Then arose a young man, Theobald Smith, at the opening of the last ten years of the eighteen hundreds, to show why northern cows get sick and die of Texas fever when they go south, and to explain why southern cows, though healthy, go north and trail along with them a mysterious death for northern cattle. In 1893 Theobald Smith wrote his straight, clear report of the answer to this riddle; there was certainly no public horn-tooting about it and the report is now out of print--but that report gave an idea to the swashbuckling David Bruce; it gave hints to Patrick Manson; it set thoughts flickering through the head of the brilliant but indignant Italian, Grassi; that report gave confidence in his dangerous quest to the American Walter Reed and that gang of officers and gallant privates who refused extra pay for the job of being martyrs to research. What kind of man is this Theobald Smith (safe to say all but a few thousand Americans have never even heard of him), and how could his discoveries about a cow disease set such dreams stirring--how could those farmers’ reasonings that he proved, show microbe hunters a way to begin to realize the poetic promise of Pasteur to men? II In 1884 Theobald Smith was in his middle twenties; he was a Bachelor of Philosophy of Cornell University; he was a doctor of medicine from the Albany Medical College. But he detested the idea of going through life solemnly diagnosing sicknesses he could not hope to cure, offering sympathy where help was needed, trying to heal patients for whom there was no hope--in brief, medicine seemed to him to be a mixed-up, illogical business. He was all for biting into the unknown in places where there was a chance of swallowing it--a little of it--without having mental indigestion. In short, though a physician, he wanted to do science! In especial he was eager--as what searcher was not in those piping days--about microbes. At Cornell (it was before the days of jazz) he had played psalms and Beethoven on the pipe organ; here too (college activities had not yet engulfed mere learning) Theobald Smith dug thoroughly into mathematics, into physical science, into German, and particularly he became enthusiastic about looking through microscopes. Maybe then he saw his first microbe....