10 minute read
History Lesson
JAY BURNS
Some of the pathogens that Sawyer cultured and mounted during his wartime service were doozies, including meningitis, diphtheria, anthrax, and gonorrhea.
Found in Carnegie Science Hall, a Bates biology professor’s historic teaching slides, created during World War I, feature a veritable What’s What of deadly pathogens — including one that infected a high-ranking Army officer
by jay burns
THE HAND-LETTERED LABEL on the World War I–era microscope slide is blunt: “Gonococci. Highest ranking officer in Marseille. W.H.S.”
Translation: The slide contains the gonorrhea-causing Neisseria gonorrhoeae bacteria, presumably taken from a U.S. Army bigwig stationed in Marseille, France. “W.H.S.” stands for “William H. Sawyer,” a 1913 Bates graduate and later a longtime professor of biology, who prepared the slide while stationed at an Army lab in the French port city during the war.
The gonococci slide was among a trove of Sawyer’s historic teaching slides discovered in a Carnegie Science Hall storage room in April 2020. The slides feature a veritable What’s What of deadly pathogens that cause diseases like meningitis, diphtheria, and anthrax. (The samples are “fixed,” meaning dead and inert.)
A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Bates, Sawyer earned a master’s degree from Cornell before attending one of the Army’s new laboratory schools, at Yale, to learn the basics of bacteriology and
At 40x magnification, this image shows the bacteria Bacillus anthracis, which causes anthrax. Don’t worry; it was fixed (made inert) on a microscope slide by William Sawyer while he worked in an Army lab in Marseille, France, during World War I.
ANNA MARIE BOWSHER
pathology as the U.S. prepared to enter the Great War.
After training, Sawyer, by then a sergeant in the U.S. Army, was sent to France, crossing the Atlantic on the SS Belgic, “loaded with explosives and about 5,000 troops,” according to a brief story about Sawyer’s wartime experiences in The Bates Student.
After arriving in Winchester, England, Sawyer was sent to Marseille, where the Army had established one of its 11 Base Sections to funnel war supplies from incoming ships to the front lines, including everything from tins of corned beef and instant coffee to trench mortars and machine guns.
At Base Section No. 6 in Marseille, Sawyer and colleagues set up a laboratory, one of some 300 labs that the Army aggressively deployed throughout Europe to identify and fight the infectious diseases that always accompany armed forces.
There were many of them, and some doozies.
The pathogens that Sawyer cultured and mounted include Bacillus anthracis, which causes anthrax. It is now thought that soldiers in World War I contracted anthrax from infected horse hair in their military-issued shaving kits.
He also cultured Balantidium coli (intestinal disease) Corynebacterium diphtheriae (diphtheria), Mycobacterium tuberculosis (tuberculosis), Neisseria meningitidis (meningitis), and Staphylococcus albus and Staphylococcus aureus, which cause wound infections.
He also identified parasitic diseases like dysentery, caused by Entamoeba histolytica, and blood eosinophilia, caused by tapeworms.
Disease, particularly influenza, caused nearly as many U.S. Army deaths as combat during World War I. The one-two punch of the flu and pneumonia as a secondary bacterial infection killed some 45,000 soldiers by the end of 1918. That’s only about 8,500 fewer than those who died in combat.
Sawyer’s slides include some with pneumonia-causing streptococci, but mostly he found gonorrhea: eight of the slides in his collection, out of some two dozen, feature gonococci, suggesting that the disease (as well as other sexually transmitted diseases) was widespread at Base Section No. 6, as it was throughout armies on both sides of the war.
During World War I, only the influenza pandemic accounted for more loss of wartime duty than STDs, which cost the U.S. Army some seven million person-days and led to 10,000 men being discharged.
Of all the gonococci slides in Sawyer’s collection, only the one with “highest ranking officer” written on the label has such a detail about who the “host” was. Was Sawyer showing a bit of snark, perhaps, toward the officer corps? (And who exactly was the “highest-ranking officer” with the clap? We did find a colonel in Army records who stepped down from command of the Marseille Base Section in March 1919, when the station was still active.)
The cleanup of the Carnegie storage space that resulted in the discovery of Sawyer’s slides was partly inspired by pandemic downtime but also by the pending move of equipment to Bonney Science Center this past summer.
While many of the slides were created by Sawyer, the labels on others indicate that they came from professional labs. Beth Malachowsky, a chemistry research assistant who was among the first to examine the slides, says that Sawyer’s specimens are in remarkably good shape. While the stained bacteria on some of the professionally prepared slides have faded over time, the bacteria fixed on Sawyer’s slides are still visible more than a century later.
Malachowsky works in the lab of Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Andrew
MUSKIE ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS LIBRARY
At Commencement 1949, Professor of Biology William Sawyer, Class of 1913, inspects the college’s new mace as President Charles Phillips looks on.
Kennedy, a cutting-edge memory researcher who was also part of the crew that found the Sawyer slides in Carnegie.
A student of the history of science, Kennedy has thought about “what it means to find these slides, many prepared during the 1918 influenza pandemic, during today’s pandemic.”
What feels similar to 1918, he says, is the politics of the pandemic. “We’re in a similar place. In 1918, the mask also became a political symbol, and there were riots about it — which always seems to happen with disease: People tend to get frustrated and turn on one another politically.”
What’s very different from 1918, he says, is that scientists a century ago knew very little about viruses. “Today, we saw accurate illustrations of the coronavirus even before it was detected in the U.S.,” Kennedy says.
In fact, during the 1918 pandemic, there was “considerable debate in the scientific community” about the cause of influenza, he says. Many scientists thought that a bacterium, Pfeiffer’s bacillus, caused influenza because it was often found in the lungs of people sick with the flu.
There are no samples of Pfeiffer’s bacillus in Sawyer’s collection, even though he undoubtedly cultured the bacteria, Kennedy believes. He speculates that the scientist disposed of them after it was determined years later that the bacterium was only a secondary invader after the influenza virus.
Scientists and other scholars are constantly filtering out what’s no longer thought to accurate-
ly explain our world, explains Kennedy. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION “I don’t tell my students, ‘We’re going to learn something today that’s no longer true.’ We don’t teach phrenology,” the idea that skull shape reflects personality. And in Sawyer’s case, he may have quite literally “filtered out the slides that weren’t important for his stu-
Face masks were as controversial during the 1918 pandemic as they have been during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 1918, dents.” He’s witnessed a similar shift with his neuroscience
Seattle citizens were not students. “Fifteen years ago, it permitted to ride a streetcar was thought that only about 2 without wearing a mask. percent of the genome was useful and the rest was ‘junk DNA.’ But we know now that, in fact, pretty much all DNA is recruited for some process besides encoding for proteins.” “My students don’t even know the ‘junk DNA’ idea — which seems amazing to me, because everyone over the age of 25 knows it well.” At the most basic level, Sawyer’s slides symbolize the power of scientific observation and its role in the scientific method. Anna Marie Bowsher, a Bates research associate who has recently headed to medical school, did much of the work to digitize and preserve Sawyer’s slide collection. She describes the thrill of seeing Sawyer’s handiwork under a microscope. “They’re interesting by themselves, but you don’t really know anything until you put a slide under the microscope,” says Bowsher — just like it was a century ago, in Sawyer’s day. “I think that’s really cool.” n
In Dana Chemistry Hall in July, Beth Malachowsky, research assistant in the lab of Andrew Kennedy, displays the microscope slide containing the bacteria Gonococci.
archives
Buckle Up
After winning the Colby-Bates-Bowdoin title 55 years ago, the football team received commemorative belt buckles. This one belonged to Kevin Murphy ’67 (he scratched his initials on the back). Another team member, Jeff Sturgis ’69, notes that members of the undefeated 1946 Bates squad, which included Sturgis’ dad, also received buckles.
Up for Argument
A century ago, in June 1921, Bates became the first college to debate abroad when, from left, Professor Craig Baird and his debaters Robert Watts, Class of 1922; Charles Starbird, Class of 1921; and Edward Morris, Class of 1921, sailed to England to debate at Oxford University. As the team set sail for Liverpool, President Warren Harding and Vice President Calvin Coolidge both sent congratulatory telegrams.
Gotta Match?
Featuring Hathorn Hall, this “match safe” would’ve hung on a homeowner’s wall to hold household matches. (Its hanger is broken off.) On the back is printed the name A.L. and E.F. Goss Co., a bygone purveyor of stoves and furnaces in Lewiston, suggesting that the match safe was perhaps a giveaway.
Put a Pin in It
This vintage Bates brooch, likely from the early 1900s, was made by the Charles M. Robbins Co. of Attleboro, Mass., well-known for its college memorabilia.
Look what I saw through the looking glass. First, an explanation of what you’re seeing: exhaust stacks on the roof of Carnegie Science Hall reflected in the windows of the “Beacon” at the new Bonney Science Center, right across Campus Avenue. Upon looking up, my eyes opened wide at the scene’s distorted color, pattern, and shape. Bonney will doubtlessly provide new opportunities for everyone who works in and walks by this striking treasure. As one of its new faculty occupants commented: “Eye candy!” — Phyllis Graber Jensen
Bates Magazine Fall 2021
Editor H. Jay Burns
Designer Jin Kwon
Production Manager Grace Kendall
Director of Photography Phyllis Graber Jensen
Photographer Theophil Syslo
Class Notes Editor Doug Hubley
Contributing Editor Mary Pols President of Bates A. Clayton Spencer
Chief Communications Officer Sean Findlen ’99
Bates Magazine Advisory Board Marjorie Patterson Cochran ’90 Geraldine FitzGerald ’75 David Foster ’77 Joe Gromelski ’74 Judson Hale Jr. ’82 Jonathan Hall ’83 Christine Johnson ’90 Jon Marcus ’82 Peter Moore ’78
Contact Us Bates Communications 2 Andrews Rd. Lewiston ME 04240 magazine@bates.edu 207-786-6330 Production Bates Magazine is published twice annually at family-owned Penmor Lithographers, just a few minutes from campus. We use paper created with 30 percent postconsumer fiber and print with inks that are 99.5 percent free of volatile compounds.
On the Cover Stella James Sims, Class of 1897, has renewed prominence at Bates these days with the appointment of Paula Schlax as the inaugural Stella James Sims Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry. For more about James Sims and other history-making Bates women, see page 50. Photo courtesy of Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library. Nondiscrimination Bates College prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national or ethnic origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression, age, disability, genetic information or veteran status and other legally protected statuses in the recruitment and admission of its students, in the administration of its education policies and programs, or in the recruitment of its faculty and staff. The college adheres to all applicable state and federal equal opportunity laws and regulations. Full policy: bates.edu/nondiscrimination
