I had dosed my four Indians at seven, and time was wearing on. Tetrachloride, which is a purgative, should have acted quicker. The men were dumb and drowsy. Would this be coma? I felt their lean wrists, listened to their lean chests; pulse and respiration normal. How soon would they take a turn for the worse?
Dr. Hall had taken a dose of it.
Yes, but Hall had been in the prime of health, able to throw off toxic poisoning. These poor fellows were like dry leaves. The very thing that made treatment necessary had weakened them to the exhaustion point.... Then I thought: Even if I had drugged myself with the stuff it wouldn’t have proved much; what I was trying to find out was its actual effect on hookworm....
******
I had wandered back to my office, hoping that solitude and a cigarette might tell me what to do next.... The door burst open and Chris Kendrick tumbled in on me. His look was grave as he said, “That tetrachloride—”
“Are they dead?” I asked stiffly.
“Dead!” Chris waved his hands. “They’re all jumping out of bed, and simply spouting hookworms!”
That was how the news came to me. I had been watching them for hours while local medical officers passed their beds and made long faces which said to my fevered imagination, “See what Lambert’s done now!” Then the minute I turned my back CCl₄ had begun to work. For three days while my Indians were, as Chris exaggerated it, “fairly spouting worms,” the result was a constant wonder. Cordiality glowed in an atmosphere which had been none too warm. Doctors gathered around our hookworm count like baseball fans around the box score. The native orderlies were as excited as the rest. First day, second day, third.... I had gambled with four lives, and won. I call that Tetrachloride Experiment Number 2, since Hall swallowed the first dose; and Experiment Number 2 was a surprising success. Between them my patients had expelled 244 worms after a single dose. The following week we gave them a test treatment with chenopodium—and only got four Necators. The man I mark down as Case 1 expelled none at all. The other three needed no follow-up treatment. In three days Case 1 had shed ninety-five hookworms, and all were discharged as cured. One dose of CCl₄, mind you, had proven 99 per cent perfect.
******
Mine was the embarrassment of riches. I had worked for the Foundation too long to believe that they would approve of wholesale treatments with so new and untried a drug. If I went on with tetrachloride, as I felt I must do, the only way was to go ahead and say nothing about it.