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Now, it was hardly more than a guess of that romantic Schaudinn that spirochetes had anything to do with trypanosomes, but it set Paul Ehrlich aflame.
"If the pale spirochete is a cousin of the trypanosome of the mal de Caderas—then 606 ought to hit that spirochete. . . . What kills trypanosomes should kill their cousins!" Paul Ehrlich was not bothered by the fact that there was no proof these two microbes were cousins. . . . Not he. So he marched towards his day of days.
He gave vast orders. He smoked more strong cigars each day. Presently regiments of fine male rabbits trooped into the Georg Speyer House in Frankfort-on-the-Main, and with these creatures came a small and most diligent Japanese microbe hunter, S. Hata. This S. Hata was accurate. He was capable. He could stand the strain of doing the same experiment a dozen times over and he could, so nimble was this S. Hata, do a dozen experiments at the same time. So he suited the uses of Ehrlich, who was a thorough man, do not forget it!
Hata started out by doing long tests with 606 on spirochetes not so pale or so dangerous. There was that spirochete fatal to chickens. . . . The results? "Un-heard . . . of! In-cred-i-ble!" shouted Paul Ehrlich. Chickens and roosters whose blood swarmed with that microbe received their shot of 606. Next day the chickens were clucking and roosters strutting—it was superb. But that disease of the loathsome name?
On the 31st of August, 1909, Paul Ehrlich and Hata stood before a cage in which sat an excellent buck rabbit. Flourishing in every way was this rabbit, excepting for the tender skin of his scrotum, which was disfigured with two terrible ulcers, each bigger than a twenty-five-cent piece. These sores were caused by the gnawing of the pale spirochete of the disease that is the reward of sin. They had been put under the skin of that rabbit by S. Hata a month before. Under the microscope—it was a special one built for spying just such a thin rogue as that pale microbe—under this lens Hata put a wee drop of the