Page:Microbe Hunters.djvu/366

This page has been validated.
336
PAUL EHRLICH

is no doubt that to the end of his days this man’s chief joy (aside from wild scientific discussions over the beer tables) was in looking at brilliant colors, and making them.

"Ho, Paul Ehrlich―what are you doing there?” asked one of his professors, Waldeyer.

"Ja, Herr Professor, I am trying with different dyes!"

He hated classical training, he called himself a modern, but he had a fine knowledge of Latin, and with this Latin he used to coin his battle cries. For he worked by means of battle cries and slogans rather than logic. "Corpora non agunt nisi fixata!" he would shout, pounding the table till the dishes danced―"Bodies do not act unless fixed!" That phrase heartened him through thirty years of failure. "You see! You understand! You know!" he would say, waving his horn-rimmed spectacles in your face, and if you took him seriously you might think that Latin rigmarole (and not his searcher's brain) carried him to his final triumph. And in a way there is no doubt it did!

Paul Ehrlich was ten years younger than Robert Koch; he was in Cohnheim's laboratory on that day of Koch's first demonstration of the anthrax microbe; he was atheistical, so he needed some human god and that god was Robert Koch. Painting a sick liver Ehrlich had seen the tubercle germ before ever Koch laid eyes on it. Ignorant, lacking Koch's clear intelligence, he supposed those little colored rods were crystals. But when he sat that evening in the room in Berlin in March, 1882, and listened to Koch's proof of the discovery of the cause of consumption, he saw the light: "It was the most gripping experience of my scientific life," said Paul Ehrlich, long afterwards. So he went to Koch. He must hunt microbes too! He showed Robert Koch an ingenious way to stain that tubercle microbe―that trick is used, hardly changed, to this day. He would hunt microbes! And in the enthusiastic way he had he proceeded to get consumption germs all over himself: so he caught consumption and had to go to Egypt.