I can remember today that speck of mould on Fleming's Petri dish. It was fluffy and white, its centre dark green, almost black. I remember wondering at the time if it was the same mould as grew upon the loaves we ate in the basement, too stale to set before our betters above stairs. My mother would often bandage it on my septic cuts, an old wives' remedy which sent me to school with my fingers in the form of a sandwich. The mould from a dead man's skull was apparently more effective, had she been able to lay her hands on any.
The mould had at least not lodged me unfavourably in the memory of Sir Almroth Wright. As I left for tea with him three weeks later, I daringly slipped into my tweed jacket pocket the phial of Domagk's 'Streptozon'. I decided that the King's physician had been a shade off-hand about the drug. Today I realize that Sir Edward had little faith in any treatment at all, because there was little treatment to have any faith in, even for a King. He had only insulin for the diabetic, liver for the anaemic and digitalis for the cardiac, X-rays were ghostly and the electrocardiograph a delicate toy. He used mostly his own eyes, hands and ears, dextrously assembling round the sick man a fragile scaffolding of the medicaments available until Nature cured.
I had not set eyes on St Mary's Hospital since leaving with my scholarship, after working there and enjoying free its first-year lectures. It was an exorbitantly solid building of red brick and stone, its first and second floors with verandahs looking upon the passing bus tops in Praed Street. The Prince Consort laid its foundation stone in 1845, it grew amid the shrieks of engines from Paddington Station, the miasmas of the Grand Junction Canal and the stink of a nearby carter's stables. The hospital itself was sick in my time. It was the most popular among the medical students in London, being the worst and therefore the easiest to get into. But the new dean was already effecting a cure, as in World War II he effected it with the health of Winston Churchill.
The terrace of seedy Victorian shops opposite was the same, so was the Fountains Abbey pub on the corner. But the turret which had housed the Inoculation Department, in converted poky wards and sisters' sitting-rooms, was superseded by a handsome, rectangular, five-storied building joined to the hospital by a bridge and known to everyone as 'The House of Lords'.
'Ah! Young Elgar. Been on your travels, I hear.'
I found Sir Almroth Wright in his own laboratory, at his elbow a row of metal drums packed with test-tubes plugged by cotton wool, on the bench before him microscope, Petri dishes, platignum loops, a throaty Bunsen burner, behind him shelves of chemical reagents and dyes. A bacteriologist, like an airline pilot, has to keep everything within finger-tip reach.
He immediately started talking to me in German, which he had learned fifty years before as a student in Leipzig. It seemed to suit his taste for polysyllabled pomposity. Pink cheeked, white hair brushed across the dome of his head, white moustached, he had a Nordic look inherited from his grandfather, once Director of the Swedish Mint. He had a protruding lower lip, circular steel-rimmed glasses half way down a stubby nose, a dark suit with the hopelessly ill-fitting look of a growing schoolboy's, and only a wing collar to show respect for his professional position.
'It would seem that Herr Hitler's cohorts are now diverting their murderous energies more usefully against each other,' he broke off in English, after we had talked of Wuppertal and Domagk. 'Directly after von Papen-of all people-dared to speak out for tolerance, freedom of the Press, silence for fanatics, and all that. Causing Dr Goebbels to stuff his fingers very promptly into his countrymen's ear-holes. From my knowledge of the officer corps, I should imagine the German Army was behind the massacre at Munich. They wouldn't care for Rцhm's plan to enlist a brownshirted rabble of two and a half million Storm Troopers in their ranks.'
I saw that he was not condescending to invite my opinion, and indeed events had moved so swiftly in Germany after my leaving that I could not give one. It was shortly after the 'Night of the Long Knives', when Hitler appeared at two o'clock on the Saturday morning of June 30 at the Hanslbauer Hotel in the lakeside resort of Weissee near Munich, to pull his closest friend Ernst Rцhm and other top Storm Troopers from their beds, an operation simplified by many being in bed with each other. 'Peculators, drunkards and homosexuals', the Storm Troopers appeared through the monocle of General von Brauchitsch-and they were anyway interfering with the serious business of Germany's illicit rearmament.
A thousand other prominent Germans were murdered in the days which followed. Affable, portly 'Artful Dodger' General Kurt von Schleicher was shot on his doorstep with his new wife. The socialism in National Socialism was eliminated, the Storm Troopers were demoted, the black-uniformed SS were freed to become the most efficient and ruthless political police in Europe's tortured history. President Hindenburg watched it all through eyes dimming with death, and the gentleman showjumper Franz von Papen, whose talent for survival approached genius, lived to fight another day, at Nьrnberg.
German politics lead us on to German drugs. Sir Almroth tipped my red 'Streptozon' tablets into the palm of his hand.
'I left Elberfeld with the laboratory and the factory in my mind inseparable,' he said in a discouraging voice. 'I G Farben churns out every variety of chemical for dyes, pesticides and yarns, and Professor Domagk churns them into mice, to see if the chemical kills them, or the bacteria with which he's already infected the poor creatures. That's not experimentation. That's not even science. It's roulette-a limited mental exercise, which even with the best of luck inevitably bankrupts the players.'
I had anticipated a rebuff more readily than from Sir Edward. Sir Almroth Wright was a Victorian naturalist with a microscope, at one with the country rector classifying his lepidoptera, the holidaymaking schoolmaster chipping specimens from the Alps, the don with camel-hair brush cross-pollinating his roses. He sought the panacea with glass microscope slides, putty and dabs of sealing-wax.
'The cure for disease, the elimination of human disease altogether, lies in the intelligent application of vaccine therapy,' he emphasized to me. This was more than Wright's life work. It was Wright's life. 'Do you know what is far superior to any mouse as an experimental animal? The human white blood corpuscle. We watch down our microscopes the effect of our cures upon that, not upon cages of white mice.'
He handed me back the phial. I was in no position to protest, nor had I the courage. Our conversation was anyway disrupted by the sudden appearance of Dr John Freeman, tall, handsome, Charterhouse and Oxford, in his fifties but eternally energetic, said in the Inoculation Department always to 'Blow in, blow up and blow out'.
Sir Almroth gave his usual salutation, 'Well, friend, what have you won from our Mother Science today?'
They started discussing hay fever, on which Freeman was an expert. He thought this miserable complaint to be caused by the spores of moulds, and for years had scraped bedroom floors all over London for specimens of them. They were shortly joined by Professor Alexander Fleming, as different from Freeman as Burns from Byron.
Flem was not Charterhouse and Oxford, but Kilmarnock Academy and Regent Street Polytechnic. The last of an Ayrshire sheep farmer's large family, he clerked four years in a Leadenhall Street shipping office before warmer breezes of fortune brought him the windfall of a legacy, and wafted him into St Mary's at the turn of the century. He had passed the surgical fellowship with the plan of applying his nimble fingers to the profitable scalpel of an eye surgeon, but had been given a job in the Inoculation Department to retain at St Mary's his other talents as a sharpshooter in the hospital rifle team.
Their talk turned to wound infection. All three had served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the war at No 13 General Hospital in Boulogne Casino, studying infection in the top floor laboratory, even constructing experimental wounds among the plethora from paper and spiky test-tubes impregnated with blood serum and germs. Wright had always been close to the Army. He was professor at the Army Medical School in the 1890s, resigning when the Army ridiculed his notion of inoculation against typhoid fever. Fifteen out of every thousand soldiers in the Boer War died from typhoid, then the Army thought again, and in the Great War the proportion dropped to two.
Sir Almroth had a military air about him, the atmosphere of his department was said to resemble a mess of the Indian Medical Service, and so did the language. He always talked of his 'sons in science', and if one of them had the effrontery to get married never spoke to him for six months. A Marie Curie, a Florence Nightingale, could never have found work in the Inoculation Department. He had married one of the most intelligent women in Ireland, but that blew up before Europe did in 1914, and he went home every night to a housekeeper's dinner off the Earls Court Road. That he was a homosexual was a secret which everyone knew and no one uttered.
It was four o'clock. We went through to the library, which contained a divan, some wooden chairs, a square kitchen table and a gas ring for the kettle. Tea was a daily ritual which Wright naturally dominated. George Bernard Shaw probably attended because even he was flattered to share the cabalistic confidences of medical men.
I had never set eyes on GBS, nor on a performance of one of his plays, but I had heard all about him. In the 1930s everyone in England had heard all about him, because he was continually telling Englishmen what to do about everything. I saw the famous grizzly white beard, the thick white eyebrows and neatly parted white hair. He wore a brown tweed suit with a soft collar and loosely-knotted tie. Shaw was then seventy-eight. Wright was seventy-three. Both were Irishmen. They had known, respected and misunderstood one another since the start of the century.
I had decided to write a note of the expectedly brilliant conversation, which I still have. Like lesser men, they talked of women.
'Emotional tension is intolerant of an intellectual impasse,' declared Sir Almroth, 'but not in the woman. The female intellect will fail in trying conditions, as a Baby Austin car will fail on a steep hill.' He had himself learned to drive a car at the age of sixty-four. 'She will either come to a halt, coast with ever-increasing momentum back to where she started from, or blow up and burst into tears.'
Shaw was arrogantly at ease, long legs stuck out. 'The female intellect will grasp as quickly as my own that you are reloading your guns with the same ammunition you fired against the Suffragettes. And now it's even more likely to explode in your face, with twenty years' rust on it.'
'My target has not changed. It has simply progressed a little. I wrote _The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage_ in 1913.' Everyone in the Inoculation Department had heard of the book and no one had read it. 'Today they hoist the flag of Women's Freedom, but that is the flag of financial freedom for women and financial servitude for men.'
'Any man will beggar himself for a woman, with the exquisite cheerfulness he reserves for observing somebody else beggar his neighbour.' Shaw had of course no need to wind up the watch of his wit, but the chimes sometimes had little relevance to the hour.
I noticed Fleming, perched on the table looking bored. He was a short, stocky man, with a large head, a pink complexion, pale blue eyes, a small chin and a straight mouth which turned down at each end like Sir Walter Scott's. His was that unmercurial Lowland face, to be encountered as readily in the pubs of Glasgow as the mission huts of China or the surgeries of Canada. He was clean shaven, though at the Boulogne Casino he was a Lieutenant with a neat triangular black moustache. He seldom smiled. He was often silent.
At fifty-three, his thick black hair with a quiff had grown grey. He wore his usual dark suit, with semi-stiff collar and spotted bow tie, and it was the brief period of the year which he found too warm for his grey knitted pullover. He had an enormous wristwatch. He was nearly always smoking a cigarette. I wondered if his thoughts were in his lab, or the Chelsea Arts Club where he stopped on his way home, or even further in the hills of Argyll.
Sir Almroth took a teacup from the fixedly smiling Freeman. He continued severely, 'You cannot divert attention from good arguments by bad ones, as you repeatedly succeed in doing on the stage.'
'The female physiological constitution is a matter of fashion, like all medical theories. Today's philosophy is tomorrow's absurdity, and what was rank foolishness last year is everybody's wisdom the next.'
It was the traditional fireworks display in the Inoculation Department, but the squibs were growing damp. Shaw did not die until he broke his hip lopping trees in 1950, but that afternoon in St Mary's he had everything behind him, only Geneva and _In Good King Charles's Golden Days_ to come. It was thirty years since Wright had struck from his flinty mind the spark of _The Doctor's Dilemma._ The play was prompted by a gratified observation from Freeman that the Department had more work than it could handle, and Wright's reply to Shaw's inevitable question that the human life for the doctor to save under such pressure of strained resources was the life most worth saving. Sir Almroth had walked out of the first night at the Royal Court Theatre in 1906, not because he objected to his depiction on the boards as Sir Colenso Ridgeon, the stimulator of the phagocytes, but because in his opinion Shaw killed off the wrong patient.
Behind Sir Almroth that afternoon was his brazen declaration, 'The physician of the future will be an immunizer.' Ahead lay the bitter confession at the age of eighty to the Royal Society of Medicine, of the 'Need for abandoning much in immunology regarded as assured.' He left a heap of discredited medical theories and a book on logic, which consumed his life in the writing and again which nobody wanted to read.
As I left, Fleming handed me silently a copy of the _British Journal of Experimental Pathology,_ which he inscribed on the cover _For J Elgar,_ and signed. Neither he nor anyone else had said anything about a job.