CONNECTIONS      1996-12
by James Burke

Sweet Dreams

One of the less glamorous aspectsof my work is having to fly frequent transatlantic red-eyes, and any airline that gives me a sleep-inducing hot chocolate gets my money. So there I was the other night, droning up into the sky, sipping and thinking about Sir Hans Sloane. Sloane helped to establish the place where I do most of my research,when his collection of 2,500 plants, animals and assorted memorabilia became the core of what would end up as the British Museum. And it was Sloane (while spending time in 1688 as personal physician to the governor of Jamaica) who discover edthe soothing effects of mixing chocolate and warm milk.

Back in England, in 1715, Sloane treated one of thegreat beauties and literary wits, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was suffering from smallpox. (She ended up with no eyelashes and a pitted face.) A year later, when Lady Mary moved to Turkey with her incompetent ambassador husband and saw what the locals were doing for smallpox (inoculation), she carried outTurkish-style treatment on her own son. When she went home, she persuaded various royals to inoculate their kids. Then, with Sloane's help, everybody else got vaccinated, too.

In 1736 Lady Mary found herself fatally attracted (as were various other lords and ladies) to an androgynous Italian science typenamed Francesco Algarotti, half her age, who was visiting London and doing for women readers a rewrite of Isaac Newton's work. They fell hopelessly in love.Well, she did. Three years of one-sided passion later, Lady M.headed for Italy and a change of air, after arranging a secret rendezvous with Algarotti. Of course, he never showed, having gone off to Prussia to be court chamberlain (the Prussian crown prince Frederick had also apparently fallen for him, to judge by the fact that he went around referring to Algarotti as the "Swan of Padua").

Algarotti was a bit of a social climber (you noticed), and so he must have been tickled pink when his interest in Newton brought him a social invitation as rare as hen's teeth. It was to stay at the Château de Cirey in Lorraine, at which the extremely reclusive François-Marie Arouet Voltaire was holed up with his intellectual paramour Gabrielle Émilie, Marquise de Châtelet (the French state security cops were after Voltaire for such misdemeanors as saying England had a better political system). Each of the mwas also producing a version of Newton: he, a general book for lay readers; she, a rather more demanding commentary on the Principia Mathematica.

Voltaire also happened to be a big admirer of a pal of Algarotti's: the Italian priest-experimenter Lazzaro Spallanzani, who (100 years before Louis Pasteur) noticed that putrefaction did not occur in hermetically sealed vessels. He also investigated how flat stones skipped on water, climbed around volcanoes and sliced up thousands of worms, snails, salamanders and tadpoles to test their regenerative abilities. He reported the first case ever of artificial insemination of a spaniel. Above all, Spallanzani made real enemies among the scientific establishment by rubbishing the popular idea of spontaneous generation of life (that is, that maggots came from decaying meat, mice from rotting cheese, and so on).

Spallanzani became so famous that he inspired the wizard-genius character in one of a collection of creepy pseudoscientific yarns (full of maniacs, automata, ghosts and such) written around 1815 by a Berlin lawyer and known, from the author's name, as the Tales of Hoffmann. Apart from having his story lines snitched by such operatic biggies as Tchaikovsky and Wagner, E.T.A. Hoffmann's other main claim to fame was that he defended a pan-German liberal fanatic by the name of Friedrich Jahn.

The recent defeat by the French had brought German university student mobs into the streets, calling for a united Germany, free speech, democracy and other such dangerous lunacy, and Jahn was in court because much of this stuff was his idea. That, and gymnastics. Which Jahn saw as the only way to make German youth strong and disciplined enough for"the struggle ahead." A crackdown on Jahn's adherents followed his trial, on grounds that exercise might be detrimental to state security.

After one of Jahn's devotees carried out the spectacular 1819 stabbing of a well-known establishment figure, August von Kotzebue, freedom of the press was abolished, all universities were taken over bythe state, and another disciple, the athletic liberal Karl Follen (a close friend of the Kotzebue stabber), fled to Harvard. There he opened the firstcollege gym in America and started everybody jogging. By 1851 German-Americangymnastics was so widespread that 100 gym clubs had united as the SocialistGymnasts' League and were chosen to provide Abraham Lincoln's bodyguard at his inauguration in 1861.

German gymnastics really took off in the U.S. when the YMCA adopted physical health as one of its basic tenets and built some ofthe first public gyms (and eventually invented basketball to play in them). The international nature of the YMCA movement had been established as early as 1855, with a conference held in Paris to cement the charter. This gathering was the brainstorm of Swiss libertarian and evangelist Jean-Henri Dunant.

In 1859 Dunant happened to be in Italy watching the one-day battle of Solferino (people used to picnic on hills next to battlefields and enjoy the carnage). Dunant was so appalled at the condition ofthe 6,000 wounded that he fetched buckets of water and 300 citizens andbattle-watching tourists to wash wounds all night. In 1862 the publication of his book Memories of Solferino led to the founding of the Swiss Red Cross in 1864. By the end of the century the Red Cross was on every battlefield, doing everything but blood transfusions (probably needed by the wounded above all else but which, when attempted, often seemed to kill ratherthan cure).

It took the Viennese immunologist Karl Landsteiner to make transfusions possible. In 1909 he discovered the three main blood groups--A, B and O--and in doing so revolutionized surgery at a stroke of the needle. In 1922 Landsteiner moved to the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City and collected a Nobel in 1930.

That same year, in the same place, another Nobelwinner, French-born surgeon Alexis Carrel, who had developed new suturing techniques that changed the world of blood vessel surgery, took a major stepforward in organ transplantation (for which Landsteiner's blood-matching discovery was essential). The success followed Carrel's collaboration with achap whose sister-in-law had a heart valve problem that was inoperable becauseat the time there was no way to maintain the patient's circulation during theoperation.

So when somebody introduced this fellow to Carrel,they became a dream team. Over the next few years he perfected a new perfusionpump for Carrel that used compressed gas to keep the necessary fluids flowingin the body. In 1938 both men made the cover of Time.

The pump maker was used to the publicity, ofcourse, because he was already world-famous. He was Charles Lindbergh, in 1927the first person to fly across the Atlantic and the man who made possible flights like the one on which I nodded off at the beginning of this column.Hope you didn't.