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But they discovered the diphtheria antitoxin.

They never could have done it without the modest discovery of Frederick Loeffler. He was that microbe hunter whose mustache was so militaristic that he had to keep pulling it down to see through his microscope; he sat working at Koch's right hand in that brave time when the little master was tracking down the tubercle bacillus. It was in the early eighteen eighties, and diphtheria, which several times each hundred years seems to have violent ups and downs of viciousness—diphtheria was particularly murderous then. The wards of the hospitals for sick children were melancholy with a forlorn wailing; there were gurgling coughs foretelling suffocation; on the sad rows of narrow beds were white pillows framing small faces blue with the strangling grip of an unknown hand. Through these rooms walked doctors trying to conceal their hopelessness with cheerfulness; powerless they went from cot to cot—trying now and again to give a choking child its breath by pushing a tube into its membrane-plugged windpipe. . . .

Five out of ten of these cots sent their tenants to the morgue.

Below in the dead house toiled Frederick Loeffler, boiling knives, heating platinum wires red hot and with them lifting grayish stuff from the still throats of those bodies the doctors had failed to keep alive; and this stuff he put into slim tubes capped with white fluffs of cotton, or he painted it with dyes, which showed him, through his microscope, that there were queer bacilli shaped like Indian clubs in those throats, microbes which the dye painted with pretty blue dots and stripes and bars. In nearly every throat he discovered these strange bacilli; he hurried to show them to his master, Koch.

There is little doubt Koch led Loeffler by the hand in this discovery. "There is no use to jump at conclusions," you can hear Koch telling him. "You must grow these microbes pure—then you must inject the cultivations into animals. . . . If those beasts come down with a disease exactly like human diphtheria, then . . ." How could Loeffler have gone wrong,