by Arthur Allen
Erwin Ding, 23 years old, baby faced and five feet eight inches, with short brown wavy hair, smiles from his 1935 SS personnel file—alert and handsome, in a boyish way, though with eyes a little close together, and an expression that suggests cunning and trouble. In his résumé he writes cheerfully of his future career and the bright prospects of Nazi Germany. But how he hated his name! It was the ridicule-inspiring detritus of an unhappy childhood that he wanted to bury under a glorious career in the service of the master race. In the process of filling out the tiresome questionnaires required of all SS men, Ding launched a legal appeal to change his name to Erwin Schuler. He provided two reasons. In the first place, Ding wrote, he needed to clarify that Schuler was his father in order to show his Aryan genetic background; proof of good blood was far more significant than any lingering bitterness Erwin might have carried for this man who so cruelly used his mother. The Schuler family, according to the numerous genealogical charts Ding filled out for the SS, had an illustrious German ancestry traceable at least to the 16th century.*
The reason closest to his heart for the change, however, was that he was sick of people making fun of him. “From my earliest school days, the name Ding has provided my schoolmates and enemies an excuse for ridicule and teasing wordplay,” he wrote in an early entreaty. “It’s always been, here comes ‘Ding an Sich,’ [“the thing in itself”—a reference to Kant’s philosophy] or ‘There goes Mr. Ding-Dong’ ‘the Washlady’s Ding,’ and things of this nature.” The name Ding, which means “thing” in German, was an albatross that the ambitious young man could never seem to shake. He obsessed over it nearly to the end of his very busy, criminal existence.
Erwin Ding, 1935. (Bundesarchiv.)
For Ludwik Fleck, 1935 was also an important year. The great hero of Polish independence, Marshal Piłsuldski, died, and the sea of black armbands worn by Piłsudski loyalists in Lwów did nothing to keep politicians of a more anti-Semitic stamp from grabbing the reins of state. “Poland was literally sick with this problem,” Ludwik Hirszfeld later wrote, adding, “When I think back about the German atrocities, Polish anti-Semitism seems mild to me. Nationalism was young and, seeking to discharge itself emotionally, fell upon the Jews as the nearest suitable object.”
Fleck’s main source of income, his private laboratory, was relatively unaffected by the political climate, since doctors, whether Aryan or Jewish, still needed diagnostic help, and his work was held in high regard. The publication of The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact was a happy achievement, though the book received relatively little attention. Fleck’s friend Chwistek, in a newspaper review, praised it as a landmark in philosophy. A few German reviewers, perhaps oblivious to the writer’s ethnic origins, speculated about how Fleck’s evident scientific relativism fit into the Nazi worldview, which also divided science into different categories—Aryan and non-Aryan. In Lwów, Fleck was asked to give lectures by various learned and medical societies. In 1936, he was elected chairman of the Lwów chapter of the 400-member Jewish Medical Society, and on April 21 he gave a speech at an auditorium on Mariacki Square, the central plaza of Lwów. A year later, he presented an update on new developments in infectious disease at the same locale. Fleck’s lectures were advertised in the popular Jewish daily Chwila (Moment), published in Polish in morning and evening editions.
Fleck’s book was not, ostensibly, aimed at a Jewish audience, though it must have struck a chord among scientifically trained Jews who had learned, through nationalistic exclusion, that the scientific community to which they belonged was just as subject as any other field to cultural tendencies. Fleck’s marginality—his enforced independence—clearly liberated his thought. He was a practicing scientist virtually outside the academic stream, a Jew in Catholic Poland, an intellectual on the edge, in some sense, of the enlightened world. All of this may have made it easier to view the structures of the scientific establishment with a critical eye. Fleck was not shy about exposing the pathetic sham of “Jewish versus Aryan” science, but this was not the main thrust of his work. He was looking at something deeper, something constant in the complexion of human behavior.
Science, Fleck wrote, was increasingly dependent on specific techniques, methods of investigation, and instruments. There was no such thing as “pure” scientific truth, because scientists relied utterly, in their inquisitive work, on tools that were artifacts of scientific culture. Specialists no longer believed they were looking into the heart of things; they no longer pretended that any Ding an sich, or essence of things, was within their grasp. “When they penetrate ever deeper into objects they find themselves more distant from the ‘things’ and closer to the ‘methods,’” wrote Fleck. “The deeper in the woods, the fewer the trees and the more numerous the woodcutters.” No matter how science was practiced, he held, the procedures and concepts behind the work were shared collectively. In modern parlance, Fleck might have said that “thinking outside the box” was a rare phenomenon. In a democratic system, the scientific elite catered not only to each other but also to the interested public, which provided research money and prestige and, perhaps most importantly, validated the collective’s work by spreading versions of its successful research findings. Thought collectives consisted of inner, “esoteric circles” of specialists, and what Fleck called “exoteric circles,” that is, nonspecialist but interested parties. In fields other than science, the thought collectives were more elitist, keeping their distance from the outer circles through secretiveness and dogmatism. One example, in his view, was the religious organization—Fleck had observed both Jewish and Catholic forms—and another, on a lighter note, the fashion industry, with its arbitrary yet airtight requirements:
The special mood of the thought collective of fashion is constituted by a readiness immediately to notice that which is fashionable and to consider it of absolute importance, by a feeling of solidarity with other members of the collective, and by an unbounded confidence in the members of the esoteric circle. The most dedicated followers of fashion are found far out in the exoteric circle. They have no immediate contact with the powerful dictators forming the esoteric circle. Specialized “creations” reach them only through what might be called the official channels of intracollective communication, depersonalized and thus all the more compulsive. . . . [T]hey are simply told “ce qu’il vous faut pour cet hiver” [Here’s what you must wear] or “à Paris la femme porte”. . . . It is coercion of the strongest kind, because it appears in the guise of a self-evident necessity and is thus not even recognized as a coercive force. And woe to the true believer who does not or cannot conform.
Dogmatism was also, of course, the characteristic of scientific thought collectives in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. For progress to take place, Fleck believed, the “esoteric circle” needed to interact with the outer circles. Democracy, he said, leads to the development of new ideas and to progress, while isolated elites were characterized by “conservatism and rigidity.” Fleck was not a relativist about the democratic requirements of science. Stalinist and Nazi thought styles could not replace a practice that demanded free thought, even if scientific thought was not quite as unencumbered as people assumed.
Although it could rarely offer definitive answers to anything, Fleck wrote, science had to do its best to inform the public—even people with arcane specialties relied on popular versions of science to express their knowledge. To give a sense of how this worked, he provided a hypothetical case in which he was asked to examine a throat swab from a child who might be suffering from diphtheria. After conducting an examination, Fleck tells the family doctor, “The microscopic specimen shows numerous small rods whose shapes and positions correspond to those of diphtheria bacilli. Cultures grown from them produced typical ‘Löffler bacilli.’”* If Fleck were communicating his findings to a fellow microbiologist, he would give a much more detailed, nuanced descriptive passage that concluded, “In view of the origin of the examined material, and the morphological and culture charac
teristics of the bacilli, the diagnosis of Löffler bacilli seems sufficiently well established.” The parent, meanwhile, would simply be told, “‘Your child has diphtheria.”
The fact that the bacteria were found in the throat of a young patient with symptoms of diphtheria was crucial to the diagnosis. You had to know what you were looking for when you looked into a microscope, and your scientific acculturation inevitably shaped what you saw. If Fleck had been ignorant of the surface that had been swabbed, it would have been impossible—in 1935, anyway—for him to hazard more than a guess at the identity of these germs, whose forms and shapes were highly variable. Every expert understood this. If Fleck said as much to the family doctor, however, the latter might accuse him of cutting corners, or stating the obvious. As a member of a wider thought collective that also included, broadly, the family doctor and the patient, the scientist had to communicate on different levels to bring about a successful treatment.
Every communication and, indeed, all nomenclature tends to make any item of knowledge more exoteric and popular. Otherwise each word would require a footnote. . . . Each word of the footnote would need in turn a second word pyramid. If continued, this would produce a structure that could be presented only in multidimensional space. Such exhaustive expert knowledge completely lacks clarity and is unsuitable in any practical case. . . . Certainty, simplicity, vividness originate in popular knowledge.
Yet the push for clarity had its costs. To get consistent results, scientists needed bacteria to be fixed and stable species. To achieve this uniformity, Fleck noted, they usually injected animals or culture plates with bacteria that had been growing in a given medium for 24 hours or less. This was more likely to provide “fixed” species, but it also meant ignoring any secondary changes that would typically occur in the bacterial cultures after they had sat an additional day or so in the petri dish.
By 1935, strict Kochian logic—the idea that bacteria inevitably cause disease—was out of date. Nicolle and others had shown that some people (“Typhoid Mary,” for example) carried and could transmit bacteria without becoming ill. Scientists were starting to notice the abundance of seemingly harmless bacteria in and on the human body. Yet these observations had to reckon with a scientific culture permeated with “primitive images of war” brought down from earlier periods of human thought, Fleck wrote: “The disease demon haunted the birth of modern concepts of infection and forced itself upon research workers irrespective of all rational considerations.” This was despite the fact that “man appears as a complex to whose harmonious well-being many bacteria, for instance, are absolutely essential.” Imbalance, rather than invasion, was a better analogy for disease, he wrote, but in 1935 this idea was “not yet clear, for it belongs to future rather than present biology. It is found in present-day biology only by implication, and has yet to be sorted out in detail.” As Fleck predicted, today we know that people are colonized by trillions of bacteria that play crucial roles in our digestion and other bodily functions. It was not until the 21st century that science began focusing in earnest on these commensal organisms.
Among the procedures Fleck worked on as a bench scientist was the Wassermann reaction. This test’s value in establishing a diagnosis of syphilis was the specific “fact” Fleck examined in Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. The Wassermann test took its name from the German-Jewish scientist August Paul von Wassermann, who with colleagues at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin announced the creation of the test in 1906. For Fleck, the development of the Wassermann reaction perfectly embodied the culturally conditioned nature of science.
First of all, the test came about because the German health minister, in competition with the French, had offered special funds to scientists to develop a quick test for syphilis. The disease had a major impact on the military and other groups, which gave it a political significance. Culturally, it symbolized the evils of fornication, and thus a blood test was seen not only as crucial to public health but also as necessary to uncovering the tainting of the blood, whose “purity” continued to have deep cultural meaning. “Thus from the very beginning,” Fleck wrote, “the rise of the Wassermann reaction was not based upon purely scientific factors alone.”
Fleck also found it revealing that the test that Wassermann “discovered” was not really a test for syphilis. Syphilis, an organism known as a treponeme, could not be grown easily in a petri dish. It was like typhus in this way. Since he couldn’t grow pure cultures of syphilis, Wassermann used heart tissue from syphilis-infected cows. When he mixed these tissues with the blood of syphilitic patients, it caused a reaction that destroyed the red blood cells—indicating the presence of antibodies to syphilis in the patients’ blood. The test had not been out long, however, when other scientists noticed that extracts of noninfected cow hearts produced the same reaction, which was caused not by the treponemes, it turned out, but by cardiolipin, a substance present in beef hearts. The Wassermann reaction, though often inaccurate, quickly became a standard tool in the medical diagnostician’s handbasket. If Wassermann had been as clumsy in formulating a test against, say, athlete’s foot, his inquiry probably would have ended with the initial failure. But society required action on syphilis.
Fleck was not the only scientist of this period to push against old-school bacteriological notions. The 1930s in Germany saw the growing resurgence of the ideas of Max von Pettenkofer, the Munich hygienist who had lost the environment-versus-germ argument to Robert Koch in the late 19th century. Pettenkofer believed that germs were not fundamental to infectious diseases, which he thought broke out in epidemics where populations lived in filth or had chronically bad health and nutrition. His beliefs were incorporated into an old-new theory called Geomedizin, whose leading practitioner was Heinz Zeiss of the Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases in Hamburg. Like Pettenkofer, Geomedizin’s followers took a holistic view of infectious disease, going beyond the presumed causative agent, the germ. But whereas the social medicine promoted by Pettenkofer’s school was aimed at improving the health of individuals by improving community nutrition, water, education, and other factors, Geomedizin defined disease in racial and cultural terms. Zeiss and his disciples—the SS doctors Joachim Mrugowsky and Erwin Ding trained with him in Berlin in the late 1930s—amassed great influence under Nazi rule. Zeiss called his field the “science of terrain-related medicine”; a colleague elaborated that “the borders that contain a race [Volkskörper] also include a particular disease-causing flora and fauna. The climatic environment of a people, its cultural level, and its customs also fit into its own microworld.”
Geomedizin was exactly the kind of quackish, totalizing system of thought that Fleck castigated in his book; it borrowed real scientific findings to prop up a worldview based on culture alone. Fleck viewed such belief systems as deluded claptrap. But they were dangerous beliefs, because the followers of Geomedizin, race hygiene, and other dubious Nazi ideas were to become medical authorities in occupied Europe. In a 1944 journal article, for example, Mrugowsky concluded that one could judge a country’s level of “culture” by the types of infectious illness that predominated (diseases carried by insects [typhus] and water [typhoid fever] were characteristic of underdeveloped Southern and Eastern European cultures, he wrote; Nordics suffered primarily from respiratory illnesses). It was an entirely pointless article in terms of its scientific content, but it was not without significance, for Mrugowsky, at the time, was one of the leading SS health officers. He was responsible for medical experiments at concentration camps around Europe. He procured the Zyklon B cyanide gas that ended up being used in Auschwitz’s gas chambers.
The ideology of Geomedizin—that illness was an irrefutable and inevitable result of culture—carried tragic significance for the Jews of Eastern Europe, for it provided an excuse for the doctors who worked with the Nazi invaders to refuse care to the Jews and to quarantine them behind ghetto walls. In Eastern Europe, with its “low cultural level, terrible poverty and lack of clean
liness, typhus is a daily disease in broad swaths of the population, especially the Jews,” one Geomedizin follower wrote. The louse, carrier of typhus, was the symbol of the Jew in Nazi racial ideology: a filthy, parasitic, blood-sucking disease vector that had penetrated the German nation but was being massively extirpated. “The Jew is a bacillus and a plague,” said Julius Streicher, editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer. “He is not a human being, rather an enemy, a criminal, a disease carrier, that in the interests of humanity we must eliminate.” The association of lice and Jews was known to Franz Kafka when he opened his 1915 story, The Metamorphosis, with Gregor Samsa’s waking discovery that he had been transformed into einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer—“a monstrous vermin.” While some translators prefer “giant bug,” Samsa could just as well have been louse as roach.
The belief that certain cultures were inevitable carriers of a given disease embodied what Ludwik Fleck called “proto-ideas” in medicine. An 18th-century example was Cotton Mather’s belief that smallpox was caused by “animalcules.” It is tempting to view this as a perceptive progenitor of the notion of infectious microorganisms, but Mather’s concept was really a proto-idea, a piece of an earlier “thought style” in which the “animalcule” was no indifferent microorganism, but rather an agent of evil. In Mather’s time, the invisibility of the microbial world made its denizens impossible to distinguish from the demons and angels whose existence was every bit as real as smallpox to Mather and his compatriots.