The Great Influenza (41 page)

Nonetheless the mayor agreed to appoint him. The three men then climbed the steps to his office, and Copeland was sworn in.

The best municipal public health department in the world was now run by a man with no belief in modern scientific medicine and whose ambitions were not in public health but in politics. If Tammany wanted vacancies to fill with loyalists, that is what he would give them. (Copeland once explained his loyalty to Tammany in simple terms: 'Man is a social animal and cannot work without cooperation. Organization is a necessity and my organization is Tammany.' A few years later Tammany would repay his loyalty by carrying him to the United States Senate.) So he continued the machine's efforts to disassemble the department. One of the best division heads was first threatened with criminal charges and when that failed he was hauled to a civil-service hearing on charges of 'neglect of duty, inefficiency, and incompetency.'

Park had run the department's laboratory division since 1893, had never involved himself in politics, and was himself untouchable. He continued to do excellent science in the midst of this turmoil; soon after Avery and Cole and others at Rockefeller developed their serum against Types I and II pneumococcus, Park developed a procedure for 'typing' the pneumococcus so simple that any decent laboratory could perform it within thirty minutes, allowing nearly immediate use of the right serum for treatment.

But now he had to defend the department. He helped organize a defense, and the defense became national. Criticism rained down on Tammany from the city, the state, from Baltimore, Boston, Washington. Welch and nearly every major figure in medicine attacked Tammany. Rupert Blue, the head of the U.S. Public Health Service, publicly called upon the mayor to desist.

Tammany backed off, and Copeland embarked on a public relations campaign to repair the damage to himself and his 'organization,' relying on patriotism to stifle criticism. By late summer the frenzy had died down, but what had been the best public health department in the world was demoralized. The internationally respected director of the Bureau of Public Health Education resigned. The deputy commissioner of health, in office twenty years, resigned, and the mayor replaced him with his personal physician.

On September 15, New York City's first influenza death occurred. By then the disease had long since begun leaking out of the army and navy bases into the civilian population of Massachusetts.

In two polio epidemics in the preceding decade, public health officials had all but closed down the city. But now Copeland did nothing. Three days later, as hospitals began filling with influenza cases, he made influenza and pneumonia reportable diseases, while simultaneously stating that 'other bronchial diseases and not the so-called Spanish influenza are said to be responsible for the illness of the majority of persons who were reported to be ill with influenza' .'

A few days more and even Copeland could no longer deny reality. People could see disease all about them. Finally he imposed a quarantine on victims and warned, 'The health department is prepared to compel patients who may be a menace to the community to go to hospitals.' He also assured all concerned 'that the disease is not getting away from the control of the health department but is decreasing.'

* 

Park knew better. As a student in Vienna in 1890 he had watched that influenza pandemic kill one of his professors and wrote, 'We mourn for him and for ourselves.' And for several months now he and others in his laboratory had followed the progress of the disease. He was well aware of the transformation of the
City of Exeter
into a floating morgue and of serious cases in July and August on ships arriving in New York harbor. Those cases did one good thing: they relieved the laboratory of political pressure and allowed him and it to concentrate on work.

In late August he and Anna Williams began devoting all their energies to the disease. In mid-September they were called to Camp Upton in Long Island. The disease had just reached there, and few deaths had occurred (yet) but already a single barracks, filled with soldiers from Massachusetts, had two thousand cases.

Park and Williams had collaborated now for a quarter of a century, and they complemented each other perfectly. He was a quiet brown-eyed man with a somewhat reserved, even aristocratic, bearing. He had a claim to the social elite; his father's ancestors arrived in America in 1630, his mother's in 1640. He also felt a calling. Three great-aunts had been missionaries and were buried in Ceylon, a cousin to whom he was very close became a minister, and Park himself had considered becoming a medical missionary.

He had a serious purpose and curiosity per se did not drive that purpose. His seeking of knowledge in the laboratory served his purpose only to the extent, as he saw it, that it served God's purpose. He donated his salary as professor of bacteriology at New York University to the laboratory, or at least into the hands of some of his professional workers who struggled on city salaries. He also involved himself directly with patients, often working the diphtheria wards at the city-run Willard Parker Hospital across the street from his laboratory. The hospital was a new, gleaming place, thirty-five iron bedsteads to each ward, with water closets and bathtubs of marble with porcelain lining, the polished hardwood floors washed every morning with a 1:1,000 solution of bichloride of mercury, the same solution in which patients themselves bathed at discharge and admission.

Methodical, somewhat stolid, he was a master bureaucrat in the best sense of the word; he had run the health department's Bureau of Laboratories for decades and had always looked for ways to make the system work. What drove him was the desire to bring laboratory research to patients. He was a pragmatist. Goethe observed that one searches where there is light. Some scientists try to create new light to shine on problems. Park was not one such; his forte was making exhaustive explorations with existing light.

It was his and Williams's work that had led to mass production of inexpensive diphtheria antitoxin. It was his work that had marked America's acceptance as a scientific equal of Europe, when that international conference had endorsed his views on tuberculosis over Koch's. His scientific papers were exact if not quite elegant, and he matched his precision with a deeply probing and careful mind.

It was that precision, and the missionary's sense of right and wrong, that had led to his public feud over meningitis serum a few years earlier with Simon Flexner and the Rockefeller Institute. In 1911 Park had created the Laboratory for Special Therapy and Investigation, at least in part to rival the Rockefeller Institute. He was a few years older now, but no mellower. He and Flexner remained 'pretty acid' about each other, noted one scientist who knew them both well, with 'no love lost between them,' but despite their animosity both of them cooperated with the other whenever called upon, and neither held back information.

(This openness was a far cry from the atmosphere at some other laboratories, including the Pasteur Institute. Pasteur himself had once advised a protegé not to share information with outsiders, saying, 'Keep your cadavers to yourself.' When Anna Williams visited there, she was refused any information on a pneumonia antiserum until it was published, and also had to promise that after she left, she would say nothing about anything else she had seen until it was published. Even in publication Pasteur scientists did not tell everything. As Biggs wrote Park, 'Marmorek has taught her how it's done (it is secret of course. In the usual way, he omitted the essential thing in his article.')

If Park was almost stolid, Anna Williams injected a certain wildness and creativity into the laboratory. She loved going up in airplanes with stunt fliers (a reckless act in pre-World War I airplanes) and loved sudden fast turns and out-of-control drops. She loved to drive and was always speeding; when traffic was stalled, she often simply pulled into the opposite side of the road and proceeded, and she had a string of traffic tickets to prove it. Once she took a mechanic's course and decided to take her Buick engine apart - but failed to put it back together. In her diary she wrote, 'From my earliest memories, I was one of those who wanted to go places. When I couldn't go, I would have my dreams about going. And, such wild dreams were seldom conceived by any other child.'

Despite (or more likely because of) her wildness, she had established herself as the premier woman medical scientist in America. Her achievement came at a price.

She was unhappy. She was also lonely. At the age of forty-five, she wrote, 'I was told today that it was quite pathetic that I had no one particular friend.' She and Park had worked together for decades but they maintained a careful distance. To her diary she confided, 'There are degrees to everything, including friendship' . [T]here is no sentimentality about my friendships and little sentiment.' Religion gave her no relief. She wanted too much from it. She told herself that Jesus knew that his anguish was momentary and that in exchange he was going to save the world. 'This knowledge' if we were sure, oh! what would we not be willing to undergo.' Of course she had no such knowledge. She could only recall 'all the good things I have been taught' [and] act as if they were true.'

Yet in the end, although jealous of those who lived a normal life, she still preferred 'discontent rather than happiness through lack of knowledge.' Instead she did content herself with the fact that 'I have had thrills.' Analyzing herself, she confided in her diary that what mattered to her more were 'love of knowledge,' 'love of appreciation,' 'love of winning,' 'fear of ridicule,' and 'power to do, to think new things.'

These were not Park's motives, but she and Park made a powerful combination. In science, at least, she had had thrills indeed.

She was fifty-five years old in 1918. Park was the same age. There were no thoughts of thrills on the long drive and rough roads from Manhattan to Camp Upton, even though Park indulged her and let her drive. At the camp the military doctors, knowing what was happening at Devens, begged for advice.

Park and Williams were experts on vaccine therapy. Even during the polio epidemics they had done excellent science, if only to prove the negative; Park had tried to develop but instead proved the ineffectiveness of several treatments. This time they felt hopeful; their work with streptococci and pneumococci, like that of the Rockefeller Institute's, was promising. But as yet Park and Williams had no advice to give; they could only swab the throats and nasal passages of the sick at Upton, return to their laboratory, and proceed from there.

They also got material from another source, which Williams never forgot. It was her first influenza autopsy; the body was that of, she later wrote, 'a fine-looking youth from Texas' who shared her last name. She stood staring at his fine features wondering about him, wondering even if he was some distant relative, and noting, 'Death occurring so quickly it left little or no marks of disease anywhere except for the lungs.'

She could not have looked at his perfect form, perfect but for death, and not wondered just what the country was about to endure. The drive back to New York, the car filled with swabbings from mucosal membranes, sputum, and tissue samples of a mysterious and lethal disease, likely alternated between intense conversation and silence, conversation as they planned their experiments and silence knowing the silence of the laboratory that awaited them.

* 

There was in fact nothing like Park's laboratory in the world. From outside on the street, Park could look up with pride on the six-story building, the floors of laboratories, knowing that his successes had built them. Entirely dedicated to diagnostic testing, production of sera and antitoxins, and medical research, his creation sat at the foot of East Sixteenth Street with the teeming wharfs of the East River just beyond.

Streetcars, horse-drawn carriages, and automobiles clattered past, and the smell of manure still mixed with that of gasoline and oil. There was all the sweat and ambition and failure and grit and money of New York City, all that made the city what it was and is.

Inside the building Park oversaw a virtual industry. More than two hundred workers reported to him, nearly half of them scientists or technicians in one laboratory or another, each one with lab tables laid out in horizontal rows, gas burners in virtually constant use on each table, glassware stacked on shelves above the tables as well as filling shelves along the walls, the rooms often hissing with steam and humidity from the autoclaves used to sterilize.

No other laboratory anywhere, not in any institute, not in any university, not sponsored by any government, not run by any pharmaceutical company, had the combination of scientific competence, epidemiological and public health expertise, and ability to carry out directed research (to focus all resources on one question and not be deflected from that search no matter how enticing or important a finding might be) intent on immediate practical results.

His laboratory could also function in extreme crisis. It had done so before: preventing outbreaks of cholera and typhoid, triumphing over diphtheria, helping in meningitis epidemics. It had done so not only in New York City but all over the country; when requested, Park had sent teams to fight outbreaks of disease elsewhere.

And one other ability made the department unique. If a solution was found, it could produce serum and vaccines in industrial quantities as quickly as (and of better quality than) any drug manufacturer in the world. Indeed, it had been so successful making antitoxins that drug makers and city physicians had combined to use all their political power to limit that production. But now Park could quickly gear back up. Because of the assignment to produce serum for the army, he had just quadrupled the number of horses he could infect and then bleed.

So it was not surprising that soon after Park returned from Camp Upton, he received a telegram from Richard Pearce, head of the National Research Council's section on medicine. Pearce was grabbing at any information he could get from the French, the British, even the Germans, and distributing it to investigators everywhere. He was also breaking the questions about influenza into pieces and asking each of a handful of investigators to focus on a single piece. From Park he wanted to know 'the nature of the agent causing the so-called Spanish influenza' [and] pure cultures of the causative organism if obtainable' . Will your lab undertake the necessary bacteriological studies and make reports as quickly as possible to the undersigned?'