******
With a hop, skip and jump I went to the laboratory used by the Medical Officer of Health. Naturally old Carment, who presided over the collection, wouldn’t have the drug. Why should he? Yes, but there it was! A big, brown bottle with the label CCl₄. It had never been opened, of course, and how it got there nobody knows. Strange, useless things drift onto laboratory shelves.
When I went up to Dr. Montague’s office I had the brown bottle under one arm and the Medical Journal under the other. “Read that and look at this,” I said. He read the article painstakingly, then turned the bottle in his hand. “Lambert, try anything,” he sighed. That was about the way we all felt those days.
We had been trained in the empirical school. Try anything, if evidence is in its favor. Even the jungle medicine man, for all his black magic, has herbs and simples which the respectable practitioner might include in his remedies. A thousand years before Harvey demonstrated the blood’s circulation Asiatic wizards were giving chaulmoogra oil for leprosy—true, they gave it wrong, but they gave it. The Incas of Peru taught us the value of quinine for malaria; they chewed the bark. Before the Crusades, corner barbers were giving mercury to syphilitic noblemen. Up to fifty years ago the medical profession depended pretty much on the household remedies your grandmother used to choke down you; as long as they worked they saved many a fine prescription in abbreviated Latin.
The old empiricals had moved along that line. But men of the new thought, like Pasteur, like Ehrlich, had set out deliberately to fit a drug to a condition. And that was how Hall had worked.
So we were trying to cure hookworm disease with a cleaning fluid. A veterinary had recommended it. True, he was about the greatest vet in the world. I have to laugh now, remembering how we, as green young undergraduates at Syracuse Medical, used to snoot veterinaries and dentists as “hoss doctors” and “tooth yankers.” We didn’t take the trouble to remember that modern anesthesia originated in a dentist’s brain. And since we lacked the gift of prophecy, how were we to know what a horse doctor would someday do with something out of a fire extinguisher?
My mind was made up, but my heart wasn’t doing any too well when I went to the native ward and picked out four hookwormy East Indians. I wasn’t sure how these follows would behave, for Mr. Gandhi’s Civil Disobedience had become their evening prayer. However, they felt pretty sick and were ready, like Montague, to say, “Try anything.” I started them off with a stiff dose of salts.
At seven next morning my faltering hand administered to each of them 3 cc. out of the brown bottle. The minute they swallowed it I felt like a Borgia. It was too late to do anything about it, unless I gave them a quick emetic. If tetrachloride went back on me I’d be responsible for the death of a man, maybe four. Doctors have to become hardened to death, otherwise they couldn’t remain in practice. But experimental killing is a different thing. If any of these Hindus died I’d have the weight on my soul. Not only that, I’d lose my job.... Already I saw my resignation from the International Health Board being requested by cable.
I steadied myself with an argument: If the Fiji campaign failed along the old line that wouldn’t be any feather in my cap either. Well, I was deciding something on a very long chance.... My stomach went back on me, foolishly reflecting the pain of my victims. Solid food didn’t appeal, so I breakfasted on a pint of coffee, embittered with a new torment. Why hadn’t I taken tetrachloride myself, before I tried it on those Indians?[3]
Dr. Hall had taken a dose of it.