Disease. I wondered what 'Prontosil' was. It was written by Professor Klee, and I remembered from Domagk's letter to Dr Dieffenbach that Klee had been testing out 'Streptozon' in Wuppertal. I turned over the pages, starting to translate Domagk's paper, lips moving and finger running along the lines. They seemed to have re-christened 'Streptozon', as 'Prontosil'. But undoubtedly it was the same sulphonamide drug which had saved my hand. The world was at last learning what I had heard from a part-time prostitute in a Cologne slum the night they burnt down the Reichstag.
18
I had no chance to discuss the German discovery with Colebrook before we met in the hall of Queen Charlotte's in Marylebone Road on the early evening of Monday, March 6, 1935. He had just come through the door, bag in hand and mackintosh flapping. He greeted me, 'Hello, Elgar-had your baby?'
'Yes, this morning. Everything seems fine.'
'Congratulations. Boy or girl?'
'Girl. I'm on my way to see them now.'
'I say, those papers by Domagk and Co in the _Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift_ are causing something of a sensation in London.' Coli strode along with me. 'They've even got into the newspapers. I wrote to Domagk for more information, but I haven't heard. I expect he's snowed under with similar requests from all over the world. And of course things are getting a little sticky in Germany, they do so seem to be turning in upon themselves. It's as though they were already at war with the rest of us in Europe.'
'I wondered why they renamed it 'Prontosil'?' I had once mentioned to Coli my being one of the earliest cases on 'Streptozon'. 'Or as I suppose the Germans would pronounce it, 'Pronto_zeal'.'_
'Oh, I G Farben register any number of trade marks-euphonious labels for drugs as yet unsynthesized.' (The name 'Prontosil' had been registered in 1928 with the intention of sticking it on some new sleeping-draught.) 'You know what someone in my lab suggested? It's an abbreviation _of pronto_ and _silentium.'_ Coli gave his laugh, which could fill a corridor. He was a cheerful man behind his solemn manner and austere tastes. 'I must say, it's strange-to say the least-that Domagk kept completely quiet about his discovery for more than two years.'
'Wouldn't he want to be absolutely certain it always worked? It would be cruel to raise the world's false hopes.'
'You're being very Christian. The reason for the delay is simple. I G Farben wanted to be certain they'd got all their patents safely tied up. And they wanted exactly the right moment to market the stuff. I know my German drug industry.'
Remembering my past discouragement, I felt entitled to complain, 'Perhaps some lives might have been saved had Sir Almroth Wright seen the possibilities.'
'You can't blame The Lion.' Expectedly, Colebrook came to his defence. 'This is chemotherapy, of course. But a different sort than we've been accustomed to since Ehrlich first coined the word. It's not like the cure of syphilis or malaria or kala azar. The drug is simple, the administration is simple, and the streptococcus is no rare parasite, but flourishing upon all of us.'
'You mean, it's one of those concepts which stand out like mountains, which nobody sees because we're too busy staring at the toes of our boots?
'You might put it like that, yes.'
We parted, as I turned towards the entrance of the ward. The baby had been born at seven o'clock that morning. Rosie had started her pains early on the Sunday, when I had found a taxi at King's Cross Station and taken her into the hospital, waiting in a room with two other husbands. A well-starched midwife had appeared after an hour or so to explain that my wife had 'gone off the boil' and the baby was not expected that day. I gathered that for the first child the labour pains provided a prolonged overture to the drama. When I returned the next morning they had been trying to find me, and I was a father.
After I left Colebrook, I found Rosie still with the radiance of new motherhood, an expression which can transform the most ordinary girl into a saint, and which I do not believe has ever been accurately caught by painters of the Madonna.
'What do you think of her?' she asked, squeezing the bundle against her breast.
'She seems perfectly all right.'
'She's
'Why not?'
Rosie wrinkled her nose. 'I dunno…it's a sort of stuck-up name.'
'I don't think so. St Clare of Assisi founded the order of Poor Clares.'
'Are you sorry she ain't a boy?' Rosie was looking at me guiltily.
'Why should I be?'
'Most men like a boy first.'
'It's all the same to me.'
'We'll have a boy next time,' predicted Rosie, smiling and snuggling up the baby again.
When I returned on the Tuesday evening, Rosie was not in such high spirits, a little tired, but well. On the Wednesday, she was flushed, with a temperature.
'It's nothing to worry about unduly,' said the starched midwife. 'After all, it's hardly unknown for a mother to run a slight temp during the puerperium. Your wife's got a rather nasty discharge down below, which would account for it. We've already taken a swab for the lab.'
'Do they know the infecting germ yet?' Her reassurance had made me anxious.
'They'll have the culture tomorrow. With luck, she'll be on the mend by then.'
The following evening, a nurse asked me to wait outside the ward door. The midwife appeared with the news, 'I'm afraid your wife's rather poorly, Mr Elgar.' I felt a pang of alarm. 'Her temp's gone up, and she's rather miserable because she's having a rigor or two. The doctor's just been with her, and he thinks the infection is still localized to the birth canal.'
I was even more suspicious of her optimism. 'What was the organism? I've had some training in bacteriology.'
'It's a haemolytic streptococcus,' she said calmly.
'Oh,' I said. Rosie was seriously ill. Potentially, gravely so. I went into the ward to find her pale, shivering and frightened. I stayed only a few minutes, distrusting too plainly my own reassurances.
'The doctor wants to move your wife to the hospital isolation block out at Chiswick,' the midwife imparted as I left. 'She'll be better looked after there.'
'Can Dr Colebrook see her? You know that I'm acquainted with him.'
'Dr Colebrook sees all the patients in the isolation block.'
'It's puerperal fever, isn't it?'
'I don't think we need quite say that. It's a severe infection, but still not a generalized one. Let's hope for the best, shall we? Can we get hold of you if we want to?'
'I'm at Arundel College all day. At night you'll have to send a policeman, or something.'
The isolation block in Goldhawk Road at Chiswick had been opened five years. Its forty beds gathered puerperal fever cases from the whole of west London. The patients were nursed in separate cubicles off battleship-grey corridors and the place reeked of antiseptic. Colebrook had instituted nursing with rubber gloves, sterile gowns and face masks, like a surgical operation, but two or three out of every thousand women delivered at Queen Charlotte's still died from childbed fever, and twelve of the forty ill women in the cubicles would not leave them alive.
With characteristic kindness, Colebrook came from his laboratory to Rosie's cubicle as I was leaving on the Friday afternoon.
'She doesn't look too well, Coli.'
'The infection seems to have spread to the peritoneal membrane lining the abdomen,' he said in his solemn way. 'That's not a good sign, I'm afraid. And of course your poor wife is suffering, with the distention and tenderness.'
We started walking along the corridors towards the door. 'She was very distressed at leaving the baby.'
