Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

In Germany, he said, a doctor named Robert Koch had discovered what caused consumption and had proved how it was transmitted. The culprit was a germ, he said. A little plant, although it wasn’t green and wasn’t shaped like a plant: it was invisible except under a microscope. Inside the lungs these germs made deadly poisons.

One by one the women bent to the eyepiece and peered through the metal tube. A smear of gray mist, the broken fragments of a decaying lung. Between these fragments were brilliant blue rods — so slim, Nora thought. The blue of wild gentian, or iris, or lobelia. Astonishing blue. Nothing like the tattered, dark red bits she’d seen her invalids cough up. The peculiar color, Dr. Kopeckny said, came from the blue dye with which he’d stained them, to make them visible.

That first time, the shock of that first sight: Sophie put on her cloak and left, taking Jane with her. Phoebe, who shuddered and said her flesh was crawling, stayed but withdrew to the kitchen with Mrs. Kopeckny. Nora stared and stared. She’d looked in books over the years, whatever books she’d been lucky enough to find; she’d seen drawings of lungs and stomachs and hearts and she knew how blood and lymph moved through a body, and food and air and water. But this—“Where do you find them?” she asked. “Are they everywhere?”

“In the sputum,” Dr. Kopeckny said. “And in the spray a patient coughs out, and inside the airways and the lungs.”

“Can you kill them?” Bessie asked.

“Not yet,” he said. “But the things you give your patients, rest and good food and clean air, make the body more able to fight off the infection. Sometimes the bacilli can disappear entirely.”

“All the bedding I’ve changed,” Olive said quietly. “The laundry I’ve carried and washed, the dishes I’ve handled. The handkerchiefs, the nightshirts, all the times I’ve been coughed at and sneezed at …”

She looked at her friends. “It’s not that simple,” Dr. Kopeckny said. “I didn’t show you this to scare you — don’t you think you’d already have it, if you were going to get it?”

“Eight years,” Bessie said. “Since I took in the first one. Everyone told me it wasn’t contagious.”

“In a big city almost everyone is exposed to the bacillus. But most of them don’t get sick, any more than you have.”

“That’s true,” Bessie said. “Not one of us has, nor our families. No one native to the village.”

“Then are the bacilli the cause or not?” Nora asked. “How do you know the bacilli aren’t just there in a person’s sputum, the way …” She looked at her friends and at her own arm, which she held out. “The way these freckles are here on my skin, but not on Bessie’s. They don’t mean anything, they don’t mean I’m sick or she’s not sick. They’re just here.”

“That,” said Dr. Kopeckny approvingly, “is a very good observation.”

“Then why do you think the blue plants cause the disease?”

There were experiments, Dr. Kopeckny said, which Koch had done with mice and rats and rabbits. He tried to explain these and then frowned and tapped the microscope. Later, when he acquired a newer, more powerful instrument, he’d give this one to Nora. “Without the germ there’s no tuberculosis — no one has found a sick person who didn’t carry the bacilli. But you don’t always have the disease just because you carry the germ. If you think of the germ as the plant, perhaps we’re like the soil. Uncongenial soil and the plant doesn’t grow. The plant might be fussy. Or delicate — maybe it dies easily when it’s outside the body, and maybe the care you take to keep things clean in your houses is enough to keep it at bay.”

The women left his kitchen in a clump, talking furiously among themselves and delegating Nora to learn, as quickly as she could, whatever else Dr. Kopeckny was willing to teach her. As the cold deepened and the snow kept falling, Nora visited his house repeatedly. He talked to her, he thought out loud in her presence, he gave her things to read. Some of the articles startled her. Criminals condemned to death might well be experimented on, one doctor wrote. There is nothing cruel nor revolting about this idea; for a certain period prior to the execution, the criminal should be exposed to the dried sputum of one known to be sick. After execution a careful necropsy would show if tubercles had developed. Thus might useful results be secured.

She stared at the pages, thinking about her days, so long ago, at Grosse Isle. If Dr. Grant hadn’t been there, what else might have happened to her? We must be scientific, the paper said. The white plague puts all of us at risk. But meanwhile another doctor claimed that the presence of the bacillus in the sick might be only a harmless concomitant, useful perhaps as a diagnostic sign but in no way a convincing demonstration of the germ theory.

“What does he mean by ‘germ theory’?” Nora asked.

“I shouldn’t have assumed you knew that,” Dr. Kopeckny replied. As simply and swiftly as he could, he told her about Pasteur, in France, who’d proved that all life came from earlier life, and that putrefaction and decay were not spontaneous but were caused by living germs. He’d found germs that fell from the air or lived in the soil, that made wine go bad or killed cows and sheep. Under the microscope Dr. Kopeckny showed Nora the creatures swarming inside spoiled meat and then those that lived in her own saliva: brethren to the brilliantly blue sticks.

For weeks she looked in that eyepiece, always seeing something new. On her way home the world would seem utterly different to her, every surface quivering with a thin secret film. There was life on the leaves and in the rivers, on the food she ate, and on her clothes; it was wonderful, it was horrifying, some days she couldn’t eat and she wanted to boil her hands. The world was alive in a way beyond the way she knew. What did that mean?

Nora went back to her friends and together they worked through the implications of what she’d learned. The bacilli come into the lungs, Dr. Kopeckny had said, attached to dust particles in the air. Infected dust might be spread about by the swish of a skirt or a vigorous broom; the worst things they could do were to raise any dust or allow infected material to dry before it was disinfected. Most of their habits still made sense in the light of this new information. They’d never used carpets or curtains in the invalids’ rooms; they’d always damp-mopped the floors instead of sweeping, and wiped down the walls and woodwork frequently, simply to keep the rooms tidy and fresh. But now they figured out, together, that the invalids’ laundry might best be kept dampened until it could be washed. That scraps of torn paper, used only once, might be better than handkerchiefs, and that the papers should be burned.

For a while, some of the women kept more than their usual distance from their guests. But after the initial fright they relaxed, partly from habit — they’d been doing this work for years, it was hard to think about it differently — and partly because they realized that what Bessie had said was true. Not a single person in the village, not even those who cared directly for the invalids, had ever gotten sick.

To Nora’s surprise, it was not people in the village but guests from the cities who first began to shun the sick. The following summer, a wealthy widow objected to sharing a table with Elizabeth, whose cough had grown much worse. She had not paid good money, the widow said, to be in contact with the same germs the filthy immigrants assaulted her with in Boston.

Ned moved the woman to a distant corner of the dining room, and later took Nora aside. People were getting ideas, he said. From articles in the paper, from conversation with doctors. After all the years when people might share a bed with a consumptive family member, sleep in the same room, share dishes and food, suddenly they were being told about invisible, lurking germs that leapt from person to person. It might be better, Ned said, if Elizabeth took her meals separately for a while, and if Nora didn’t talk about her work. A few guests, he said, had left simply after hearing what she did in the winter months.