Page:Microbe Hunters.djvu/387

of mercury—mercury fed them and rubbed into them and shot into them until their teeth were like to drop out of their gums, He told of such cases given up to die. One shot of the compound six hundred and six, and they were up, they were on their feet. They gained thirty pounds. They were clean once more—their friends would associate with them again. . . . Paul Ehrlich told, that day, of healings that could only be called Biblical! Of a wretch, so dreadfully had the pale spirochetes gnawed at his throat that he had had to be fed liquid food through a tube for months. One shot of the 606, at two in the afternoon, and at supper time that man had eaten a sausage sandwich! There were poor women, innocent sufferers from the sins of their men—there was one woman with pains in her bones, such pains she had been given morphine every night for years, to give her a little sleep. One shot of compound six hundred and six. She had gone to sleep, quiet and deep, with no morphine, that very night. It was Biblical, no less. It was miraculous—no drug nor herb of the old women and priests and medicine men of the ages had ever done tricks like that. No serum nor vaccine of the modern microbe hunters could come near to the beneficent slaughterings of the magic bullet, compound six hundred and six.

Never was there such applause.

Never has it been better earned, for that day Paul Ehrlich—forget for a moment the false hopes raised and the troubles that followed—that day Paul Ehrlich had led searchers around a corner.

But, to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. What is true in the realm of lifeless things is true in the lives of such men as Paul Ehrlich. The whole world bawled for salvarsan. That was what Ehrlich—we must forgive him his grandiloquence—called compound six hundred and six. Then, in the laboratory of the Georg Speyer House, Bertheim and ten assistants—worn these fellows were before they started it—turned out hundreds of thousands of doses of this marvelous stuff. They did the job of a chemical factory in their small