FOREIGN BODIES: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations, by Simon Schama
The appearance of yet another enthusiastic and erudite history from Simon Schama is an event always to be welcomed.
“Foreign Bodies,” conceived and delivered during the recent health emergency, purports to tell of similar emergencies of the recent past — most notably grand and infamous outbreaks of cholera, smallpox and plagues of varying types.
But the book is in essence both more and less than that: It is a thinly painted veil of a biography of one saintly and only half-remembered scientist who battled two of the most wicked of the maladies, succeeding in both cases in stopping them in their tracks by his cleverly home-brewed vaccines.
The story of Waldemar Mordechai Wolff Haffkine, little told in the West beyond the world of bacteriology and within the annals of Judaica, is thrilling in its nobility and verve, and it might have better served Schama’s purpose had he devoted the entire book to the tale of a man he so clearly adores.
As it is, there are excursions and flourishes that weigh down the main story and blur its details. Not the least being the single-page prologue, which certainly stopped me in my tracks.
The starting thesis holds that it is Nature, in the form of germs, bacilli, viruses, fungi, spores and their kin, that will be the agents of humankind’s ultimate undoing, and that, essentially, only the heroic practitioners of science can save us.
That may well have been true in centuries past, in the days of Galen and Jenner, Pasteur and Lister. But it is surely not so now: As we glimpse, on the far horizon, the coming centenary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and as we watch with alarm the glaciers draw back and the oceans claw their way up the beaches, it is abundantly clear that it is we, us, ourselves, who are to be the agents of our own demise. Nature, lancing us painfully with the occasional, spectacularly lethal pandemic, will look on with impotent dismay as atomic fission and anthropogenic sweltering destroy us.
This not insignificant caveat aside, Schama’s central character proves an irresistible enchantment, and we learn of him with a relish that we evidently share with the author himself. “Goodness but he is beautiful, the Vaccinator,” he writes of Haffkine, seen through the eyes of an Indian photographer. To this day, he remains a revered figure.
He was born in Odessa in 1860, and as a teenager was set to defending his community from the endless Russian pogroms. In time he moved to Switzerland and then to France, where he trained at the Pasteur Institute and, after studying paramecium, threw his energies into the scourge of cholera. He treated himself with an experimental vaccine and took off to India in 1893 to see how it worked.
That it did, brilliantly, and by today’s reckoning his invention saved millions. His more remarkable eventual success came five years later with a vaccine for eradicating bubonic plague.
Schama — by his own admission no biologist — describes the painstaking method of making a plague vaccine with enthralling technical precision. He writes of the gentle and respectful means of extracting the noxious fluids from the swollen buboes that dangled in the intimate parts of the infected and the dying; of the subsequent culturation process, in ghee-covered flasks of goat broth — no cow or pig could be used, since the vaccines would be given to Hindu and Muslim alike — and then of the nurturing of the resulting silky threads that held the trove of bacilli, ready to be injected.
Notwithstanding Haffkine’s immense contribution to India’s public health, the British colonial authorities, haughty and racist by turn, eventually wearied of the man. Their own means of dealing with infection had, after all, relied on brawn and bombast — the wholesale destruction of villages, the eviction of natives, the smothering of everything with lime and carbolic acid. Such schemes had generally failed, and it irritated the burra sahibs that a foreigner, and moreover a keen adherent to an alien belief, could succeed where they had not.
And so Haffkine was eased out, first from his Calcutta laboratory across to Bombay, and then out of the empire’s crown jewel altogether. He later went to Lausanne, where he would spend his final years.
The book ends with a flourish of well-directed support for the beleaguered Anthony Fauci, and with a fascinating and quite unexpected paean to the Atlantic horseshoe crab, and how its vividly blue blood has long played so crucial a role in the manufacture of modern vaccines. But these two tales seem more like phoned-in afterthoughts. If Schama really wants to demonstrate how some scientists truly do manage to be heroic, and thus counter the damage done by others, then Waldemar Haffkine is the man to describe, in full.
FOREIGN BODIES: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations | By Simon Schama | Illustrated | 477 pp. | Ecco | $32.99