Rats, Lice and History

ANYONE who has been privileged to do chores about Harvard University for a quarter century or so has had the good fortune, from time to time, to see new stars swim into his ken. Some years ago one Hans Zinsser appeared, having swum to Harvard from Stanford via Columbia. This star at once began to shine here with a rare lustre, with no chill sidereal light, be it said, but with a warmth of charm and good-fellowship. Then rumors of music from a violin, heard by late workers in the laboratories of bacteriology, were run down, and it was found that the music came from the Professor’s room. He made a touching and beautiful address to the students at Columbia, and next we heard of the worldly honors which come only to the scientist who has done far more than just make good. He was off to Mexico or to Tunis to try out a new test. Always typhus, typhus is in the background of most of what we hear of him and in the forefront of all his waking hours and of his dreams.

Now from the press conics Ins Rats, Lice and History (Atlantic Monthly and Little. Brown, $2.75), a rare and delightful book indeed. Where else recently can you find the light and whimsical results of such obviously deep erudition, such sustained wit, without either coarseness on the one side or silly triviality on the other? Rats, Lice and History is the biography of a disease, typhus fever. Zinsser states his thesis on page 9 when he says, ‘Our chief purpose in writing the biography of one of these diseases is to impress the fact that we are dealing with a phase of man’s history on earth which has received too little attention from poets, artists, and historians. Swords and lances, arrows, machine guns, and even high explosives have had far less power over the fate of nations than thes typhus louse, the plague flea, and the yellow-fever mosquito.”We agree, and moreover who will disagree when he adds (page 13), ‘Infectious disease is one of the few genuine adventures left in the world. The dragons are all dead, and the lance grows rusty in the chimneycorner. Wars are exercises in ballistics, chemical ingenuity, administration, hard physical labor, and longdistance mass murder. Ships have wireless equipment. Our own continent is a stage route of gas stations, and the Indians own oil wells. Africa is a playground for animal photographers or muscum administrutors and their wives [one each, and italics mine], who go there partly to have their pictures taken with one foot on a dead lion or elephant and disgusted-looking black boys carrying boxes of champagne and biscuits on their patient heads,’The mention of the museum administrator in Africa rather tempted me to digress, but it is far more worth while that I try to point out that this is a great and serious document.

For all the lightness of Zinsser’s touch, his book is full of tragic history. What a world of reading and contemplation it reveals! The natural migration of plagues in the past and the artificial and often bitterly cruel dissemination of disease by civilized man during his ‘trafficks and diseouverics,’his enslaving of peoples and waging of wars, are set forth brilliantly and with an almost incredible simplicity. Here there is plenty of sound science and medical research, but the lay reader need never fear that he will be either bewildered or bored; he will be enthralled.

I had my own innings in due season, for (on page 59) 1 knew right off what a saprophyte was and I did not learn by means of a crossword puzzle either, but from Farlow and Thaxter no less. Also my silly taxonomical soul was galled a bit when I saw (on page 190) polyplax and Xenopsylla both thus on one and the same line. Generic names always begin with a capital letter, please — so says the Code. Likewise (page 190) the Muridm are Old World, not New World mice; and the Professor’s palaeontological time scale (page 105) is a little too moderate for the moderns. If the truth be told, I confess I had to hunt tike the mischief to find even these trivial sins, no review being complete without a short querulous note at about this point.

The genial editor told me I might use 750 words in this little review. I quit with regret. I must add just one line for the reader and that is to bet him that he’ll read Hans’s book not once but twice—even as I have.

T. BARBOUR