Origins and Spread of the Bacterium

De Bacterium Volume I - Being a True Account of the Bacterium and the Undoing of Men Set Down in the Year of Our Lord, 1815, by One Who Watches, Nameless No scholar has yet been able to determine with certainty the moment at which the Bacterium first entered the affairs of men. The calamity that followed was so sudden in its later stages that it invites the comforting fiction of a clear beginning - a single ship, a single patient, a single dreadful day upon which the world turned. Yet the surviving records allow no such neat division. When the old papers are examined with care, the earliest disturbances appear scattered across many years, long before the final campaigns of the Empire, and long before any man imagined that what we now call the End could come to pass. Most accounts place the first credible signs at the ports. Bordeaux is most often named, though never with certainty. The registers of the city for the year 1798 contain an entry from the infirmary near the Chartrons quay describing a sailor brought ashore from a vessel newly arrived from the West Indies in a state of violent agitation. The attending physician noted that the man fell upon two orderlies with such strength that irons were required to hold him, though he had already received wounds that should have rendered him insensible. The case was entered simply as a derangement of the humours attended by fever of an unknown kind. The man died before morning, and the matter went no further. Earlier still, a parish book from the countryside outside Poitiers, dated October 1794, records the execution of a farm labourer who, after several days of what the priest called a black fever of the mind, seized a stable boy and tore at his throat with his teeth before being shot by men of the local guard. The disturbance was set down as delirium brought on by privation, which was common enough in those unsettled years, and no further notice was taken. In Lyon, the surgical notes of the Hôtel-Dieu for March 1799 describe a patient who continued to thrash, bite, and struggle after receiving injuries which, in the surgeon’s words, ought to have extinguished all voluntary motion. The man expired only after prolonged restraint. The attending surgeon judged the case to be a most pernicious inflammation of the nerves, perhaps made worse by drink. Nothing in the report suggests that the occurrence was thought extraordinary. There exist even older notices, though their relation to the Bacterium cannot be proved. In the diary of a merchant of Nantes, written in the summer of 1787, there is mention of a dockworker who, after falling into a violent fever, attacked a customs officer without provocation and attempted to bite those who came to his aid. The writer supposed the man to have contracted some distemper brought in with the cargo newly arrived in port, and the incident was passed over without remark. No deaths beyond the patient himself were recorded. Among the military papers preserved at Metz is a memorandum dated 1792 concerning a dragoon who, after complaining for several days of pains in the head and spine, struck at his comrades with what the adjutant described as animal ferocity. The report recommends confinement, and in the margin is later added that the man died in the infirmary after a sudden worsening of his condition, the cause being entered as malignant fever. Taken singly, such incidents appear of little consequence. The medicine of our present day possesses a broad and accommodating language for afflictions imperfectly understood. Disorders of the humours, corruption of the blood, inflammations of the nerves, putrid fevers, distempers brought by ship from distant climates - any of these might be named, and often are. In an age long accustomed to war, famine, and pestilence, violence attended by delirium does not at once present itself as the sign of any new calamity, but is readily set down among the many miseries to which the body and mind of man are already subject. Only after the calamity had fully declared itself, in the troubled years that led at last to the End, did clerks, surgeons, and magistrates begin to look back through the old entries with a different eye. When these scattered notices are set side by side, they give the uneasy impression that the Bacterium may have moved quietly among the people for many years before it was recognised. A sailor in Bordeaux in 1798, a labourer in Poitiers in 1794, a soldier in 1792, a dockside sickness in 1787 - each too small to alarm the authorities, each explained according to the understanding of the time. Some therefore hold that the first stirrings of the plague may reach back further than a decade before the fall of the Empire, perhaps further still, concealed among the ordinary confusions of disease and madness that filled the records of the closing years of the last century. Others maintain that these earlier cases are being drawn into the present account only because later horrors compel us to search for a beginning where none was recognised at the time. Thus the origin of the Bacterium remains uncertain even now. It may have entered France by way of a crowded seaport in the last years of the previous century. It may have lingered, weak and imperfect, through the disorders of the Revolution. It may even have appeared more than once before finding the circumstances in which it could fully take hold. What seems most certain is only this: by the time men understood that something new had come among them, it had already been there far longer than anyone then living was willing to believe.