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Ehrlich was thirty-four years old then, and if he had died in Egypt, he would certainly have been forgotten, or been spoken of as a color-loving, gay, visionary failure. He had the energy of a dynamo; he had believed you could treat sick people and hunt microbes at the same time; he had been head physician in a famous clinic in Berlin, but he was a very raw-nerved man and was fidgety under the cries of sufferers past helping and the deaths of patients who could not be cured. To cure them! Not by guess or by the bedside manner or by the laying on of hands or by waiting for Nature to do it—but how to cure them! These thoughts made him a bad doctor, because doctors should be sympathetic but not desperate about ills over which they are powerless. Then, too, Paul Ehrlich was a disgusting doctor because his brain was in the grip of dreams: he looked at the bodies of his patients: he seemed to see through their skins: his eyes became super-microscopes that saw the quivering stuff of the cells of these bodies as nothing more than complicated chemical formulas. Why of course! Living human stuff was only a business of benzene rings and side-chains, just like his dyes! So Paul Ehrlich (caring nothing for the latest physiological theories) invented a weird old-fashioned life-chemistry of his own; so Paul Ehrlich was anything but a Great Healer; so he would have been a failure――― But he didn't die!

"I will stain live animals!" he cried. "The chemistry of animals is like the chemistry of my dyes—staining them while they are still alive—that will tell me all about them!" So he took his favorite dye, which was methylene blue, and shot a little of it into the ear vein of a rabbit. He watched the color flow through the blood and body of the beast and mysteriously pick out and paint the living endings of its nerves blue―but no other part of it! How strange! He forgot all about his fundamental science for a moment. "Maybe methylene blue will kill pain then," he muttered. and he straightway injected