enc. w. letter
[May 2, 1931] from Sturgis

NEW YORK

Herald

Tribune

BOOKS

SECTION XI

SUNDAY, MAY 3, 1931

A Child With
Power

NOGUCHI.

By Gustav Eckstein . . . New York: Harper -and Brothers . . . $5.

Reviewed by
MARY ROSS

"A CHILD with power," one of the others called him during the last driving weeks of his life when Noguchi was working in a little settlement on the African Gold Coast, staying up all night to do an immediate post-mortem on one or another of his 500 monkeys to find out if his earlier years' work had been mistaken—if, after all, the yellow fever that he had known in Cuba and Ecuador and Brazil was different from that in Africa. "A child with power" is indeed the text to which Dr. Eckstein writes his swiftly running story of Noguchi's fifty-one years. Gay, improvident, demanding, egotistic, yet with the fire of genius to which his friends could deny nothing.

Noguchi came of the poorest—a deserting father, a mother, "a most excellent farmer," who worked all day in the fields, and sometimes also the night, leaving the baby son with his elder sister. One day, hungry, the little girl went to see what delayed the mother, leaving the baby asleep. A scream brought them both running. The baby had crept to the hole in which was the basin of charcoal to boil water for the tea. He was trying to scramble out, fighting the hot coals. The fingers of the left hand were mostly gone, the left arm and left foot and right hand badly burned. For twenty-one days the mother did not sleep, but wedged her eyelids open with bits of wood, fought the infection, gently massaged the little fingers of the hand that remained. "What kind of a farmer will he be with a hand like that?" the boys taunted when the child was old enough to go to school. They called "Tembo, tembo!"—hand-boy—and he fled before them and hid behind the stones in the cemetery next to the school. They talked of him as the boy who was always reading.

Hideyo Noguchi

This picture was drawn by C. LeRoy Baldridge five days before Noguchi died

The will of the mother, the urge to dominate of the taunted boy, are the threads running through those next few years when Noguchi Seisaku absorbed learning with a thirst that knew nothing of fatigue. It was suggested that a doctor in the town, a doctor who had learned in America, might aid that stump of a hand. A neighbor helped with money and the fathers of other boys in the school gave what they could. Twenty miles must be walked each way, but that was nothing, though many treatments were necessary after the doctor in strange trousers and waistcoat had cut the scarred tissue so that the stump could hang down, like any one else's hand. The money was not enough and the lad eagerly offered to work out the debt as a drug boy in the doctor's office. It was there that he read the life of the French general, then told his friend that he himself would be like Napoleon. "Not fight battles. Not kill people. He would be a doctor, but with the will of a Napoleon. Napoleon slept only three hours a night. Henceforth he will sleep only three hours a night." It was there one day that Watanabe-san called the drug boys to look through the microscope at a drop of blood from a patient who had a fever. Could they see a minute twisted thing among the cor-

puscles? The youngest drug boy resolved that he would be a bacteriologist.

But between that decision and the world-famous scientist lay troughs of delay and indecision. He had no money, though he could get others to lend it to him almost without stint. He was proud and sensitive and arrogant. His ambition stopped at nothing less than that some day he should be personal physician to the Emperor. At times he would work madly, without stopping for food or sleep; at others he was lazy, profligate. The money he had borrowed for passage to America—a friend sold his wife's bridal kimono to give it to him—was gambled away in a night. But not even the shameless young student could admit that to the lender. He came in the steerage, a doctor of medicine then twenty-four, one who had been a quarantine officer, a member of a pest commission in China, a translator of books. He made his way straight to Philadelphia, sure that all would be well when he found the American doctor he once had met in his own country. Generous Americans, he felt sure, would be glad to help a Japanese boy.

The busy university had no place waiting for him. He wrote frantic letters to the Japanese friends, then when the money came it still ran through his fingers. However, this is no longer Noguchi Seisaku, but Noguchi Hideyo. The change had come while he was still in Tokio, when he picked

up a novel, "The Life of a Contemporary Student," the story of a promising student of medicine who wasted his life in drink and women. Oddly enough, the name of the student in the book was Nonoguchi Seisaku. The coincidence shook the other young Seisaku and in conference with one of his benefactors he changed his name to Hideyo, which meant great-man-of-the-world. And in Philadelphia in 1900 the young protégé of S. Weir Mitchell and Simon Flexner, working messily at laboratory tasks for which he had no training or knowledge, began to show the qualities that had made him in fact a great man of the world at fifty-one.

His star was on the ascendant as the newly founded Rockefeller Institute gave him the financial security that he needed, the chance to work; as an American wife took over some of the practical management of his erratic life; as from the Danish scientist, Theodore Madsen, he learned order and patience and exactness, but perhaps too much order. Before many years the nations of the world, including his own, heaped honors on him, and he greeted honors airily. Once he went back to Japan and saw his old mother before she died.

Noguchi's scientific fame rests chiefly upon his discovery of the spirochete of yellow fever, a chapter in a saga as dramatic as the man himself. Great epidemics had

Continued on page six

swept the American cities through the nineteenth century, once carrying off nearly 30,000 in New Orleans, once 8,000 in Memphis. In the year that the young Japanese doctor came to the United States American privates in Havana had risked their lives in the experiment in which Walter Reed showed conclusively that the terrible disease was transmitted by the bite of an infected mosquito. It remained for Noguchi to find the germ itself, and by repetition of his study in Cuba, in Ecuador and Brazil, to keep on demonstrating his finding in spite of the tormenting doubts of other workers. In this last was bound up the puzzle of the relationship between yellow fever and infectious jaundice.

Bit by bit yellow fever through twenty-five years was forced out of the western hemisphere, and the disease which had claimed its hundreds of thousands of lives became a rarity of remote mountain districts. But yellow fever still lingered in Africa. Was this the same disease? One dramatic theory held that it was; that yellow fever, through the mosquito, had been brought to the new world in the water casks of the slave ships, a super-cargo that avenged with death the wrongs that the whites had inflicted on the blacks. The Rockefeller Foundation, which had led the western fight, sending Noguchi as emissary of science where trouble threatened, dispatched an expedition to the African Gold Coast to see if that yellow fever was the same disease, and to wipe out its first and last stronghold. Young Stokes had gone, and Noguchi was in part responsible for his going. In September, 1927, word came that Stokes himself was dead of yellow fever. Then Noguchi must go. It was of no account that others should remind him that he was far from well. A life of superhuman exertion had racked that small strong body; he had diabetes and no longer could eat his three bowls of rice a day. For years he had known that his heart was dangerously enlarged. He had all but died of typhoid fever. The night before he sailed he slept, but for the previous two he had not been in bed at all, merely snatching an hour's rest in a chair, then continuing the tasks that must be finished before he left. He must go to Africa himself to vindicate his own work. Five months later, that work done, his findings vindicated though he himself had hardly yet realized the implications of that frantic period of experimentation and exertion and discomfort, Noguchi lay dead of yellow fever in a hut on the African Gold Coast. In his delirium he had said "funny Noguchi!" as if it had been said of him, as if he had heard it many times and knew what to think of it. "One feels," said his nurse, "one would do anything in the world for him."

It is the quality of a personality that Dr. Eckstein has gathered so forcefully into his story of a man. Save for his mother and two or three friends, the other persons of the drama, even the wife, are wraiths. Possibly they were also to Noguchi, that small hurrying figure, with eyes blazing under the mane of hair that seemed to stand erect when he glowed with success, to be a limp part of his utter despair when something impeded his progress. Dr. Eckstein's biography is concerned with this man, for whom one would do anything in the world, only incidentally interested in dates and names and places. It is written in the present tense, as quick, hurrying, sometimes baffling, as the man himself must have been. It may even annoy the literal-minded student of scientific history. (There is no index or bibliography!) It will excite those who love people, by a dynamic and searching portrait of a man whose reality was more dramatic than fiction.

2 XI

Mengistui for NEW

tion, is the kolkhoz, or collective farm, of which the prevailing type of the present, the artel, is only a half way step to the real collectivism of the agricultural commune. From the human point of view the great dramatic interest is in the competition which has developed between the peasants on the collectives (kolkhozniks) and those who still prefer to remain embattled individualists. The overpowering merit of the kolkhoz, says Mr. Hindus, is the demonstrated superiority of large scale farming as a method of production over the strip system of individual peasants in backward Russia.

Especially interesting is the author's summary of the pluses and minuses of the kolkhoz. For instance, the revolutionary tension is whipped on to such speed that the breakage of machinery through ignorance is tremendous. This is charged up to education, as Russians are just discovering the machine. Hence disabled tractors dot the landscape. There also is a lack of agricultural experts and a general lack of labor discipline. Labor on the collectives is now going through the same difficulties encountered by labor in industry several years ago. But Red management is introducing piece work and fines and a whole series of graded punishments to mete out to Ivan Ivanovich who has never known any rules. And science can now be applied on a national scale to build up great herds of cattle, to insure clean seed, to fertilize, to destroy weeds over a wide territory, etc. The immediate gain to the state is a unified control of agriculture, insuring a marketable surplus to be sold abroad. On the social side the collective farm thrusts the revolution onward toward its goal with a great élan. The log hut is replaced by the barrack, which likewise destroys the privacy of the individual along with family life. The alarming revolutionary birth rate is automatically checked by the collective, as large families are no longer necessary to insure support in old age, and the women, in moving out into the economic sphere, medically educated, are no longer in a mood to bear children year after year. Women are likewise freed from cooking, as the communal kitchen feeds the group. The whole set-up in its present helter-skelter and disorder is designed to solidify the community as the new social unit, to make the peasants over into a rural proletariat, taught by radio, classes and propaganda that worship of God is a religion of the past, and that religion of the future is political mindedness and worship of man and the machine. The children, millions and millions of them all over Russia, are being placed in the kindergartens of the collectives as fast as they can be provided, and detached from their parents. The state is the parent of the future in matters of training. And the net result, of which the outlines become visible in Mr. Hindus's narrative, will be collective man, the inhabitant of Mars on earth.

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