despite the other bacteriological triumphs of this onetime country doctor, it saddened the rest of Robert Koch's life when his tuberculin not only failed to cure consumptives but killed a good many of them in the attempt.

For one brief morning last week a veteran U. S. tuberculosis specialist in Connecticut found himself almost as great a Press hero as Robert Koch had been in 1890. In 1890 Dr. Stephen John Maher, now white-bearded and 73, was a young general practitioner in New Haven. In 1900 he began specializing in tuberculosis. He has chairmanned Connecticut's Tuberculosis Commission since 1913, was on the inner council of the International Tuberculosis Conference in 1914, was a board member of the National Tuberculosis Association from 1922 to 1926.

At a sanatorium in Shelton, Conn, one evening last week Dr. Maher told 1,800 attentive physicians what he had been doing to some tubercle bacilli. Culturing them in a sterile glycerin broth, he had added some sterile litmus milk, put the flask in a cupboard at room temperature. The deadly, rod-shaped bacilli slowly disappeared, transmuted into round-shaped bacteria called cocci and diplococci. These bacteria, he explained, produce an acid which destroys their progenitors.

Dr. Maher did not claim that his cocci would cleanse a human body of its tubercle bacilli. He frankly admitted that, as yet, they had had no effect, either preventive or curative, on guinea pigs and rabbits. But he did think that he was at least on the right track, urged other researchers to join him in the search for "the greatest prize in the world," a specific cure for tuberculosis.

"Come to this field, my colleagues." cried he, "but bring with you, besides flasks of sterile glycerin broth and sterile litmus milk, much patience and an open mind!"

Loud was the applause of Dr. Maher's professional listeners at Shelton. Next morning the Press took up his story, twisted it out of technical focus, sent it rumbling across the land. Headline gobblers gathered that a cure for tuberculosis was, if not already achieved, at least imminent.

Fearful lest consumptives throw up their present arduous treatment in the hope of an easy cure, medical men leaped to challenge Dr. Maher's thesis on two main counts:

1) Cocci and diplococci have been recognized in cultures of tubercle bacilli for at least 15 years. They probably get there from the air, where they abound.

2) It is easy to kill bacteria in a test tube, hard to kill them in the human body.

Declared Dr. Kendall Emerson, managing director of National Tuberculosis Association: "Evidence is lacking that the findings presented will have any value in providing a serum or cure for tuberculosis. It must be kept well in mind that laboratory experiments are not always borne out in human experience."

Said the New York Academy of Medicine's spokesman, Dr. lago Galdston, after consulting with half a dozen specialists: "There is nothing in the scientific world which at present warrants the belief that we are at last on the trail of a certain remedy for the white plague."

Best that most experts could say of Dr. Maher's findings was that they were "interesting," would stimulate further research along the same lines. That, it seemed, was all that Dr. Maher had really wanted.

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