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on which every night he scrawled hieroglyphic directions fo1 the next day’s work of his scientific slaves, Paul Ehrlich, noted as a man of action, whispered:
"Is it safe?"
Arsenic is the favorite poison of murderers. . . . "But how wonderfully we have changed it!" Paul Ehrlich protested.
What saves mice and rabbits might murder men. . . . "The step from the laboratory to the bedside is dangerous—but it must be taken!" answered Paul Ehrlich. You remember his gray eyes, that were so kind.
But, heigho! Here was the next morning, the brave light of the bright morning. Here was the laboratory with its cured rabbits, here was that wizard, Bertheim—how he had twisted that arsenic through all these six hundred and six compounds. That man could not go wrong. So many of them had been dangerous that this six hundred and sixth one must be safe. . . . Bravo! Here was the mixed good smell of a hundred experimental animals and a thousand chemicals. Here were all these men and women, how they believed in him! So, let’s go! Let us try it!
At bottom Paul Ehrlich was a gambler, as who of the great line of the microbe hunters has not been?
And before that sore on the scrotum of the first rabbit had shed its last scab, Paul Ehrlich had written to his friend, Dr. Konrad Alt: "Will you be so good as to try this new preparation, 606, on human beings with syphilis?"
Of course Alt wrote back: “Certainly!" which any German doctor—for they are right hardy fellows—would have replied.
Came 1910, and that was Paul Ehrlich's year. One day, that year, he walked into the scientific congress at Koenigsberg, and there was applause. It was frantic, it was long, you would think they were never going to let Paul Ehrlich say his say. He told of how the magic bullet had been found at last. He told of the terror of the disease of the loathsome name, of those sad cases that went to horrible disfiguring death, or to what was worse—the idiot asylums. They went there in spite