274 • The Great Plagueemploying knowledge and tools that Dr. George Thomson had lacked in his
controversial autopsy two centuries before.
The Japanese specialist, Shibasaburo Kitasato, had played a role in discov-
ering the tubercle microbe and an antitoxin for anthrax at Koch’s German
laboratory. He came in with a team of Japanese specialists and impressive
equipment: glass slides and stains, solid and liquid media for growing bacte-
ria, inoculating needles and loops, the latest Zeiss microscopes, and the in-
dispensable autoclave for preparing and sterilizing media, glassware, and dis-
posed-of cultures. To the local Chinese physicians, this Japanese native’s
offer of help represented a double irony: he came as a native of a country
about to wage war with China, bearing Western techniques alien to Chinese
tradition.
The arrival of Swiss-born French expert Alexandre Yersin reflected differ-
ent ironies. He had worked at the Pasteur Institute and had collaborated
with Emile Roux on the discovery of diphtheria toxin. Growing restless with
laboratory life, he had left the Pasteur Institute on a quixotic adventure. Col-
leagues were shocked when this young scientist abandoned a promising ca-
reer and took passage as a ship’s doctor on a vessel bound for French Indo-
china. The diminutive, almost reclusive figure quickly settled into an alien
culture and language, teaching himself the skills of cartography and meteor-
ology. Yersin mapped the coasts and explored the jungle, braving encounters
with pirates, hostile tribesmen, a tiger, and debilitating bouts of malaria and
diarrhea. Letters to his mother related the pleasure of treating the native
people for smallpox, cholera, dysentery, and rabies and his relief at escaping
the tedium of research in Paris. “My firm intention is to never return again to
work at the Pasteur Institute,” he informed a disappointed mother. “Life in a
laboratory there would seem impossible to me after having tasted the free-
dom and life of the open air.” Then a telegram arrived from his former friend
and colleague Roux, forcing him back into the world of research: the Pasteur
Institute wanted him to help the British fight the plague. He hastily de-
parted for Hong Kong, hand-carrying the microbe hunter’s barest essenti-
als—his microscope and autoclave.^22
When Kitasato and Yersin reached the stricken port city in mid-June, they
found the streets almost deserted. The Chinese were in near panic, bewil-
dered by Western medical techniques and resisting quarantine orders issued
by foreigners. The colonial authorities tried in vain to isolate the sick mem-
bers of the Chinese community; the infected Chinese simply fled to their an-
cestral villages to die among their own people, past and present, an ancient
custom that treated death with dignity and communal support. The British