He suspected that Dr. Tubbs, now magnificent with the ribbon of the Legion of Honor, had retained him in the Institute only because of Gottlieb’s intervention. But it may be that Tubbs and Holabird hoped he would again blunder into publicity-bringing miracles, for they were both polite to him at lunch—polite and wistfully rebuking, and full of meaty remarks about publishing one’s discoveries early instead of dawdling.
It was more than a year after Martin’s anticipation by D’Hérelle when Tubbs appeared in the laboratory with suggestions:
“I’ve been thinking, Arrowsmith,” said Tubbs.
He looked it.
“D’Hérelle’s discovery hasn’t aroused the popular interest I thought it would. If he’d only been here with us, I’d have seen to it that he got the proper attention. Practically no newspaper comment at all. Perhaps we can still do something. As I understand it, you’ve been going along with what Dr. Gottlieb would call ‘fundamental research.’ I think it may now be time for you to use phage in practical healing. I want you to experiment with phage in pneumonia, plague, perhaps typhoid, and when your experiments get going, make some practical tests in collaboration with the hospitals. Enough of all this mere frittering and vanity. Let’s really cure somebody!”
Martin was not free from a fear of dismissal if he refused to obey. And he was touched as Tubbs went on:
“Arrowsmith, I suspect you sometimes feel I lack a sense of scientific precision when I insist on practical results. I— Somehow I don’t see the really noble and transforming results coming out of this Institute that we ought to be getting, with our facilities. I’d like to do something big, my boy, something fine for poor humanity, before I pass on. Can’t you give it to me? Go cure the plague!”
For once Tubbs was a tired smile and not an earnestness of whiskers.
That day, concealing from Gottlieb his abandonment of the quest for the fundamental nature of phage, Martin set about fighting pneumonia, before attacking the Black Death. And when Gottlieb learned of it, he was absorbed in certain troubles of his own.
Martin cured rabbits of pleuro-pneumonia by the injection of phage, and by feeding them with it he prevented the spread of pneumonia. He found that phage-produced immunity could be as infectious as a disease.