Epilogue• 275residents were stranded and frightened as shipping companies stopped
transporting passengers from Hong Kong. Two additional hospitals were re-
served mainly for the British sick. The labor market was paralyzed, and reve-
nues from the opium trade dwindled. But the most daunting problem was
sanitation. There were hasty burials, as evidenced by shallow graves in way-
side ditches. Official reports characterized the Chinese waterfront dwellings
with four words: “unfit for human habitation.”
Yersin had to make do with a makeshift hut as his laboratory and bribe
British soldiers disposing of infected bodies to let him have some for testing
of the victims’ blood. By contrast, the Kennedy Town Hospital, manned by
English doctors, provided Kitasato’s team, which had arrived first with great
publicity, with their up-to-date facilities and a constant supply of bodies. As
often happens in medical research, however, the successful route among the
rival paths to discovery was not the obvious one. Kitasato, brilliant, exacting,
and superbly equipped as he was, stumbled.
The day after Kitasato’s arrival, his assisting pathologist, Dr. Aoyamo,
hastily performed a postmortem without a bed, blanket, or mosquito netting.
A photograph from Aoyamo’s research paper shows half-naked patients ly-
ing in a large warehouse, where numerous mosquitoes entered at night.^23
(Some mosquitoes were later found to be infected with plague but lacking
the ability to transmit the organisms.) That first plague patient had expe-
rienced a temperature reaching 40 º Celsius ( 104 º Fahrenheit). Lymph nodes
in the groin were swollen and of a red-bluish color. The connective tissue
displayed small red spots. The spleen and other organs were enlarged. Other
dissections followed, but Aoyamo and a coworker became infected and en-
tered the isolation ship. Aoyamo survived; his colleague died, recalling the
rumored deaths of Dr. Thomson’s collaborators in 1665.
Kitasato pressed on with his work, sending illustrations of his findings to
the British medical journal Lancet.^24 Under the microscope, small, rod-shaped
bacteria were visible. The Koch-trained expert had stained his samples with a
reliable enough gram stain, giving a purple color if the bacteria were gram
positive or a red hue if gram negative. But Kitasato hesitated as he looked at
his blood samples. They contained both gram-negative, nonmotile bacilli and
motile, gram-positive diplococci, round bacteria associated with pneumonia.
He inoculated live mice to try to verify whether he had found the plague ba-
cilli. The small rodents showed signs of plague, but Kitasato remained unsure
of the bacillus.^25 Probably his samples had been contaminated.
Three days after Kitasato’s arrival with his team, Yersin had appeared un-
accompanied. Five days later he wrote in his diary, “At first glance, I see a real